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Chapter 1: What significant milestones has Suno achieved recently?
Today on the podcast, I'm talking about AI in music. This is something you, if you know me, you know I'm like a huge fan of. We have Google that recently came out with Lyria 3, their own audio music model, and they've actually just made a huge acquisition. They've purchased a big company. In addition, we have Suno, who has just reached a new record for paid subscribers.
And for annual recurring revenue. So we're going to get into basically what's going on in the music industry. There's a lot of changes and a lot of milestones that we've reached. And this has come from someone who my background is. I've been creating music on Spotify and other places since I was in college.
A lot of it says a hobby, but I still make, you know, a couple thousand dollars a month from music. Some albums I posted when I was in college. So this is something that I'm like super interested in. I've been posting AI music as well for a very long time. Something I experimented with almost eight years ago now. So this is an interesting place. Let's get into all of it.
Before we do, I wanted to mention if you want to get access to a lot of the models I talk about. on the podcast, including we're adding music models for the first time to my platform, AIbox.ai. We're going to be adding some music models from 11 labs very shortly. If you want to try those out, you can go and make an account. It's $8.99 a month.
You get access to over 40 of the top models for everything from Google Gemini to Grok to Claude to Cohere to tons of open source models, a bunch of image generation models and 11 labs and other models like that for audio. So all of that is $8.99 a month. You get 20% off if you get an annual plan. If you need more tokens, you can also get higher subscription tiers, but go check it out.
It's all on the platform. All right. Let's get into what's going on in the AI music industry.
So Suno, which is the platform I typically use when I'm creating AI-generated music, Udio is the second biggest one, but Suno seems to be one of the bigger players right now, and they have an awesome studio where you can basically put a song in there and select a certain part of the song and type in an instrument like violin, and it will generate violin stems for just that particular part of the song.
It does a whole bunch of really cool things or any instrument, so you really can get quite creative with Suno. Their CEO was just posting. It's Mikey Shulman on LinkedIn. He said that they have now reached 2 million paid subscribers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue. So this is, I mean, this is coming after just three months ago, they raised $250 million and they did it at a 2.45%.
billion dollar valuation. I think when that happened, the company had been kind of talking to the Wall Street Journal and they said that they had just hit $200 million in annual recurring revenue. So I mean, just three months later, we're at $300 million. They're definitely growing very quickly, which is kind of crazy to think that they were able to raise $250 million.
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Chapter 2: What legal challenges is Suno facing in the music industry?
You've got to send this file around to a whole bunch of people, make sure everything syncs up, lines up. And then you got to put it all together with an audio engineer if you're not good at that. So Suno has solved a real problem in the market. Because of that, we're seeing a huge spike in adoption, but also we're seeing a big spike in, I guess you could say, controversy.
Basically, there's a whole bunch of major record labels that are suing Suno over copyright infringement. They're arguing that their models were trained on copyrighted recordings. I think there's a big shift. Warner Music Group recently settled their lawsuit and they struck a licensing agreement with the company. So basically, they went from
suing them to, all right, well, we'll settle, give us some money and let's sign a licensing agreement. Just keep paying us money. Basically, the deal is going to let Suno continue to build models using the license track from Warner's catalog. And Warner Music has such a huge percentage of the music industry's catalog.
I think Suno will be just fine with just that, though they'll probably sign more licensing deals. But basically, I think there's a pretty solid path for Suno here towards working with music players and people that have these legacy rights and then for these AI startups to basically get access to that and create models that are good at making music.
I think we'll see that from a lot of players in the future. Suno-generated tracks have also proven to be, you know, very successful. There's a bunch of synthetic songs that were created and posted on Spotify, and they've climbed the Billboard top charts. There's one example that came from Talisha Jones, who's a 31-year-old from Mississippi.
She used Suno to transform her poetry into a R&B song that was called How Was I Supposed to Know? She later signed a $3 million deal with Howlwood Media. So people have actually used Suno to create the music, to bring the music to life. They've been able to sign record deals. I mean, it's pretty phenomenal. Now, not everyone in the industry is on board or is a big fan.
Billie Eilish, Chappelle Rhone, Katy Perry, all of them have criticized generative music tools. And there's, I think, like a lot of musicians that have signed that assigned a letter a couple of years ago that was kind of urging tech companies not to undermine human creativity with AI systems trained on copyrighted work without consent.
Now, the train on copyrighted work without consent, I'm of course, I think everyone's on board with that. They're going to kind of sign these licensing deals. So artists get compensated.
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Chapter 3: How does Google's Lyria 3 function in music creation?
And I think that's totally cool. But as far as undermining human creativity, I mean, you could be unlimited creative with these tools. Like there's no limit to how creative you can be. Basically being able to say any type of instrument. And at the end of the day, users want quality. And so when you're listening to music, if you think something sounds cheesy or bad or
or too AI-generated or fake, you're just not going to listen to it. It's not going to be something that sticks around with you. But if someone uses it in a really tasteful way and creates an amazing piece of art and brings their vision to life, I think that's incredible.
And also, there's so much electronic music that's created today that's just on computers anyways, so I really don't see... It's basically just kind of the next way that we use these tools. Okay. So there's also a legal landscape that we're seeing with the whole music industry that feels pretty unsettled. There's a bunch of publishers recently that sued Anthropic for about $3 million.
They alleged that there was unauthorized downloading of about 20,000 copyrighted songs. And this is a completely separate case because Anthropic doesn't even have a music generator. But the federal judge ruled that the training on copyrighted materials might actually be legal. They said, of course, pirating it is not.
And I think this is also kind of gets to Anthropic getting in hot water for pirating like every book that exists in the world. And they later tried to buy all the books. And the judge said, look, it's totally cool if you train your model after you've physically purchased the book. But if you just pirate them all, you can't do that. So it's interesting.
It's interesting the lines we're drawing here with AI and how they get their training data. At the same time, there's a bunch of big tech firms that are pushing into music more. The biggest and most notable right now is Google, who just announced that they have the generative music tool producer AI. It's going to become part of Google Labs.
This is something that was backed by the chain smokers, and it basically lets users create music from prompts. You could say, you know, something like make a lo-fi beat and it will do that. It runs on Lyria 3, which is a music model from Google DeepMind, which basically can turn text and images into audio.
So you could like put a you could put like a cool image in there and it's like make a song that's the vibe of this retro image. And it will do that, which is I mean, it's kind of cool. The downside is like it only can make, I think, 30 second long music snippets. I'm sure it will get better in the future. But right now it's not very useful, in my opinion, for making music.
just what you can do on Gemini, but perhaps inside of Producer AI, it can do more. Google said that Lyria 3 is also going to be integrated into not just Producer AI, it's going to be in Gemini, and they're basically trying to make this feel like a collaborative partnership more than kind of a one-shot generator, right? So
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Chapter 4: What innovative features does Suno offer for artists?
So making it like less useful than something like Suno that the pros are using where you ought to like tinker with it and ask it a bunch of questions before it sends something doesn't seem that useful in my opinion. There's a bunch of high profile musicians right now that are starting to experiment with this like AI generated music as well.
The three time Grammy winner Wyclef Jean used Lyria 3 in Google's Music AI sandbox on his recent track, back from Abu Dhabi. He just he basically said that it was he kind of used this careful curation rather than blind automation, right? Like all these artists kind of want to seem like, look, I'm still in charge and I'm still making sure it's like super tasteful.
At the end of the day, though, like Wyclef Jean, I don't know much about his music creation process. So I guess people can roast me if they're big fans. And I'm like, totally, out of line here.
But I feel like for a lot of these guys, they don't create their background tracks anyways, they go and hire a producer, you go hire a beats maker, like someone produces the whole thing. I mean, freak, like even Justin Bieber, most of his music isn't written by him, someone else wrote it, and they just give him the track, give him the lyrics, he sings it. And then off to the races they go.
I mean, that's kind of how it works with these bigger artists. So it's funny to me when they're like,
I was like, I was using it for my track and I was trying to be like really carefully and curating it and not like automating it. It's like, dude, you already automated your whole music process by hiring other people to do everything for you. But whatever. I digress. I'll get off my soapbox on there. In any case, I think for a lot of artists, AI is less about kind of replacing creativity.
It's more about enhancing it. Paul McCartney used AI powered noise reduction to clean up an old demo by John Lennon, which basically resulted in the Beatles, their track Now and Then, it won a Grammy in 2025.
But like that track, it wasn't really able to be posted, it wasn't able to be used until they were able to use AI to clean up the old demo and basically bring John Lennon's song to life, which had just kind of been sitting there for many, many years. So
I think if you look at all of this together, you can see the industry, it feels like there's kind of this battle going on between lawsuits and companies and people worrying that it's going to take over all the creative process of music generation. Personally, from my perspective, I think it's an exciting time to be making music.
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