‘The format of the future,” says Mikey Shulman, “is music you play with, not just play.” As the CEO and co-founder of the generative AI music company Suno, Shulman currently finds himself in the exhilarating if perhaps unenviable position of being simultaneously regarded as the architect of music’s future – and its executioner.

Suno, which was founded just over two years ago, allows users to create entire songs with just a few text prompts. At the moment, you can’t prompt it with the name of a specific pop star, but asking for “stadium-level confessional pop-country” that “references past relationships” or “public rivalries” might get you a Taylor Swift-style song or thereabouts.

In June 2024, Suno became the target of litigation by record company trade body the RIAA on behalf of major labels in the US, while German collection society GEMA, representing songwriters, filed its own lawsuit the following January. Both claimed the service was training its systems on their copyrights without authorisation or licences.

Gen AI music services have triggered an existential crisis in the music industry. The utopian reading is that they will democratise creativity. The dystopian one is that art will be smothered by AI slop, as humans making music become surplus to requirements. (And many musicians already struggle to make a living from streaming revenues.) Dave Stewart of Eurythmics called them an “unstoppable force” and said musicians should, begrudgingly or enthusiastically, embrace them. Catherine Anne Davies, AKA the Anchoress, told me recently she believes it to be “dystopian”. Music lawyer Gregor Pryor has argued it is already killing off background music work.

“I like to think of us as trying to make the next format for recorded music,” says Shulman. “The format of the future will be interactive.” What does he mean? “It should be social, meaning you’re doing it with other people. What we are doing is building the best digital version of that.”

Investors were clearly not scared off. In November, Suno raised $250m (£187m) in funding, taking its valuation to $2.45bn (£1.83bn). Gen AI is the hottest thing in Silicon Valley, with a Stanford University report saying it drew $34bn (£25bn) in private investment in 2024. But there are fears, notably at the Bank of England, that this brilliant boom can only be followed by a bitter bust. For now, however, investors believe gen AI is too big to fail. The stakes for Suno’s success are astonishingly high, especially given the recent leaking of an investor presentation suggesting the company only had 1 million paying subscribers. The standard monthly plan costs £8.25 ($10).

“The thing that investors needed help realising,” says Shulman, “is how important music is in the world. Once you show them, their minds are changed and they realise that much, much more is possible.”

When a new outside technology imposes itself on the music industry, the response typically runs from apoplexy to legal action, then negotiation and ultimately licensing. The three biggest names in gen AI music are at different stages along this trajectory. Klay got deals with all three majors before launching or training its technology on music, making it a rarity in this “Launch first, license later” world. Udio signed deals with Universal Music Group (UMG) and Warner Music Group (WMG). Suno, however, only has a deal with WMG, and legal action from the other majors is still live.

Shulman, now 39, was a failing musician, which provided a catalyst for Suno. “I played in a lot of bands in high school and college,” he says, speaking by video from his home in the US, pointing to the bass hanging on the wall behind him. “I was OK, not great, and I was not going to be able to make a great career out of it.” He’s cautious and thoughtful when speaking, without the tang of arrogance you sometimes get from heavily hyped start-up founders.

A career swerve into a physics PhD led him to Suno’s other co-founders. They wanted to build something different to heavyweight AI companies such as OpenAI, as those deal with “reasoning and automation to solve very specific problems. Music isn’t like that. There’s not a right or a wrong answer. It’s not a problem to solve.”

There remains debate about where exactly Suno sourced the music to train its systems – essentially breaking music into data strands for cataloguing – before its licensing deals were in place. “We train our models on medium- and high-quality music we can find on the open internet,” wrote Shulman in a 2024 blogpost. Suno’s initial legal defence was that this constituted fair use, and the music it drew on did not require prior permission. The record industry thought differently. “Fair use,” countered the RIAA, does not apply “when the output seeks to ‘substitute’ for the work copied.”

I ask Shulman what he means by the “open internet”. There is a clear distinction between what is copyrighted (recordings are typically protected for 70 years) and what is in the public domain. “Copyright is a different thing,” he says. “I can’t get into too many specifics because there is active legal stuff going on, and also some of it is trade secrets.”

Could Suno’s philosophy of “democratising” music-making be inherently anti-art? What once sprang from extraordinary human creativity now becomes ordinary. Shulman insists that, as with digital recording or sampling, this is just another example of how technology “pushes music forward”, how “new people get discovered” and “new genres get invented”.

The issue of so-called AI slop is wholly subjective, he says. “I made a really funny song with my four-year-old yesterday morning. That is ‘slop’ to you – you don’t care about it – but I love it. It’s fantastic.” He is keen to stress, meanwhile, that music generated by Suno can be extremely high quality.

And AI-powered music is flooding streaming services: Deezer says more than a third of music delivered to it each day is AI (equal to 50,000 tracks), and 70% of streams of AI music on Deezer are fraudulent (scammers get cheaply made AI tracks on to such services, then use bots to manipulate streams at scale in order to get royalty payments, although services are increasingly wise to this). The company has started tagging AI tracks to alert users. Bandcamp recently announced that it won’t platform music “generated wholly or in substantial part by AI”.

Should others follow? Shulman will say only that he doesn’t want to be “the arbiter of what happens on other platforms. There’s maybe some line to draw, but I don’t know where.”

Velvet Sundown, a wholly AI “act”, released their debut album and a follow-up last summer. The 70s-styled rock band generated millions of streams, but it was a short-lived phenomenon. “I don’t know exactly what their strategy was,” Shulman says of Velvet Sundown. “It was all a bit of a goof. I think that’s why it was a flash in the pan.”

Some AI-powered tracks have staying power, though. Following allegations it used Suno to clone Jorja Smith’s voice, I Run, by Haven, was excluded from the UK charts, but a version re-recorded by Kaitlin Aragon, a human singer, was chart-eligible and went Top 10. Into the Blue by Sienna Rose, who is widely suspected to be an AI act, recently made the Top 10 on Spotify’s Viral 50 Global chart. And the track Jag Vet, Du Är Inte Min is one of the biggest of the year so far in Sweden, although it has been booted out of the country’s charts for being “mainly AI-generated”.

More concerning was Suno being used last year to create tracks that the Anti-Defamation League said glorified Adolf Hitler, deployed racist slurs and talked of “white power”. Shulman says: “It was three songs that had a combined 10 plays. It was a very small thing. Unfortunately, drawing attention to it made it worse.” He says Suno has developed more rigorous safeguards to stop similar things happening in the future.

Suno is keen for its deal with WMG to be seen as proof that gen AI companies can partner in mutually beneficial ways. Did the $1.5bn (£1.1bn) that AI company Anthropic paid to the book industry in September to settle claims its AI was trained on pirated copies spook Suno to get deals done swiftly? “We didn’t pay all that much attention to that,” says Shulman. “There’s a lot more to do together than fighting one another. And we intend, with this Warner partnership, to show that very strongly.”

But questions do persist about the WMG deal. Did the label insist on changes to the service? Were payments made to cover past use of its music in Suno’s training? Did WMG get equity in Suno? Shulman won’t reply, saying only that it is “a little early” to share such information, possibly fearful of compromising pending licensing deals.

Agreements with the majors are one thing, but wooing artists is another. The majors insist they will only have their music used if they opt into deals. But if only a tiny percentage do – never mind their name, image and likeness rights – this will surely compromise results.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularised “the 10,000-hour rule”, suggesting that this is the amount of practise time an artist needs to achieve any sort of mastery. Will the likes of Suno change this? “I think people will [still] have to spend 10,000 hours,” says Shulman. “They may be doing different things and practising different skills, but they will certainly need to spend 10,000 hours to make the best music in the world.”

As part of its charm offensive, Suno signed up US producer Timbaland as a strategic advisor, but he had to make a public apology after he took a track by producer K Fresh without permission and, Fresh alleged, “uploaded it into Suno’s AI platform, and released an unauthorised AI remix”.

Nevertheless, Shulman says the musicians he talks to about Suno see it as an important new creative tool and songwriting aid. He had previously told the 20VC podcast: “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.” This does not mean musicians hate the creative process in toto, but they are appreciative of tools that can remove at least some of the grunt work.

They just see it as a dirty secret, he suggests now. “When you get people one-on-one, they’re just more comfortable admitting it. It was described to me that we’re the Ozempic of the music industry – everybody is on it and nobody wants to talk about it.”

The fear, of course, is that by putting music on Ozempic, it wastes away to nothing.