There’s a radical shift happening in how the music industry approaches the ongoing AI revolution, at least if you believe the man arguably most responsible for starting that revolution: Mickey Schulman, CEO and co-founder of Suno, the music industry’s most prominent AI music generation platform.
“This wasn’t even happening at the end of last year, but in the last couple of months since the beginning of this year,” Shulman says via zoom. “I don’t meet a lot of producers and songwriters who don’t use Suno at least a little bit in their workflow. I think people are starting to feel a little more comfortable being open and upfront about their use, and more importantly, I think I’m a little more optimistic about the future. Not everyone, but there’s definitely a shift in the market.”
Suno entered the industry as a major taboo, a murderous musician who had been unauthorizedly trained on millions of songs by the greatest recording artists of all time, an app that only needed a prompt to create an entire song. For the creators, its use was treated as blasphemy. By 2024, both Suno and rival music generation platform Udio were being sued by the Big Three music labels side by side, with the brands alleging collective copyright infringement.
And certainly that’s still a big part of the company’s identity. Two of the Big Three record labels are still in litigation with Suno — and many other industry stakeholders remain deeply skeptical. Just last month, a coalition of prominent artist advocates published an open letter titled “Say No to Sono,” comparing the company to the thieves who stole jewelry at the Louvre last year. They viewed this model as “hijacking the entire world’s music treasure.”
However, there is a feeling that the war may be abating. Udio made settlements and partnerships with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group last fall, and Suno settled with WMG in November. (Sony is still in litigation with both companies, and is the only major brand that has not reached a settlement with either.) With some brands now calling on AI lab partners, platforms have sought to position themselves not as invaders, but as music companies themselves.
In fact, although this is still a controversial topic, many songwriters have spoken out about it THR They acknowledge that they see their peers using AI platforms like Suno more frequently.
Autumn Rowe, a professional songwriter with credits on songs by Jon Batiste, Dua Lipa, Ava Maxx and many others, says many of her peers have used Sono to do demo productions on songs they’ve written and been able to place those songs with recording artists. (Once the artist takes it, the demo is produced by an actual producer, she says.)
Ru is a skeptic of AI music herself but has begun experimenting with Suno slightly. In recent weeks, I’ve taken years-old demos I’d written that were never recorded and asked Suno to remix them to see if they could be updated to try to give them a second life.
“I have concerns about AI, and I worry about young writers using Suno before they have spent many hours writing songs,” says Rowe. “But I think AI in music will continue to become more prominent, and I think it can help writers have more impact if they can do a lot of that production ahead of time themselves.”
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As the music industry continues to explore the path ahead for artificial intelligence, it provides a look into the not-so-distant future for the rest of the entertainment industry, which has largely moved at a slower pace.
So far in film and TV, the only studio with an active AI content deal is Lionsgate, which has a deal with AI company Runway to train a generative model on the studio’s IP. Disney announced a landmark deal with OpenAI’s Sora image generator at the end of 2025 that included a $1 billion investment from the studio, but exited the deal after OpenAI’s surprise announcement that Sora was shutting down.
Major record companies were more active. Along with UMG and WMG’s deals with Suno and Udio, over the past few years the majors have announced countless agreements with the likes of Spotify, Nvidia, Splice and Stability AI. On the flip side, production companies have sued Suno and Udio — as well as AI giant Anthropic after they found the company was using lyrics from their songs to train AI agent Claude — proving that they will take action when they feel innovations are going too far.
Outside of the labels, Moises AI, an AI-powered non-production music service that provides tools for musicians (such as vocal isolation and mastering), hired Charlie Puth as its head of music earlier this month, with the singer serving as a creative and producing direction consultant for the company.
It’s a marked change from the industry’s long-standing reputation as a business resistant to change. The scars are still there from the days of Napster, and how record companies were ill-equipped to handle widespread piracy from peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, which degraded the value of music until the advent of the streaming era finally stopped the bleeding.
Tatiana Ceresano, a music industry analyst at Media Research, says she’s “pleasantly surprised” by the way the industry has approached AI so far.
“The industry has a reputation of being somewhat resistant to technological disruption and unwilling to participate in it,” she says. “I would say at least some of the reaction we’re seeing is that the industry is trying to prove it wrong.”
The music industry may actually be better equipped than film and television to handle the age of AI, at least for now, says Siricano, noting that AI is only accelerating problems the music industry has already faced for years.
“The barrier to entry for music has been lowering for a very long time in the digital age, and that has brought with it a lot of challenges and questions for the music industry already,” says Siricano.
With the vast improvement of home recording devices along with streaming becoming the primary means of music consumption, anyone can put out a technically professional soundtrack and put it on the same proverbial shelf as the biggest artists in the world. Up to 100,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day, even before services like Suno. YouTube has leveled the playing field for other content creators and stolen many eyeballs from traditional film and TV, though AI could represent another big shift as production on more ambitious film projects could become much cheaper for smaller creators outside of film studios.
“AI greatly accelerates musical challenges, but some of the fundamental questions are the same,” she says. “This is not something that film and television have faced in the same way up to this point. Maybe music will move on from that a little bit.”
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Since the WMG settlement, Suno appears to have moved on to offer an olive branch, although it still faces lawsuits from the top two major record labels. During Grammy week, Sono held a days-long songwriting camp at a recording studio in Hollywood, hosting industry executives, artists and songwriters with the goal of demonstrating how Sono can help creatives in their process.
“We’ve been there, and we’ll be listening a lot and learning and presenting as well,” Schulman says of the camp.
The sessions can be amazing for beginners. The writers, led by Grammy Award-winning producer Om’Mas Keith, fed lyrics to Suno in a quick message requesting different song types and emotions, and within minutes, they had tracks with complex production and compelling lead vocals. After Sono brought up the idea, a group of international musicians, including string players and a drummer, recorded tracks to fill in the blanks and add a more personalized human touch.
]For seasoned songwriters, Shulman presents Sono as a supercharger.
“If you stay for an hour, it’s very clear that the best creators in the world make these things better than we humans do,” Shulman says.
For those humans, Shulman likens Sono to the gaming industry. He sees a future where creation is He is consumption. This might mean creating new music from scratch, or having more active ways to interact with another artist’s music. The latter concept has already been proven on platforms like TikTok, where users routinely speed up, slow down and remix songs for videos. Shulman teases features like that coming Suno’s way but declines to reveal more.
“The whole world now is passive consumption,” Shulman says. “But everyone is creative. Everyone has this drive to make something. In the future, people will create a lot, and that means interacting with music in new ways. Naturally, this means interacting with the music of their favorite artists in new ways.”
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Rowe was among the songwriters who witnessed Sono’s session during Grammy week. When asked about her thoughts on the camp, she said it was “interesting and there were some great people in the room, but I don’t know why people think we need to… [this tech]”.
“I don’t know where the idea that we had to move faster came from,” Rowe says. “The CEO of Suno can say that people don’t like learning tools or that people don’t like the process of making music, but why make music if it’s not coming from a place that understands or loves the process?”
Rowe points out what remains one of Shulman’s most controversial quotes, where he said in a radio interview that he didn’t think “the majority of people enjoy most of the time it takes to make music.”
Shulman walked back that quote in an interview with Bulletin board Earlier this month, “I really wish I had chosen different words,” he said. When I asked him to clarify the meaning of those words, he said his intention was not to suggest that people don’t like making music and encouraged people to look at his full quote.
“Yes, the struggle to make perfect music is actually fun,” Shulman says. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t improve workflow and try to eliminate boredom so you can spend your creative minutes elsewhere. I’m sure every professional I’ve talked to has parts of their workflow that they don’t find very enjoyable.”
Another major sticking point among AI critics is the value that generation tools currently add to the ecosystem. French streaming service Deezer reported earlier this year that it is seeing 60,000 AI tracks uploaded to its platform every day, adding that up to 85 percent of streams on those tracks are fraudulent. These findings suggest that the vast majority of AI music consumption is powered by bad actors looking to extract royalties from legally streamed artists.
“We don’t have to theorize about the future of AI saturation because it’s already a reality in the market. Most of this content is fraudulent or AI material,” Michael Nash, UMG’s chief digital officer, told analysts during the company’s recent earnings call in March, adding that AI offers promising opportunities for actual creativity and interaction with fans, but fan interest in AI music itself is minimal at best. “Total organic consumption of AI content by actual consumers is less than half of 1 percent.”
Streaming services acknowledge the increased potential for fraud; like Hollywood Reporter Apple Music was reported in January to have implemented a new policy to double penalties for those caught engaging in online scams, with platform head Oliver Schusser confirming that the spread of AI content played a role in the move.
Shulman pushes back on feelings of fraud, calling the criticism a “hand trick” and lacking nuance. Schulman announced in February that Suno recently surpassed 2 million paid subscribers, which he says reflects an interested user base, even if the songs aren’t huge hits.
“Even AI tracks that the general public doesn’t want to hear are not worthless,” Shulman says. “I have a lot of Sono songs that I made for myself with my kids that are not intended for mass consumption and that I enjoy in I Got Out of Hell, and that is very valuable to me. I think people need to be more hesitant before they make judgments about these things.
To say that music has figured out the issue of artificial intelligence would be a gross exaggeration. As part of its settlement with Warner Music Group, Suno will roll out a new version of its model trained only on music licensed from that label sometime this year, and the old model will be phased out. It remains to be seen whether this new model will be as effective as one trained on millions of other songs. It remains unclear exactly how artists and songwriters who agree to participate will be paid.
However, when pressed on these logistical issues, Shulman says he remains optimistic. As he says, “You don’t need everyone at first.”
