Somewhere, a bedroom producer who spent years learning how to EQ drums and mix vocals is reading a blog post about “responsible” music creation from Suno, a company that trained an AI model to do it in seconds.The post, published this week under the hilarious title “How We’re Building the Future of Music Responsibly,” mixes genuine product news with a lot of crisis-PR language designed to make you forget why artists are upset in the first place.
Ad 0:00 Click for sound 0:00 / 0:00 Suno, the controversial AI music platform that allows users to create songs with simple text prompts, recently raised over $400 million and raised its valuation to $5.4 billion despite a thicket of contentious copyright lawsuits.Co-founder Mikey Shulman had faced pervasive backlash last year after claiming in an interview that most people find the music creation process “not really enjoyable.” His latest remarks, conceivably written between sips of artists’ tears, read like a Silicon Valley fable where the wolf writes the sheep’s newsletter.
The blog post opens with the claim that “great music is made by people,” a sentence that reads a bit different coming from a company whose entire product lets you skip the people part.“We’ve always believed that how we build matters just as much as what we build,” Shulman wrote.
“From the beginning, we’ve held ourselves to a clear set of principles that help us make decisions in a fast-changing environment, always rooted in supporting artistry and creativity.” His blog also name-checks Spark, Suno’s in-house incubator program that forbids members from criticizing it, as proof of its devotion to musicians.Buried under all the unintentional comedy, however, is actual news.
Suno is rolling out a new downloads policy aimed at curbing mass distribution of AI tracks on streaming services, according to Shulman.He claims this change will make...