CEO of AI music generation firm Suno claims majority of people don’t “enjoy” making music
The executive’s latest take on music creation has the industry up in arms.
Image: miodrag ignjatovic / Getty Images
Suno CEO Mikey Shulman has claimed that most people don’t actually “enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music”.
The AI music generation startup executive shares his controversial take on the creative process in a recent interview on the 20VC podcast, during which he asserts that music-making is “not really enjoyable” due to the amount of time and practice it demands.
Expounding on his vision for the future of music — one he believes Suno is poised to help realise — Shulman explains: “We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people.”
“And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now.”
According to Schulman, “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now… It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”
Host Henry Stebbings then interjects, likening the music-making process to running, whereby things aren’t enjoyable at the start but ultimately become rewarding as people get better at it over time.
To this, the CEO counters, “Most people drop out of that pursuit because it was hard. And so I think that the people that you know that run, this is a highly biased selection of the population that fell in love with it.”
For many, Shulman’s comments underscore a fundamental misunderstanding of the creative process — where fulfilment is found not solely in the result, but in the very act of creation itself.
Describing Shulman’s interview as “very revealing”, one user on Twitter/ X wrote: “The solutionist language just doesn’t make sense for art, or for other things where the work is the enjoyment, but the tech companies seem stuck in their story”.
Oof. The founder of Suno really thinks this. It's very revealing. The solutionist language just doesn't make sense for art, or for other things where the work is the enjoyment, but the tech companies seem stuck in their story. https://t.co/6s3Zm9A2Kf
— Jack Stilgoe (@Jackstilgoe) January 12, 2025
Shulman’s provocative statements come at a time when Suno is facing significant legal challenges. The company, along with rival AI music generative platform Udio, is being sued by major record labels for alleged mass copyright infringement. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has accused Suno of using copyrighted recordings without permission to train its AI models.
In response, Shulman claimed that Suno’s technology is “transformative” and “designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorise and regurgitate pre-existing content”.
