Suno's Mikey Shulman: Everyone Can Make Music Now

Why It Matters

By lowering the technical barrier to music creation, Suno unlocks new creative markets and forces the industry to rethink traditional production and licensing models.

Key Takeaways

• Suno models raw audio waveforms, bypassing traditional musical constraints.
• Breakthroughs reduced compute needs, enabling high‑quality AI‑generated music.
• Users create songs via simple prompts; model handles lyrics and style.
• New genres and microtonal sounds emerge beyond conventional music theory.
• Preference data and iterative research drive rapid model improvements.

Summary

Suno, led by physicist‑turned‑entrepreneur Mikey Shulman, is building a consumer‑focused AI music platform that lets anyone generate songs from text prompts. The company’s core breakthrough is treating audio as a continuous 48 kHz float waveform rather than a discrete set of notes or instruments.

By compressing audio efficiently, Suno sidestepped the massive compute estimates that initially discouraged the team. The system uses large language models to draft lyrics, then feeds genre‑style cues into a custom sound‑generation model that produces full‑length tracks without predefined tonal limits.

Shulman notes, “If you tell the model there are 12 tones, it will only ever produce those 12 tones,” highlighting the freedom of their approach. Early Discord bots produced short, rough clips, but rapid user feedback and preference‑learning loops drove the leap to V5, delivering professional‑grade pop, country, and experimental microtonal pieces.

The platform democratizes music creation, enabling creators to blend unlikely genres—trap with sitar, country with 808s—and to explore sounds beyond traditional theory. For the music industry, this could reshape content pipelines, licensing models, and the role of human composers.

Original Description

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