My Take on Suno CEO Mikey, on 20VC - The Future Sounds Exciting

I listened to the entire chat with Mikey Sulman, founder of Suno. He’s been coping a fair bit of heat for one comment he made, but I think there’s so much more to what he said. Here's a handful of moments that stood out to me. If you have a spare 60 mins, give it a listen and make up your own mind.

My takeaways

What if Suno was released as a video game?
That’s one future Mikey talks about. What if the music industry was valued as high as the games industry? $32 billion vs. $200 billion in 2023.

The music industry has a mindset problem.
It’s like the size of the industry is set in stone, and everyone is dividing it up in its current state instead of working together to create a bigger industry. This mindset keeps us in a constant state of “we need to survive” instead of “how do we thrive.” As an industry, it can’t be about placing bandaid solutions on challenges we are seeing now. These challenges were created 10 years ago. That’s why we need to have our eyes on the horizon, not at our feet.

The future needs to be about new business models.
In the interview, Mikey spoke about how the industry right now has two sides: “creators” and “consumers.” But when you look at a model like Instagram, that completely disappears. Everyone on the platform is creating and consuming.

Music is converging to a single sound.
There’s less diversity in music than ever before. This is similar to what Tyler, the Creator, has been saying over the last 12 months. The industry, again, is being lead by platforms instead of creating it's own future. We constantly fit in with what’s in front of us because, like above, we can’t raise our gaze past our feet.

It’s about music becoming more valuable.
Individual pieces of music will decrease in value, but overall it won’t. This is where music is going—it’s becoming so ambiguous, no different from electricity, mobile phones, and the internet. We build these into our monthly spend, and for the majority of the western world, these are non-negotiable when it comes to spending.

A bad future if AI is hyper-personalised.
This is, personally, one of my largest fears—that we can no longer connect by throwing each other the aux cord, dancing to our favourite track live, or sharing a moment over a song that will soundtrack our lives. Mikey thinks this would be a bad future.

Taste will be the currency, and skill is going to matter less.
Taste is the ultimate democratiser. It’s the endgame. We are already seeing it. Sabrina Carpenter’s hit “Espresso” was pieced together using a loop library, with the creators of the loop receiving zero publishing and master rights.

Mikey envisages a world where more people are making a living from music.
He compared it again to Instagram. The value of individual photos decreased, but that drove an entirely new industry for photographers. That’s a world everyone in music would surely like to see. It’s impossible to get there now by dividing up the size of the industry as it stands.

Overall, as an artist myself, this is the type of person we need building these platforms. We can’t have someone who’s considering the industry as it is and playing on the edges to improve it. We need someone imagining what’s possible in 5–10 years from now. It’s time for the industry to stop putting founders on blast for seeing the world differently and creating it.

It’s time for some constructive conversation that together will lead to a much larger, resilient, and sustainable future for music.