Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:35:34 · Mikey Shulman
[00:35:34] S0: I don't know who your favorite artist is, but imagine your favorite artist is releasing an album next week. And let's say you're really into that artist, and so you're going to sit down in front of your best speakers, put your phone on the next room, listen to that album. That would be amazing. Most people don't do that. But I think about what can the future be. Actually, maybe you had to pay $19.99 for the interactive version of that album. And you got an advanced copy with a few samples that you could make music with, or a few verses that you could make your own versions out of, and effectively make a lot of fan fiction around this artist's work. And this is a new feeling for you to feel like you are co creating with the artist. And now that artist gets to listen to all of this fan fiction. Some of them will chart. Some of them will not chart. It will build a lot of hype around the album. It will get the whole world thinking more about that artist's music. So it's good for you. You're a fan. You're enjoying yourself. It's good for the artist. They get more fan engagement. Now imagine that artist comes to New York, and they're playing MSG, and they really, really love one of the remixes that got made by one of the fans in New York. And actually, they just play that version of the song. And how incredible of a moment that would be, where you have the entire audience connecting through the fact that they're all in New York, connecting with that artist, connecting with one another. It is just a different height of musical experience that has not happened before. And I think a lot about it, like, have you been to the Sphere?
00:37:05 · Alexa von Tobel, Mikey Shulman
[00:37:05] S1: No. Not yet. It's on my bucket list for soon as possible. [00:37:09] S0: There are concerts, and then there are concerts. And you think you've been to some amazing concerts, you think all concerts are the same. And then you go to the sphere, and you realize that there's just another level of amazing that is possible. And I think that that is probably true in most things. That is definitely true in digital musical experiences, but it is also true at the nexus between digital and IRL musical experiences. And, again, it is just for lack of imagination that we haven't built these things yet. The technologies exist. [00:37:35] S1: In the same way that YouTube exploded video, and you now can follow your creators in very different ways. You can you can interact with them in different ways, and traditional television probably had some something to say about the YouTube. You're imagining a way where you can still be in love with your creator, but you can engage with them in ways that we've never been able to do before. Let's talk a little bit about those creators because what you're really doing is actually allowing more people to make money on music, more people to make a livelihood from something that they love, and potentially for people who are the best of their game of music actually to be more successful, which is a little bit of what you're really saying, which is Suno is gonna raise all boats. How do you think about that in terms of the the wealth creation for more creators?
00:38:37 · Mikey Shulman
[00:38:37] S0: I think about it like this. At the end of the day, all of the dollars in the ecosystem and music come from consumers. And if we don't build better end user experiences that people want to pay for, then we are forever in this place where we are now of inventing new ways to split the pie. And if we... That's like a bit of a... Like a fixed pie mentality makes a bit of perverse incentives for all parties. And so if we focus on giving the end user better experiences and growing the pie, it's actually just better for everyone. And so, like, a large thrust of the company is actually just thinking about, like, how are we going to end up growing the pie of music? And that is why we don't just clone other services and just make them AI powered, and we're actually trying to invent new things. I think there's something else about YouTube which is really interesting, which is a new type of star got created. You know, early YouTube, it's like these niche things, maybe I'm a I'm a gluten free chef. Maybe I'm like the best quilter of blankets in the world. What... You know, whatever it is. And this kind of slowly evolves, and these are like little micro communities, and I think, like, the musical equivalent will be these little micro genres. But eventually, that evolves into something like mister beast. Mister beast is not for linear television. Mister beast is a u... Is a YouTube star. And there will be new types of music stars, I think. And I don't know exactly what they will look like. I think Xania Monet is, like, a step in that direction, but it's it's it's not her either. And so I think this is really exciting. Like, the new forms of entertainment will get created, and, like, that's really cool.
00:40:14 · Alexa von Tobel, Mikey Shulman
[00:40:14] S1: That is really cool. Actually, one of the questions I wanted to ask you is, how do you think about agentic artists? Right? Like, I've seen the hologram AI people who... Or the now agentic movie stars, and you're starting to see the edge of what that could be. How do you think about what that looks like, Mikey? [00:40:34] S0: I don't think a ton about agentic stars. I think about... In music, people resonate both with the way things sound and with the message and the person behind the music. And I think it is impossible to really remove either of those. It has to sound good and interesting, and there has to be a person behind it. Even if the person is not, you know, front and center, there is a person behind it whose message you are resonating with it. And I think you see that in Xania Monet. There's a person behind Xania Monet who has a message that resonates very deeply with a lot of people. But you also see that in artists today who largely don't write and produce their own music, and there's nothing bad about that at all. Like, you are still getting that artist's message and that... The performance of that artist, and they are getting helped by other people along the way to help write and produce their music. So I see I see actually not a huge change happening there. The thing that changes is who is doing it and how are they doing it. [00:41:29] S1: And how quickly they're doing it. [00:41:31] S0: Yes. 100%.
00:41:31 · Mikey Shulman, Alexa von Tobel
[00:41:31] S0: Yes. 100%. [00:41:32] S1: One question I just wanted to make sure I asked you because I'm so interested, and this is a little bit on the technical side. In less than two years, Suno moved from early generation model to a V five. So just rapid iteration is happening. And a plethora of product launches. What have you learned about structuring teams and your own sort of cultural... You know, pay it forward to all the entrepreneurs that are listening, sort of the cultural tenants to be able to move at the pace and speed that you've had to maintain at Suno?
00:42:03 · Mikey Shulman
[00:42:03] S0: I think the the thing that dictates the pace here is how much people actually enjoy their work. And it's like if you're really excited about your work and everybody here, like, truly deeply loves music, it ends up it ends up helping a lot in terms of just getting you excited enough to make the next breakthrough and the next breakthrough and the next breakthrough. I think culturally, there's something I think missing in a lot of AI companies, which is that a lot of products start as thin wrappers around the model. It's like, my product is whatever thing my model can do. And that is not a terribly user centric way of thinking about things. It's appropriate in some domains. But I think when you think about building a consumer product that is intended to be used by billions of people, it's not that. And so at the beginning of the company, the whole product is the model, but there needs to be some cultural shift of... And it's actually a challenge to the machine learning team. It used to be that the machine learning team comes up with the entire product, and now you actually need your users to come up with the product and to challenge your machine learning team, can you build this? And it's actually flipping it around. And culturally, making a one eighty like that is actually very tricky. But I don't think you can really service hundreds of millions or billions of people if you don't make that flip.