Interview, Fireside Chat
Suno's Mikey Shulman: Everyone Can Make Music Now
- Suno plans to launch a truly interactive concert experience within the next 12 months where audiences actively participate in music creation with the artist.
- A beta music video product is expected to release soon to shift the platform from background content to an immersive music experience.
- The company intends to increase product socialization over the next 12 months by focusing on synchronous and asynchronous co-creation of music and templates.
- Versions 6 and 7 of the core model are projected to be released on a steady cadence to prevent multi-year gaps in product releases.
- Users will soon be able to incorporate their own voices into generated songs to deepen personal attachment and resonance.
- The research roadmap includes aligning models to user preferences through a virtuous cycle of preference data and reinforcement learning.
- While currently strong in formulaic genres like country and pop, the company aims to raise the quality ceiling for less formulaic genres over time, acknowledging that quality may vary.
- Suno is developing capabilities to model microtonal music and blend previously incompatible genres, creating novel sounds impossible with prior technology.
- Product optimization is prioritizing full-length songs (approximately 3 to 3.5 minutes) that tell a narrative story, valuing storytelling over crisp audio quality relative to competitors.
- The company intends to elevate the cultural status of music by building a "creative entertainment" layer where the act of creation itself is the entertainment.
- Suno anticipates that low-quality generated content, or "slop," will eventually be overshadowed by a growing volume of high-quality, unique creations.
- The market is expected to produce more great music and new stars as accessibility increases, mirroring the trend following the advent of bedroom beat-making.
- In the long term, most future music is predicted to contain AI elements, preventing a split between "AI" and "non-AI" worlds.
- Significant expansion of "creative entertainment" platforms across various domains for joy-based content creation is predicted to occur over the next 10 to 20 years.
- The company projects achieving a $300 million revenue run rate at some point in the future.
- A consumer-facing interactive experience at major festivals is expected to appear soon, following potential current presence in backing tracks at events like Coachella.
- Collaboration opportunities with the existing music industry are sought that were previously unfeasible.
- Product refinement is expected as the current iteration is acknowledged as "very crude," with significant room for growth and higher ceilings for creation.
- Google is identified as a potential competitor capable of matching Suno's model capabilities over time due to superior financial resources, making product and user experience the primary differentiator.
- Breakthroughs in compute efficiency allowed the company to proceed earlier than the initial mathematical projections, which estimated music generation was orders of magnitude away.