Mikey Shulman, the CEO and co-founder of Suno, can see a future where the Venn diagram of music creators and consumers becomes one big circle. The AI music generation tool trying to democratize music has been making waves in the AI community ever since they came out of stealth mode last year. Suno users can make a song complete with lyrics, just by entering a text prompt, for example, “koto boom bap lofi intricate beats.” You can hear it in action as Mikey, Sarah, and Elad create a song live in this episode. 

In this episode, Elad, Sarah, And Mikey talk about how the Suno team took their experience making at transcription tool and applied it to music generation, how the Suno team evaluates aesthetics and taste because there is no standardized test you can give an AI model for music, and why Mikey doesn’t think AI-generated music will affect people’s consumption of human made music. 

Listen to the full songs played and created in this episode:

• Whispers of Sakura
• Stone 
• Statistical Paradise
• Statistical Paradise 2

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Show Notes: 

(0:00) Mikey’s background

(3:48) Bark and music generation

(5:33) Architecture for music generation AI

(6:57) Assessing music quality

(8:20) Mikey’s music background as an asset

(10:02) Challenges in generative music AI

(11:30) Business model

(14:38) Surprising use cases of Suno

(18:43) Creating a song on Suno live

(21:44) Ratio of creators to consumers

(25:00) The digitization of music

(27:20) Mikey’s favorite song on Suno

(29:35) Suno is hiring