Suno launches V6 model and announces music industry partnerships with Warner, BMG, and Believe

Speaker 2: for access requests and password resets. We have Mikey Schulman, cofounder, CEO of Suno

Speaker 1: here with us in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. Go. Go.

Speaker 2: Go. Yes. Since I think since you came on the show last, we have all been completely one shot by Suno. It's time to talk about Suno. Come into the studio. We're blasting Suno songs. We have a lot of fun with them. Make a Suno song for our friends, whatever the news is of the day. We're having a great time. But how are things going with you?

Speaker 1: Much better now that I know that you guys are enjoying the product. We love it. Yeah. Yeah. I will say okay. I'm gonna give you I'm gonna give you, like, I'm gonna give you Truly glaze. Gonna tell you one thing. I'm gonna tell you one thing, and then I'm gonna tell you another thing. Okay. I'm gonna tell you one is a compliment sandwich? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Compliment sandwich. Let's do Compliment sandwich. You don't need to compliment sandwich me. That's fine. No. No. No. So one, the product is like the the AI, you know, is probably the AI product that has brought me the most belly laughs Yeah. Period. Yeah. Like it's just a joy to use Yep. Daily user. Like, we have so much fun with it on the team. Yep. I've pulled it up in situations in my own home that I think are hilarious to me, you know, less less funny to members of my family. But Sure. Anyways, the product is just, like, amazing. It's wonderful. I get so much joy out of it. I think the software quality is bad Okay. In the app. Like, I think that it Not on the model side. Not on the model side. Like, the model is amazing. Like, the things that matter are, like, so good. Like, it's so unbelievably fast. And I haven't even tried the new model yet. Yes. But but the actual software, I think you've been Hard to navigate? Or No. No. No. It just feels like it's kinda buggy and it feels like you guys feels like you've been vibe coding too hard. Okay. I want you guys to, like, you know, you know, basically do some cycles on just cleaning it up a little bit. Okay. Okay. More optimist. What

Speaker 2: do you think?

Speaker 5: That that's a good complement sandwich. Let me

Speaker 1: let me say actually I only got bread on one half. The final bread. And it's amazing.

Speaker 2: No. No. The the actual quality of the of the output is is The real product is the most the Whereas, like, video generators, you're you're looking at it and, like, no matter how much ever you put in, it's still, like, not quite there. This is, like it passes the touring test of, like, listenable so you can have fun with it. Anyway, continue. I appreciate that. We should probably stop releasing models while you guys are on air so you can actually Yeah. Try them. Have some time to test them out. But

Speaker 5: yeah. Well, I'll just take the opportunity to talk about Please. What we're doing today, which is releasing a new model. Okay. And so way better than the last one. Okay. It's actually way faster. And so you'll see the

Speaker 2: the way that you can use it when the songs come back so faster is just very different, much more fun, way more expressive. Faster? Don't know why it needs to be faster. Like, was already fast enough because I would type the prompt and I would click the button and then it'd be available immediately. Yes. And I think it's because you stream it in. Right? Like, it's still rendering in the background. Is that right? No. The We're still streaming it. Okay. But

Speaker 1: No. When I when I feel like it's slow as when I'm when I'm in one of these, you know, when I'm one shot by a song, but I wanna change, like, a certain word Oh. Lyrics and I'm, like, change this to that. Okay. Well then You get on the speed. Get on the speed. You covered. But, yeah, that that was the thing when I first when when we first started using when we first got One Shot by Suno, we would fire off a prompt and put your phone down and be like, I'll come back to it in, like, you know, five minutes, see where it's at. But then it'd be back in, like, twenty seconds. Yeah.

Speaker 5: Okay. I think the thing that people don't realize is that when you're building things in entertainment Mhmm. Actually, the the loop speed, how quickly you give something to your users ends up mattering a lot. We can actually measure that Yeah. Pretty directly, and we know how much it matters. But just going back to the model, so v six is better. It's faster. The songs are way better. It's more expressive. We have v six wild, which is a model that makes just some of the most interesting stuff even though the songs themselves may not be quite as good. I'm having a ton of fun with that one. And it's actually like a big day for Suno and actually for the whole music industry where this is done in concert in partnership with some of the best music companies in the world. It's really kinda laying out a blueprint for how we think AI can really grow the entire music ecosystem. So we're we're super super excited. Yeah. We were talking to John about

Speaker 2: Say more on that. Yeah. We can go there. Sure. On the on the partnership. Yeah. The partners the partnership. Everyone's waiting for a partnership. Everyone's been been interested in how the economics will flow, what happens to songs that are used in training. Obviously, there's a fair use argument. There's obviously the the Spotify I want a royalty on everything forever. And it feels like this is the start of, moving the conversation forward at least one click.

Speaker 5: This is definitely an amazing start. Yeah. The way I think about this is, yes, these are now not only new business lines and new revenue streams for rights holders, for artists, for all kinds of creatives. Most importantly, these are really long term partnerships that let us build products together with the greatest music companies, with the best creatives. And the thing that's so exciting is that for the first time in a long time, there's actually product differentiation. There's the ability to build things that are just different. And I think we've been so ingrained in the last twenty years just to think about digital music as one thing. And so we'll be releasing more products in the near future Mhmm. That let you play with the content from your favorite artists when those artists opt in. When users play with their content, the revenues that are attributable to those users, a portion of that will flow to those artists. And then, again, just building more from that in the future of what should the future of music look like? What are the most engaging fan experiences? How do we pull people deeper into music and change place that music has in their lives to change the place that music has in culture? And the thing that's so amazing is that there's kind of acknowledgment from all sides here. Like, we have a very good start. We don't know what the all of the products should look like, and we're excited to build them together.

Speaker 2: How does AI video play into this? I noticed that when I open Suno, I often get served a vertical video feed of other Suno creations that are often AI video animated in a pretty convincing way. Like, you get a full music video, basically. Is that something that you're planning to is it already available for everyone? Is there just a button that can make these, or are there sort of, like, more pro creators that are using outside models bringing a music video to the platform?

Speaker 5: It's a great question. Right now, that is mostly creators bringing outside technologies to bear. I would just back up though and think Sure. The purpose of Suno is actually to inspire you to do things that you haven't done and not just to Yeah. Do the old thing of scrolling again. And so what you may have noticed is those videos are actually really tailored to get you to lean in, to take a piece of content. You can actually remix it right off of that video. I think we're not used to thinking of ourselves as creators, us mere mortals. Maybe you guys are. You guys are are, you know, on TV every day. Sure. But it feels amazing to be creative. And just getting people over the hurdle of, actually, I am a creator, and I will find it really enjoyable to be creative.

Speaker 1: That's kind of the magical spark that we're trying to bring to people. Yeah. And I I have that all the time. John will send me a Suno song, and I'll be thinking to myself, John even though John even though all I know I know that John just wrote, like, a handful of sentences, and he put the words and the letters in the right orders, and it got that output. I'm still thinking there's a spark of like John is a genius for putting the set of ideas together and I know that he was like thinking about the lyrics and how to arrange it and and things like that. And and so that joy of creation and and compacting it into something that and again, I just I've always seen this as, like, net new. Right? Like, John like, the the the idea of, a gag song, you know, like a joke has Yeah. Has been around forever. But but the the friction to do that. I thought we were enjoying it specifically because it allowed us to go after

Speaker 2: music that was basically low tam. So we could make a song about the most feared lawyer, about John Quinn, corporate lawyer that would never exist in any timeline other than when you drop the cost of creation to effectively zero, then you can actually get this. And I thought that was just us, but when I was scrolling sooner, I saw similar similar experiences happening in other pockets. Like, someone made a a song about the revolutionary war, they took a bunch of history. And it's like George Washington. Have you seen this video? I I don't know. But, it's all it's all animated with AI. And I was like, oh, like, this sounds like a fourth of July banger, but it's historical. But no one is really gonna sit there and arrange that. And all of a sudden, you have this, like, very niche overlap of, like, you want a July 4 hard hitting song, but you also wanna learn history and, like, it puts it together in this really weird niche way, which I I I think is, like, happening all over the place.

Speaker 5: Yeah. Look. Let me let me say two things to that. One is a plug. You can go all the way down to a TAM of one or two people. Yeah. You guys, I'm sure, have iMessages with one another. Yep. You can actually access Suna right from iMessage if you have the latest version of the app. And so it'll just be easier to interact there. Let's go. But the other thing I would say is I think maybe the best examples, I don't know if you guys saw this so called Oreo gate No. Of oh, this is a lady who took the text messages from her mom's chat about her kids eating Oreos or sending Oreos to school Mhmm. And just using music as a platform to express, I don't know, what is special and absurd and banal about everyday life. And if when I think about what was the alternative for her to be expressive like that, to to use her vantage point, she basically would have had to become a stand up comic to bring this to life. And now you can use something like music, do this in an entirely new way. And it's something that I think, like, tons and tons of people really can relate to on a fundamental level. How do you think about all the ways other than

Speaker 1: speed and overall feeling of music or or musical quality going from, you know, model generation to model generation? One one thing I noticed with the last generation was that it would just constantly be referencing, like, glass in different ways. Like, in a bunch of different songs, it would come back to this, like, you know, the glass shattering,

Speaker 2: you know Yeah. I was talking to John And there was, like, a to me to me, it was, like, a tell that Like, you like, Suno developed its own It's turns of phrases. Yeah. It's not this. It's that. Or you're absolutely right. Like, the Suno version of that was different, but it seemed to exist. How much are you hunting for those tells?

Speaker 5: You know, it's a it's a really tricky thing in music on, like, let's say, the the big labs, LLM's intelligence. There are no benchmarks. And so these questions of taste end up mattering a lot, lot more. And even just measuring these things is really hard. So we are always on the hunt for kind of that telltale sign. And then, yeah, there's a good amount of judgment that goes into how do we fine tune, how do we post train these models. Actually, what we're releasing today, having both a v six and a v six wild, v six wild being very differently post trained to be way more interesting and basically a little less good at making full songs, is kind of a start at bridging that of how do we make sure that people actually have the most creative experience that they can.

Speaker 2: Back on the deal with Warner Music Group, BMG, Believe, I'm interested to understand how you're talking to investors, how you see the market evolving over the long term because the the most extreme economic share might be something like what we see with Spotify. I think they give maybe 30% of top line to artists across everything. There's a huge stake of revenue that goes to creators. Still a $100,000,000,000 company, fantastic business. We love Spotify. And I'm interested to to to think about as the industry outside of Sunu, but just just AI generated tools, what type of economic structure would you see landing in equilibrium?

Speaker 5: I think about this in a couple of ways. There are things where we can think about how do we take the existing technology and really lower the cost and give it to way more people. And that's what you said before, and you would never be savoring these moments if it weren't so easy to make music. Yeah. And then there's the whole other side of things of how do we actually now apply this to markets that people couldn't even fathom before? And this is actually something that I, you know, kind of live and breathe every day. Yeah. If you rewind a couple years ago and people think music is really small, I don't wanna invest in it. And then you realize that it's not just that old TAM. Actually, what we're doing is fundamentally changing how people interact with media, how people entertain themselves, and realizing that that actually is much bigger. And so to answer the question more directly, this is actually evolving. This is like, we have some economic models now. We have a lot of alignment to build products together and figure out the economic models that go with those products instead of having to figure everything out all at once. The crazy time that we live in about AI progressing so quickly, we kind of don't have the luxury of trying to get it right in this very moment because things change so so fast. What's the

Speaker 2: what is the demand side from consumers on editability, the pro workflow? Obviously, the the model is outputting, basically, a complete waveform, but you can also use AI to deconstruct that into stems, into notes, into sheet music, and then a more experienced musician can go in and make fine grained tweaks and and just like you can generate an image and bring it into Photoshop if you want. What is demand like? What are you building there? Where do you see that side of the business going?

Speaker 5: We have a pretty broad product suite here from you can type in a few words or access it from iMessage all the way down to Suno Studio, which is our digital audio workstation Yep. Which is really professional workflows. What we've seen is actually by making those workflows not only different and powerful, but actually much more fun Mhmm. More of the professional tooling ends up just appealing to average people who fall in love with making music. I think this is a lot like, I might buy the signature guitar of my favorite guitarist. Yep. I don't think I'm gonna be a famous guitarist, but it actually makes me feel really good knowing that I use the same tools Yeah. That the greats use, and it makes me feel better about my creativity. And I think that it's only for lack or it's a failure of imagination to think I can't actually fall in love with digital tools in the same way. Like, I know I'm using the same tool set, at least in part, that makes some of the best music. I feel more creative as a result. I fall in love with making music, and there are virtuous cycles there. What are you learning from the early sparks

Speaker 2: of progress in AI video? I was trying to think about the biggest AI video, the most viral AI video from last year, and I was I I couldn't put my finger on it easily. I can think about the previous year because that was Harry Potter Balenciaga. That was the moment we were like, wow. This really, like, worked. And I think, for this year, music, like Rubbers by Phoenix Flexing, it's now out that it was AI generated. I don't know if you used to know or not, but it sparked the conversation. And then, I'm wondering what next year looks like if we are trying to pattern match against the ebbs and flows of progress in AI video.

Speaker 5: It's a great question. I almost think video is having a super interesting moment right now Mhmm. As there's a lot of new models and they're getting more convincing. They're getting easier to use. Mhmm. And so we look at that very closely. I think the one maybe easy thing for me to say here is that actually speed ends up mattering a lot. Mhmm. And as it becomes more affordable to really iterate a lot on video, because if you remind, let's say, six months, it's actually kind of prohibitive to make a a full length video. Yeah. I would imagine that we're going to see some very interesting cultural moment. And I think of these less as technology per se. It's actually you gave the technology to somebody who has an interesting point of view, who's able to express that point of view to the world with these tools. And so I think it's very hard to predict exactly which point of view that will be. It's like a very cultural zeitgeisty moment. Yeah. I remember I talked to Ahmad Musa. There are gonna be there's

Speaker 1: gonna be at least one very big cultural moment. I will tell you that. That's all I can say right now, but there's gonna be a big cultural moment involving music and technology.

Speaker 2: I I yeah. I was talking about Ahmad Moustak after Stable Diffusion launched years ago. This was maybe 2023, 2022. And and he was predicting that by 2024, 2025, there would be full movies that were AI generated. And we we kind of got there, but they didn't really break through. But AI video is actually really successful. It's just taken a very different approach, it's diffused in an interesting way where it's making its way into VFX workflows all over the place, and it's become very useful. But it but there hasn't been, like, the fully the fully AI generated, you know, movie that is so good. It gets over the hill of, like, oh, I don't I don't wanna like it, but I have to like it because it's good. And I'm wondering if that will be what next year in AI music looks like. It's a tool that's in every studio, every production, it's something that certain artists take off the shelf occasionally, but it's not fully AI created albums that are out, but it's also not fallen by the wayside. Is that a reasonable prediction, or do you think that's too too too conservative?

Speaker 5: No. I think that's actually not too conservative for the reason that an album is a or even a song is a is a point of view, and it's very hard to just one shot the point of view that is going to really resonate with the whole world. Yeah. It does happen, but I think of this as it is a process of refining your own point of view over and over again. And you may use an AI toolset. You may not use an AI toolset. And so, like, I think that, you know, a year from now, it's actually quite mundane that there's a lot of AI in music. It's, like, used in every single part of the production chain. Some of it will be Suno. Some of it will not be Suno. But the idea that, like, there's just gonna be charts full of one shot at AI bangers, to me, actually kinda misses the point of it doesn't express the point of view of the artist. And I think that this is kind of a this is kind of a a faulty comparison to, let's say, you know, we just saw OpenAI maybe prove a huge math theorem. Yeah. And, like, this is something that is long running, that is verifiable. Music is just not that way, and so I'm not sure we expect to see the the same types of things. Wait until I'm spinning up 1,000,000

Speaker 1: agents command 1,000,010 instances of Suno to create the gigabanger chart topper that sits at Billboard Hot 100 number one for a hundred years straight. Yes. Yes. The final song.

Speaker 2: I'm sure you can do it. I feel like through. What what was your takeaway from, like, the Astra launch over the weekend? Because the lots of, like, blender models, lots of video games created. And I feel like the the answer isn't going like like, a million one shotted web games were spawned this weekend, and I could not be more optimistic about GTA six blowing out the predictions. At the same time, I feel like as soon as I stop playing GTA six, I'm gonna get a text from a friend with a really hilarious microgame that they vibe coded that's GTA six, but for TBPN or for tech or something. I mean, oh, this is cool. This is a special thing that only makes sense to me and you. And so is that is that how you process that, or is there anything new on the on the overall AI capability side that's exciting to you these days?

Speaker 5: Maybe I'm too dumb to predict the future. And so I would just look at, let's say, the last revolution there, which would be Roblox letting people really start to make their own games. Oh, yeah. And at the beginning, it starts really small, and people are really just playing their own games. And eventually, the technology progresses where you get more of that power law, you get people playing other people's games, etcetera, and then you make an ecosystem there. It's not crazy that we'll see something similar there. Yeah. But, again, I think a game is a very it's a game's purpose is to be played by people, and it is very different from the general intelligence model of things. And so I think it's hard to really apply logic from one into the other. Yeah. Do you think that

Speaker 1: how much should we read into the the iPhone Duo launch? Do you think Apple's so soon opilled that they want, you know, every person to have more real estate to be able to make music? What's your read?

Speaker 5: I really I really hope Apple's so soon appealed. You know, humbly, I don't think we're the reason that they're making that that they're making that phone. But if if you wanna suggest that, I'm I'm very happy to take it. I'm suggesting that. Yeah.

Speaker 1: What as as somebody who makes mobile apps, do you have you guys are you guys already looking into, like, the implications of this and and how it'll, like, how you're gonna need to change your application

Speaker 2: to to be able to adapt to this kind of new Might just be one prompt. Make it work on the two o. Like, for a lot of developers, that might be the answer.

Speaker 5: Yeah. Absolutely. I think about this as opportunity of if there is different interaction with your phone, we actually are able to now inspire you at different times and, like, you can take out your phone and do something without unlocking it. You can use one camera versus the other camera. You know, I don't know what the plans are for the Vision Pro, but when I think about a final form of Suno, it's actually, how do I get a Vision Pro app that I can put on and conduct an orchestra? You know, like and so I think when we think about interfaces, this is where in the creativity game, we will just work on forever. You know, there's there's there's no end to working on how we delight people by letting them interact with technology in new ways.

Speaker 1: Last question. Have you ever have you guys ever run any billboards or wheat pasting campaigns? Not that I know of why you if you because I just feel like billboards we should Well, I just feel like you should be running a billboard that says make a song with a sentence. And you should just go go hard on that because it's just like people people need to experience the magic of this product.

Speaker 5: It's just like We gotta not get people to pick up their phones while they're driving. That would be that would be bad, but we gotta place those billboards in the right place. Everybody's in Waymo's now.

Speaker 1: Tesla Cybercabs,

Speaker 2: maybe. Whole case for billboards. Waymos, you can No. No. No. It's actually a bear case because Oh, you're looking down. Everyone's gonna be on their phone. Yeah. Maybe. It's gonna be rough. Anyway,

Speaker 5: thank you so much. The future is bright. You know, you're gonna have you're gonna be sitting in your way more. You're gonna have a lot more time to be creative. Yeah. Way better than driving. Way safer than driving. Yeah. Yeah. You say nothing from my end. Thanks. And then you go back to making Suno songs.

Speaker 2: Great to see you, Mikey. Congrats on the launch. That's great to see you soon. I'm excited to try the new model. Little a little high this time. Have a good one. Go by. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Thieves raided the Renoir Museum in the latest French art heist. We'll get to that story after we chat with Keith Raboi,