Suno's Mikey Shulman: Everyone Can Make Music Now

Most music platforms assume you're a listener. On Suno, 90% of daily users make something. Founder and CEO Mikey Shulman explains why that flips the model: the act of creating IS the entertainment, with closer parallels to gaming and Claude Code than to Spotify. He breaks down the technical bets that got them here — modeling raw sound waves instead of encoding music theory, choosing autoregression over diffusion to prioritize full songs over crisp clips, and why music isn't a scale problem the way LLMs are. He also shares why partnering with Warner matters more than disrupting the record labels, what a truly interactive Coachella might look like, and why he thinks the digital music experience is finally due for its first real change in 25 years. Hosted by Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Before Suno, basically, everybody was a consumer of music. You know, compared to the 8 billion people on the planet, there are very few people who make music and the rest of us consume it. The crazy thing about Suno is that at any given day, 90% of the users are going to create something. And the thing that's hard to wrap your head around is you're not creating it to go bring it elsewhere by and large, to do something with it. People are creating music for the fun and enjoyment and fulfillment that comes with being creative. And so that, the creation, is actually the entertaining bit. And that is the big step change.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  I'm delighted to welcome Mikey Schulman. Mikey is founder and CEO of Suno, which is building a music company or a creative entertainment platform and has been one of the most novel consumer applications I've seen out of AI. And I'm very, very excited to ask you about your journey and what's ahead for Suno. So thank you for joining us today.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  OK, awesome. I want to start with your background because it is very, very unexpected. You went from a physics PhD at Harvard, I think quantum computing with solid-state spins, to building the largest AI music company in the world. Like, what insight connected those two things for you?

• 1:27Speaker 00

  You know, I don't know how. I don't know, like, on paper, I guess I have no business building a consumer entertainment company. But a lot of people went from physics into AI. Just like, you know, 30 years ago, a lot of people went from physics into quantitative trading.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  I'll be honest, though, like, I was an OK physicist only. And there are a lot of better physicists, including one of my co-founders. And I think what I mostly learned is playing at the nexus of two things that don't usually play together is just a massive opportunity in all domains. It can be music and technology. It can be quantum mechanics and low-temperature microwave engineering, or it could be whatever else you're going to do.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  You and I got connected in the very early days of Suno. One of our mutual friends, Harrison Chase, was one of the earliest Suno Discord users, and he was having far too much fun making songs in your Discord. Maybe tell us about the early days of Suno. How did it, how did it come together? Did you, did you set out to build a music company?

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Originally, we thought this would actually be too hard. And it's because you have to rewind. This is like pre the ChatGPT moment. We did some like back of the envelope math. We knew we loved audio, but the back of the envelope math told us that actually producing good music, making good music, generating good music, was like a couple of orders of magnitude away in terms of compute and model size and capability. And it's because music, sound in general is like very unwieldy. It's not in discrete bits like text is. And so we actually started building a company that was all around using the same technologies to make sense of audio, not to produce it.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  And very happily, pretty early on, we had the right breakthroughs and we realized, oh, we actually can make music.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  You're pretty good at math. What'd you get wrong with your back of the napkin math then?

• 3:24Speaker 00

  The, the math was right. We just had some breakthroughs that said like it's, it's actually, you, you don't need that amount of compute. You can make the right technological breakthroughs to, if you want to think about it, basically just compress audio really, really efficiently. And that worked a hell of a lot better than we anticipated. So it was like a very nice being wrong moment. Not all being wrong moments are so pleasant. And to be clear, at the beginning, the music was terrible, but we still stayed up late.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  It was good. He was only your first 10 users, I think. He, he thought, he thought he was pretty good.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Certainly before we put it on Discord, the music was very terrible. Before we put it on Discord, we could make like 12 and a half second clips that wouldn't always listen to the words you asked them to sing. But we had so much fun doing it and we thought other people might have fun doing it. And so we kind of took the example of Mid Journey and we said, it's really easy to put a Discord bot out and see, will people enjoy it? And we put it out there and a hell of a lot of people enjoyed it. And that was a really confirmatory moment for us. And so a lot of people told us not to build a music company. It's not the easiest business to work in. Speech is really big. There's a lot of great business use cases for building speech technologies.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  But when you are staying up late playing with the thing and you don't want to go to sleep, it's like a really good sign that that is what you are meant to be doing. And so that's what we did.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  I love that. Are you a musician?

• 4:52Speaker 00

  I am. I play almost every day. I grew up playing a lot of piano and ended up picking up a bass around age 12 and playing a lot, a lot more of that.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so personal passion point. That's awesome.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  You know, the revisionist history is that, which is true, is that we used to have jam sessions at our last company in one of my co-founders' basements. And it's true, we had a lot of fun there. It's not why we started the company. Again, we thought it would be too hard to do this. It was just fun.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Meaning at Kensho?

• 5:21Speaker 00

  At Kensho, yes, where I met the great Harrison Chase.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  The Kensho mafia is like pretty unparalleled. There's Harrison, there's also Daniel Nadler, Sam Whitmore, you, there are a lot of you.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  There's, there's a lot of us. I just credit Daniel with that, honestly. Daniel is like, I think, the best object lesson in what talent density can do for a company. And it was a lot of people with non-traditional backgrounds. It skewed very young, but he was great at finding people and great at convincing them to join.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  I love that. Okay, so walk us through what happens when like somebody types upbeat 90s hip hop track about a road trip. You get the prompt in. What happens? What is a model doing to be able to pass something back to the user that seems like it's quite special?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  In some way, it's actually pretty simple. A prompt like that, you have to figure out what are the words of this song? And we use various LLMs to do that, to make the lyrics. And it's taking, basically, the cue there is road trip. And so like, what should this road trip be about? And it will probably get it wrong because you didn't give us enough information. But that's actually OK. You can iterate on it. And then you said 90s hip hop. And we tried to expand that out into a set of cues that the model can really understand. What is the genre? What is the style of this music? And then you put those things together. You have a lot of lyrics. You have a lot of styles. And we have our models that are trained to take in all of that information and just produce sound. The amazing thing here is that the models don't know that there's vocals and instruments. It doesn't know what kind of instruments there are.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Very early on, it was actually quite obvious to us that the more musical knowledge we give the model, the more constrained it will be in a bad way. And so we actually just model everything as sound. And that's what made it so hard. But ultimately, that's what makes these things so powerful. So just to be concrete about it, in Western music, there are 12 tones. If you tell the model there are 12 tones, it will only ever produce those 12 tones. You will be forever limited. And if you tell the model there's 200 instruments, those are the only sounds that you'll ever be able to make. And you won't get the next Skrillex using Suno. And so for us, it was all about, let's throw away everything we know about music. And let's try to do this from scratch.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  And it's like, it's just a sound wave. It's just sampled at 48,000 times a second. And it is a continuous, you know, float 32 number. And let's figure out how to model that. And that was a lot of the early breakthroughs that we had to make. But once we did, now you are only constrained by what you can describe and your imagination.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  That's so cool. Have you found that we've basically just rediscovered, you know, the existing genres of music and the 12 notes? And like, have you, I guess, independently seen just that that same behavior emerge when you're trying to, I guess, learn music from first principles? Or have you seen like a different set of capabilities emerge?

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Um, no, the amazing thing is now we see new things emerge that you never would have thought of. And so most of the time, this looks like blending genres that really have no business going together. And so you'll get, I don't know, trap with a sitar in it, or you'll get um, country with 808s in it, or whatever it is. Um, and again, this is like really empowering people to do the things that are in their heads. And it's in a way that um, would not have been possible without a technology like this, or would have been really, really hard. Um, we see microtonal music. It is really inspiring to go and just look at all of the crazy things that people are making. Um, a lot of them sound like genres you know, and a ton of them sound like totally strange and bizarre and lovely.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  That's awesome. That's really cool. Are there certain genres that you're finding your model is better at, and certain genres where you're worse at?

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Definitely. Um, we are, uh, I mean, I, I attempt not to say like, good and bad about music, other than, you know, it's sampled well, like the, the, the bit, full bit depth or full sampling rate. But um, to the extent that you uh, can make such generalizations, we're like very good at country, we're very good at pop music. Um, and I think um, the cartoon maybe to have in your head is that there are some genres that are some, somewhat more formulaic than other genres. And so perhaps we're like, better at those. Um, but I have some sneaking suspicion that for those, it's, it's um, as much raising the floor as it is raising the ceiling. And for the things where we're less good at it, we've

• 9:51Speaker 00

  not raised the floor. And so we make a lot of bad music. Um, but we have also raised the ceiling. And if you're willing to go for long enough, you'll find amazing stuff.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  That's so cool. Suno V5, uh, seems like it was a real step change in quality. What goes into one of those step changes?

• 10:07Speaker 00

  You know, it's really hard to predict when the step changes happen because it's really nonlinear in both the research inputs, but actually it's not even linear in how much like our testing says the model is better. And so just as an example, we can measure how much one model is preferred to another model. And you may come up with it's 10% preferred or 15% preferred. And you can take two different models and one is 10% preferred or 15% preferred. And the uptake on the other end, how much our users actually love it and use it, or how much the product grows when you release it, won't necessarily be all that correlated with what the preference signal is. And it's because music is messy and there's lots of

• 10:51Speaker 00

  other things that go into it. But to take a huge step back, like we have a pretty aggressive research roadmap. And in some weird way, we're always working on this thing, you know, like, we know what V6 and V7 are. At some point, there's lots of things that you want to have your model do. There's lots of improvements that you want to make. And it's almost an arbitrary cutoff of saying like, okay, this is the break. This is what we're going to call V5.5. And everything that comes after is going to go into the next models. And almost just to keep it on a steady cadence of when we release things. Because what you would hate to have happen is we don't release stuff for like, two years and we try to make, you know, the music model to save humanity. And that's going to come out in two years and we're going to do nothing before then.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Is how much of, you know, each of these improvements, you think is just a function of scale, scaling compute, scaling data, and then getting a lot of human preference data back? How much are you guys doing, I guess, more novel research?

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Music is really not a scale problem. The models are pretty small, for a variety of reasons. And I think people will often incorrectly take what they know from LLM land, where models are giant and scale helps a ton, and apply it to music. And I think the cartoon that I have in my head is that in LLM land, there's all of these benchmarks. And you can quibble about which ones are flawed and which ones are good. But these benchmarks exist and scale is actually a pretty efficient way to climb up the ladder and just keep doing better and better on the benchmarks. In music, there are no right answers, there are no benchmarks. And so scale is somewhat less helpful in solving it. It's like a, it's a messier problem in many ways, aligning models to creative human tastes.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  You and I are not going to agree on every song. You and I aren't even going to agree on how to-

• 12:36Speaker 01

  I'll just discard whatever you say. You have such-

• 12:38Speaker 00

  I don't have, I mean, I don't think you want to do that. But, so, and the models not being that big actually lets us get you the music quicker, which turns out to be really important for good UX. And so I think a lot of this boils down to research and preference data. And so we gather preference data that lets us align models to what our users like. A really underappreciated thing is how much this preference data actually lets us do research. Like, without the scale of preference data that we have, we wouldn't even be able to develop the techniques that we are using. And so there are really some virtuous cycles there in how the product itself keeps getting better just by virtue of having people use it.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Interesting. And I guess you can use the human preference data in a much stronger way than the tech's models because they're all worried about sycophancy, right? And for you, I guess that's much less of a challenge.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  100%, 100%. And so I think, yeah, there's just a tremendous amount of edge comes from our ability to understand it, do research on it, and then RL that back into our models.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Hmm, that's awesome. Okay, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about music as a consumer phenomenon. And, you know, you've mentioned consumer creative entertainment platform at the beginning. I want to dig into what that means. Maybe starting with, like, seems like music is just like a cultural, social phenomenon of, you know, I like this song, I send it to my friend, you know, it's a scarce resource, we bond over liking that song and, you know, having the mixtapes, listening together, et cetera. And to me, music has always just been like this shared cultural experience, that's what it is. Do you agree with that? And then, if so, what does AI music mean for that?

• 14:30Speaker 00

  I agree with that very strongly. Music has a very different place in culture than other media in a variety of ways. One is actually people's tastes are far more developed in music than they are in other media. Like, everybody has taste in music in a way that most people don't have taste in film or literature. And the other thing is that music is actually inherently a much more social medium. And if you think about it, how going to a concert is an inherently social thing, even though you're only really looking at the performers and it's because of the people around you, in a way that, let's say, going to a movie in a movie theater isn't quite as elevated as it would be compared to an empty movie theater, for example. And so I think this is actually largely that humans communicating sonically through our mouths and ears,

• 15:15Speaker 00

  and therefore, music is like a much earlier method of communication than than writing. It's like much more in our DNA, I think, music compared to other things. I'm obviously biased. I obviously love music. I'm not sure. I think people assume that, oh, you're just gonna have like AI-powered Spotify and it's gonna dehumanize it and music is gonna get terrible. That seems to me to be obviously wrong. I don't think you're gonna make a better Spotify just by powering it with AI. And the thing that's really interesting is actually how can we not just change, but elevate the place of music in culture? And music has this other funny thing that by virtue of being so ubiquitous, it ends up being in the background a lot. And the thing that's amazing is that AI can be used to actually change that

• 16:00Speaker 00

  and to augment how music is perceived in society and in culture, augment how it is used socially because it's actually become less social in the last 30 years. And so that is the corner of the universe that we play in and that we are really excited about.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Do you see yourselves as today, and I guess when you look at your users, are people more creators of music or are they more consumers of music or both?

• 16:25Speaker 00

  This is the crazy thing about Suno. Before Suno, basically, everybody was a consumer of music. You know, compared to the eight billion people on the planet, there are very few people who make music and the rest of us consume it. And that's fine. It tends to cater to passivity. It tends to cater to making it less social and more impersonal. And the crazy thing about Suno is that any given day, ninety percent of the users are going to create something. And the thing that's hard to wrap your head around is you're not creating it to go bring it elsewhere by and large, to do something with it. People are creating music for the fun and enjoyment and fulfillment that comes with being creative. And so that, the creation, is actually the entertaining bit. And that is the big step change.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  It's like, everybody in the world is creative. Being creative makes you feel a certain way. This is like in our DNA. And we are basically using technology to allow everybody to feel those warm and fuzzy feelings. A lot of like, the inspiration for me personally for doing this comes from just remembering like, the fondest memories that I've had, or some of the fondest memories that I've ever had, are making music with my friends. Not even performing in bands, like, practice was so much fun and you get really close to people making music. And it's because it feels really good to be productive in a way that doom scrolling your favorite app for an hour does not feel so good when you're done.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  I was an orchestra kid, so I was not doing nearly as cool music as you, but I totally agree.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  What did you play?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Violin.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Do you still?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Oh, excellent.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  I have perfect pitch and I, let's just say, I'm definitely not playing twelve tones now. So my ears bleed when I play. But I totally agree with you. Okay, so it's like a self-expression slash active entertainment platform, some parallels to gaming. And some parallels to even like Claude Code, right?

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So I think the thing, the thing that's amazing about making music is that you feel good and fulfilled and you enjoy making it and then you listen to it. And there are parallels. And so that's what we call creative entertainment. The entertaining part is being creative. It's not that you are being creative for the sake of bringing the piece of content somewhere else. I think you see that in Cooking, people like to cook even though they can get a better meal at a restaurant. And it's because it is fun to cook and it is fun to consume what you make. And I think a lot of what makes Claude Code or any of the other platforms so special is that it's fun to build things and it's fun to use what you build. And even though most of the things that I build are definitely not meant to be hosted in AWS

• 18:59Speaker 00

  and used by millions of people, I actually enjoy the act of building and I enjoy the act of using the thing that I built. And so I predict that like in 10 or 20 years, there will be way more of these creative entertainment things all over the place. And it's because that's actually finally possible. Like that is the thing that AI unlocks. It unlocks lots of intelligence things too, but it actually lets everybody be creative in almost any domain.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm guessing you have an opinion on this. What do you think of the word slop?

• 19:30Speaker 00

  I do, I do have an opinion. I actually, I mean, my answer is usually it's thrown around without any meaning and I don't know, I don't know what people, what people mean by that. I made two songs with my five-year-old yesterday. Is that slop? In the sense that 99.999% of the planet has no interest in hearing that, sure. But that's really meaningful to me. And so if you call that slop, I don't, I'm not sure I care. It's an interesting question though, right? Like this is, this has happened before, at least in music, where when way more people start to be able to produce something, people get afraid that it's just going to flood all of our ears and all of the platforms with more content.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  And this happened when people started to be able to make music on their laptops. You had like a lot of 13-year-olds making beats in their bedrooms. And you fast forward to today, that seems like obviously a good thing. Yeah, there's way more music. It means that there's way more quote unquote bad music. But it also means that there's way more great music and there's new kinds of music that get made and there's new kinds of stars that get made. And I see no reason why way more people making music again would be any different from that.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  I love that. So we talked about the floor, the slop floor, the non-slop floor. What about the ceiling? Like, what, what, tell us a little bit about the most incredible things people have been able to do with Suno. And I think you guys have had some chart-topping hits now. Maybe talk a little bit about that.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  We have had some chart-topping hits. We've had people sign to record deals. We've had people make single songs that chart. And that's amazing. And I think about that as, that is a new creator coming with a new perspective that resonates very strongly with people. And so that is obviously the ceiling going up. My favorite example is Zainaya Monet, who, it's the, the stage name of a poet, who took all of her beautiful poetry that she had been writing for like a decade, and started to make music out of it, and found an entirely new voice and an entirely new audience to resonate with her art. And like, yeah, I think this is fantastic. This is, this is people connecting, right? These are, this is like the, the most personal thing in the world.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  And when you go listen to the music, you'll realize it's extremely personal. Like, the best music will always require human guidance. And it's because, again, music has no right answer. You like a piece of music because of how it sounds and because of the messenger who delivers it. And we will find new messengers with new sounds, and we already are. And that, to me, it's, it's like, obviously, the ceiling is going up there. The other thing that's really cool is even if they're, like, I just know that there are tons of charting tracks that have little bits of Suno in them. They're not entirely Suno. And it's because, for the professionals, it's also just an amazing tool to use as part of your workflow. It's not your whole workflow. And so there's this weird thing where I think people incorrectly say it's like either all AI or non-AI. And the vast majority of music will have some AI in it,

• 22:27Speaker 00

  just like the vast majority of music today is auto-tuned or is digitally produced. And again, more tools let you push music forward faster, let you find new sounds faster. To me, this is like, obviously, the ceiling going higher.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  That's amazing. Okay, so you chose to go after music, which is like probably the one industry that a lawyer would tell you not to go after. Because the minute you're there, you have pitchforks coming after you. You just, I think you just had a pretty landmark settlement partnership with Warner. Can you tell us more about that and what you think that means for the future of collaboration with the existing professional music industry?

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think, just to back up, you know, I think people incorrectly assume that we hate the existing music industry and especially we hate the record labels. People also expect me to say like, oh, the record labels are cooked. I think that's obviously wrong. They're some of the most culturally important institutions in the world. They understand music and they understand music culture. They cultivate and grow stars that resonate with billions of people. And the way I see it, it would be a real shame if there were two worlds of music, if there were like an AI world of music and a non-AI world of music. One is it makes no sense because most music will have some AI in it.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  But the other is it's just bad for the end user to think about having to separate these things in your head and to have to go to different platforms to have effectively similar usage patterns or interactions. And so what I'm most excited about doing with Warner is actually building things together that could never have existed before. And building products that let fans interact with their favorite artist and really deepen the artist-fan connection in ways that are just positive some for everyone. It's great for the artist, they get to engage with their fans, it's great for the fans, they get to feel like they are engaging with their favorite artist through music. It's great for the rights holders. Obviously, this is like a heavily monetizable thing.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  And it's something that literally could not have existed up until like approximately right now. And my sincere hope is that going forward, we find way more of these opportunities of things to build together that couldn't have existed until today. And just to say it out loud, like, the digital musical experience has basically not changed for 25 years. We've just been streaming music for 25 years. And I think music is like due for a new innovation and a new format. And so that's what we're here to do.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  When are we gonna see Suno at Coachella?

• 25:02Speaker 00

  You probably have already. It's probably in a lot of the music. It's probably in a lot of the backing tracks. I'm sure some of the songs-

• 25:07Speaker 01

  But I mean like a main stage, you know, like a consumer, consumer participation thing.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  I hope that at some point in the next year, we see a truly interactive concert where the audience is actually able to participate and make music with that artist. One of the coolest parts of my job is if I go and I demo Suno to an audience of hundreds or even a thousand people, is making a song with that many people all at once. And it's a very special moment. It's like almost religious, you know, like a lot of religions will do like chanting and singing in large groups. And why shouldn't, why does that have to be like confined only to a religious context? Why can't that happen at Coachella where people are already so excited about being together at a festival? And so my sincere hope is that happens in the next 12 months.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Love it. Okay, we talked a lot about the model layer and then the, I guess, the cultural, cultural experience of making music. I'd love to talk about the application layer product building because I think that's also an area where you guys have been really, really, really innovative. What's your approach to how to think about building in the application layer?

• 26:17Speaker 00

  I guess a lot to say here. The first thing is actually, there isn't enough innovation for consumers right now. But the average consumer is not willing to put up with rough edges and it's because you're not using this for work. You're using this for fun. You're probably paying for it and not your boss is paying for it or your company is paying for it. And so there just needs to be a bigger emphasis on the actual experience that we deliver to people. Also, just if we're being honest, like it's unclear how much moat exists in only a model. And it's like, I'll just say it, like Google has started to build music models and while ours are way better today, they're Google and they'll outspend us seven days a week and they can probably catch up on the model side.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  And so I think it's just really under valued to invest in the product and the UI and the UX to make sure that you're constantly delighting people.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  You know, one of our company values is actually like, we're just a music company. And in many ways, I don't think of us as a technology company. And this is to make sure that we're not building technology for the sake of building technology. We're building technology for the sake of delighting people and infusing that in the culture is actually just like- Really helpful in getting people to realize what the whole point of the company is. And so that manifests itself in lots of little ways, but from a product building strategy, that's what it is.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  That's awesome. What are some of the, I guess, consumer product decisions you've made? That you're most proud of or that were the most contrarian?

• 27:46Speaker 00

  A bunch. One that I got wrong was getting off Discord very quickly. I thought we would be on Discord for a while. We got off Discord at the end of 2023 and we released a pretty thin, not full-featured web app. And it took five days for 90% of the traffic to move to the web. So that's just like a overwhelming signal that I had gotten that wrong. Maybe the biggest one and the most contrarian one is at the time, a lot of people were experimenting with music. Let me give two, actually. One was to focus on songs and not just background music, to focus on lyrical music. And it's because a song is a story and captivates you in a way that vocalist background music just won't.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  It was also just way harder and so nobody was really able to do that at the time. And so by figuring that out, that was certainly a source of moat. But in hindsight, it's not just that we were able to do something hard. It's that the human voice touches people in a certain way and just makes the product way more delightful than just making background music for fun. And then the others, also in the same direction, we decided to make full songs. And so again, a song is a story. You know, it's maybe on average three or three and a half minutes. And we optimized for that, even though originally most technologies just let you make something like 10 or 12 seconds of music. At the expense of sound quality. And for the longest time, our audio was really not crisp. And every single one of our competitors had just way crisper audio.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  And everybody could hear one second of a Suno song and know, oh, that sounds like crap. That's a Suno song. And to just go all in on that and say like, okay, we're going to make full songs. And yes, they're not going to sound amazing, but they are still going to tell the story. Instead of making perfectly sounding audio that just is like background music. And so the choice of technologies there was to use autoregression instead of diffusion. But it was really kind of product-driven and to say like, it's not just that we like autoregression because we have like emotional attachment to that technology. It's because we think that making a song and telling a story is more important than making crisp audio.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  That's so cool. What's ahead for Suno? Three hundred million in revenue run rates. I mean, you've made it extraordinarily far. What's ahead?

• 30:00Speaker 00

  A lot. I think it's really early. Most people don't even know about us. The product is still very crude. There's a lot of room to run. I think you'll see us do a couple of things. One is try to increasingly make it a more social interaction. Like, music is meant to be social, and so you are meant to be sharing music more with people, but also creating more with people. And that can be both synchronous and asynchronous. And so perhaps one day I'm going to share you not even a song, but a template for a song that you are going to explicitly riff on and send back to me, and that is you and I kind of co-creating. Maybe you're going to do that with your favorite artist with some of their old music that never got released, whatever that may be.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  And I think you will see us go much more in the direction of letting people express themselves in the music. And so like the last big feature we've released is the ability to use your own voice. When you hear yourself in the song, you get so much more attached to it. But actually, even more so is when I send you a song and you can hear me in it, that song will resonate much more than some nondescript voice, even if that nondescript voice is very good. And it's because the human ear is highly attuned to voices. We kind of felt that way. And so both of those, being more social and letting people pour themselves into the music, will be a huge focus for us for the next 12 months.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  I love that. We have music videos.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  I love music videos. I don't see enough music videos getting made. I grew up watching music videos, like on MTV.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  And there's just a huge difference between a music video, which is heightening the song and telling the story, versus background music to put behind whatever YouTube content that I may make. And I love the former, and I'm like much less into the latter. And it's because what we would like to do is pull people into music more than they are now, and not just have music be forever a background thing. There's actually a video product in beta in Suno right now, and so people really love it.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Nice. That's really cool. I can't wait. Why do you think there's so few consumer founders in AI right now? Like, what's up with that? Everyone's willing for the enterprise. Like, OpenAI just shut down Sora, which to me was, you know, I mean, I understand the reasons, but why do you think there's so few people building in consumer right now?

• 32:19Speaker 00

  I mean, I should ask you that. You're the professional investor. I mean, my theory is like, it's just harder and there are a lot of obvious business problems to solve. And I'm, you know, like, I'm happy, I'm happy to have less competition, honestly. Why do you think it is?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  I think it's very clear to see how AI is going to automate a lot of existing business processes. I think it takes real creativity to dream about how AI can seep into the way that we actually play and create. I think it, I think it takes real creativity to see that. And most people, when they think AI music, probably think AI Spotify, which just sounds terrible. And, and I think it takes a lot of creativity to, to do what you're doing.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Well, thank you. Yeah, I think like, we are much more inspired and motivated by doing something that wasn't possible until today, instead of automating or speeding up something that already exists. Not that, again, there's a lot of business value in automating and speeding up something that exists. In some sense, it is just more fun to do something that could never have been done before.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like, what are we going to do with all our time after, after all the robots are doing all their work?

• 33:40Speaker 00

  You're not going to want to doom scroll for now. You're going to want to be, you're going to want to be productive and fulfilled.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Mikey, thank you for sharing everything about your, your journey to Suno has been so cool. And to see you at the helm of a music company and an active entertainment platform and just, you know, defining what the creator layer means in a world of AI is, it's been extraordinary to watch your journey since the original days of, you know, Harrison and your Discord. And so kudos on what you've done. Big admirer of you and Suno.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun.