Today on the podcast, I'm talking about AI in music.
This is something you, if you know me, you know I'm like a huge fan of.
We have Google that recently came out with Lyria 3, their own audio music model, and they've actually just made a huge acquisition.
They've purchased a big company.
In addition, we have Suno, who has just reached a new record for paid subscribers and for annual recurring revenue.
So we're going to get into basically what's going on in the music industry.
There's a lot of changes and a lot of milestones that we've reached.
And this has come from someone who my background is.
I've been creating music on Spotify and other places since I was in college.
A lot of it says a hobby, but I still make, you know, a couple thousand dollars a month from music.
Some albums I posted when I was in college.
So this is something that I'm like super interested in.
I've been posting AI music as well for a very long time.
Something I experimented with almost eight years ago now.
So this is an interesting place.
Let's get into all of it.
Before we do, I wanted to mention, if you want to get access to a lot of the models I talk about on the podcast, including we're adding music models for the first time to my platform, AIboxai.
We're going to be adding some music models from 11 labs very shortly.
If you want to try those out, you can go and make an account.
It's $8.99 a month.
You get access to over 40 of the top models for everything from Google Gemini to Grok to Claude to Cohere, to tons of open source models, a bunch of image generation models and 11 labs and other models like that for audio.
So all of that is $8.99 a month.
You get 20% off if you get an annual plan.
If you need more tokens, you can also get higher subscription tiers, but go check it out.
It's all on the platform.
All right.
Let's get into what's going on in the AI music industry.
So Suno, which is the platform I typically use when I'm creating AI-generated music.
Udio is the second biggest one, but Suno seems to be one of the bigger players right now and they have an awesome studio where you can basically put a song in there and select a certain part of the song and type in an instrument like violin and it will generate violin stems for just that particular part of the song.
It does a whole bunch of really cool things, or any instrument, so you really can get quite creative with Suno.
Their CEO was just posting.
It's Mikey Shulman on LinkedIn.
He said that they have now reached 2 million paid subscribers and 300 million in annual recurring revenue.
So this is I mean, this is coming after.
Just three months ago, they raised 250 million and they did it at a 245 billion dollar valuation.
I think when that happened the company had been kind of talking to the Wall Street Journal and they said that they had just hit 200 million in annual recurring revenue.
So I mean just three months later, we're at 300 million.
They're definitely growing very quickly, which is kind of crazy to think.
They were able to raise 250 million, and then, three months later, their annual recurring revenue was up 100 million.
I mean, this company is growing very quickly.
And the jump that they did to hit that 300 million, I think is basically showing that there is a huge growth in AI-generated music right now.
Suno's product is really simple.
And it's pretty powerful users.
Basically, what you're doing is you're typing in like a prompt for a type of song you want to generate.
And I've done this a lot of different ways.
I've probably generated 1000 songs on there over the last year at this point, or maybe the last two years at this point.
And so basically what you do is you can describe a certain style of song.
They also have some cool features.
One that I like, where you can hum or kind of just sing a song yourself.
What I would actually recommend, if a musician was going to use this, would be to, if you've written a song, just play it on like a piano or a guitar, like a single instrument, and sing it into the platform and have it generate a full background track for for your song, so it can fully produce all of the instrumentals.
You can.
You can kind of describe what kind of you can upload that audio file and then describe what you want it to do to the background, and then take that and sing on top of that or make your harmonies or layers.
You can also do like backing vocals and harmonies and that kind of stuff with Suno, which is really cool.
So you only really need one stem of you singing your actual song, and everything else can be generated by AI.
Sounds amazing.
It basically brings your creativity to life.
And I mean the alternative is just going to Fiverr or hiring people locally that can play the instruments you need for the certain parts.
But it takes a long time, a lot of orchestration.
You got to send this file around to a whole bunch of people.
Make sure everything syncs up, lines up.
And then you got to put it all together with an audio engineer if you're not good at that.
So Suno has solved a real problem in the market.
Because of that, we're seeing a huge spike in adoption.
But also we're seeing a big spike in, I guess you could say controversy.
Basically, there's a whole bunch of major record labels that are suing Suno over copyright infringement.
They're arguing that their models were trained on copyrighted recordings.
I think there's a big shift.
Warner Music Group recently settled their lawsuit and they struck a licensing agreement with the company.
So basically, you went from suing them to all right well, we'll settle, give us some money and let's sign a licensing agreement.
Just keep paying us money.
Basically, the deal is going to let Suno continue to build models using a licensed track from Warner's catalog.
And Warner Music has such a huge percentage of the music industry's catalog.
I think Suno will be just fine with just that, though they'll probably sign more licensing deals.
But basically, I think there's a pretty solid path for Suno here towards working with music players and people that have these legacy rights and then for these AI startups to basically get access to that and create models that are good at making music.
I think we'll see that from a lot of players in the future.
Suno-generated tracks have also proven to be very successful.
There's a bunch of synthetic songs that were created and posted on Spotify and they've climbed the Billboard top charts.
There's one example that came from Talisha Jones, who's a 31-year-old from Mississippi.
She used Suno to transform her poetry into a R&B song that was called How Was I Supposed to Know.
She later signed a $3 million deal with Howlwood Media.
So people have actually used Suno to create their music, to bring their music to life.
They've been able to sign record deals.
I mean, it's pretty phenomenal.
Now, not everyone in the industry is on board or is a big fan.
Billie Eilish, Chappelle Roan, Katy Perry, all of them have criticized generative music tools.
And there's, I think, a lot of musicians that have signed a letter a couple years ago that was kind of urging tech companies not to undermine human creativity with AI systems trained on copyrighted work without consent.
Now the trained on copyrighted work without consent.
I'm of course.
I think everyone's on board with that.
They're going to kind of sign these licensing deals.
So artists get compensated.
And I think that's totally cool.
But as far as undermining undermining human creativity, I mean you could be unlimited creative with these tools like there's.
There's no limit to how creative you can be, basically being able to say any type of instrument.
And at the end of the day, users want quality.
And so when you're listening to music, if you think something sounds cheesy or bad or or too AI-generated or fake, you're just not going to listen to it.
It's not going to be something that sticks around with you.
But if someone uses it in a really tasteful way and creates an amazing piece of art and brings their vision to life, I think that's incredible.
And also there's so much electronic music that's created today that's just on computers anyways, so I really don't see.
It's basically just kind of the next way that we use these tools.
Okay.
So there's also a legal landscape that we're seeing with the whole music industry that feels pretty unsettled.
There's a bunch of publishers recently that sued Anthropic for about $3 million.
They alleged that there was unauthorized downloading of about 20,000 copyrighted songs. um in this is a completely separate case because anthropic doesn't even have a music generator but the federal judge ruled that the training on copyrighted materials might actually be legal they said of course pirating it is not um and i think this is also kind of gets to anthropic getting in hot water for pirating like every book that exists in the world and they later tried to buy all the books and the judge said look it's totally cool if you train your model after you've physically purchased the book But if you just pirate them all, you can't do that.
So it's interesting.
It's interesting the lines we're drawing here with AI and how they get their training data.
At the same time, there's a bunch of big tech firms that are pushing into music more.
The biggest and most notable right now is Google, who just announced that they have the generative music tool producer AI.
It's going to become part of Google Labs.
This is something that was backed by the Chainsmokers, and it basically lets users create music from prompts.
You could say, you know, something like make a lo-fi beat, and it will do that.
It runs on Lyria 3, which is a music model from Google DeepMind, which basically can turn text and images into audio.
So you could like put a...
You could put like a cool image in there and it's like make a song.
That's the vibe of this.
You know retro image.
And it will do that, which is, I mean, it's kind of cool.
The downside is like it only can make, I think, 30 second long music snippets.
I'm sure it will get better in the future, but right now it's not very useful, in my opinion, for making music.
Just what you can do on Gemini, but perhaps inside of producer AI, it can do more.
Google said that Lyria 3 is also going to be integrated into not just producer AI, it's going to be in Gemini.
And they're basically trying to make this feel like a collaborative partnership more than kind of a one shot generator right.
So google i mean the way that they're pitching this which honestly to me just seems less useful but they're like look it's it's not a one-shot generator it's like a collaborator like you say you know play like this part of the song this way and then it doesn't it's like okay now add this thing okay now add that now add that like and i get like that's cool because you're kind of working with it but at the same time like i think for your average person that's like hey write me a funny song for my buddies like bachelor party that i want to play that has all these specific elements to him like You could do that on Suno in like five seconds.
So I'm not sure why you'd want to sit there and tinker with it.
And especially because, like Google, Gemini doesn't really seem like the pro place that most musicians are going to be working.
So making it like less useful than something like Suno that the pros are using where you ought to like, tinker with it and ask it a bunch of questions before it sends something, doesn't seem that useful in my opinion.
There's a bunch of high profile musicians right now that are starting to experiment with this, like AI generated music as well.
The three time Grammy winner, Wyclef Jean, used Lyria 3 in Google's Music AI sandbox.
On his recent track back from Abu Dhabi, he basically said that it was he kind of used this careful curation rather than blind automation right.
Like all of these artists kind of want to seem like look, I'm still in charge and I'm still making sure.
It's like super tasteful.
At the end of the day though, like Wyclef Jean, I don't know much about his music creation process.
So I guess people can roast me if they're big fans and I'm like totally... out of line here.
But I feel like for a lot of these guys, they don't create their background tracks.
Anyways, they go and hire a producer.
You go hire a beats maker, like someone produces the whole thing.
I mean, freak, like even Justin Bieber, most of his music isn't written by him.
Someone else wrote it, and they just give him the track, give him the lyrics, he sings it.
And then off to the races they go.
I mean, that's kind of how it works with these bigger artists.
So it's funny to me when they're like I was like I was using it for my track and I was trying to be like really carefully and curating it and not like automating it.
It's like dude.
You already automated your whole music process by hiring other people to do everything for you.
But whatever, I digress.
I'll get off my soapbox on there.
In any case, I think for a lot of artists, AI is less about kind of replacing creativity.
It's more about enhancing it.
Paul McCartney used AI powered noise reduction to clean up an old demo by John Lennon, which basically resulted in the Beatles their track Now and Then it won a Grammy in 2025.
But, like that track, it wasn't really able to be posted.
It wasn't able to be used until they were able to use AI to clean up the old demo and basically bring John Lennon's song to life, which had just kind of been sitting there for many, many years.
So I think if you look at all of this together you can see the industry.
It feels like there's kind of this battle going on between lawsuits and companies and people worrying that it's going to take over all the creative process of music generation.
Personally, from my perspective, I think it's an exciting time to be making music.
I'm not a huge musician myself personally, although I've done a lot with music and kind of in the business of music.
My wife is a musician.
She loves Suno and playing around with it, although we haven't actually published anything with her music and Suno or AI generated yet.
So she does play a lot of instruments.
She just kind of does it all herself at this point.
I think.
What's interesting though, is like it's not very controversial to say that AI music is not an experiment anymore.
There's millions of people playing with this.
There's hundreds of millions of dollars in recurring revenue.
These AI music platforms are not.
I think they basically kind of moved from being a novelty to a really core part of how musicians create music.
I know a lot of people, a lot of music producers creating music right now that are using Suno for a ton and and saving a lot of money but also being able to get a lot done faster.
And basically, you know, like they're not, they're not limited to maybe a budget where they're like look, I can hire two instruments on this track because I got a low budget.
They can kind of do anything that creatively they want to do.
So yeah, I think it's an exciting time.
I love the tools.
Obviously, I'm biased on this, but this is a cool time, in my opinion, for the industry.
Excited to see what Suno and Lyria 3.
I hope Google kind of ups their game and makes their platform useful.
All right, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.
I appreciate all of you as listeners.
If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts, and I will catch you all in the next episode.
