Suno's Mikey Shulman: Everyone Can Make Music Now
In a Nutshell
Suno's Mikey Shulman explains how they revolutionized music generation by modeling raw audio waves at 48kHz float32 samples, ignoring musical constraints like 12 tones to enable limitless creativity from text prompts, yielding emergent blends like trap-sitar or country-808s. This democratizes music-making—90% of users create daily for fun, raising the floor/ceiling, powering pro workflows, chart hits, and partnerships like Warner—while prioritizing full lyrical songs, social features, and UX over raw scale. At $300M revenue run rate, Suno eyes interactive concerts, voice personalization, co-creation, and music videos to transform music into a vibrant, social cultural force.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
In Western music, there are 12 tones. Telling the model there are 12 tones limits it to only those tones. Suno threw away everything known about music to build from scratch, treating audio as a sound wave sampled at 48,000 times a second as a continuous float32 number. This led to early breakthroughs, creating a totally generic music-making machine constrained only by description and imagination.
Mikey Shulman is founder and CEO of Suno, a creative entertainment platform and novel AI consumer application. From physics PhD at Harvard in quantum computing with solid-state spins to building the largest AI music company. Insight: playing at the nexus of two things that don't usually intersect is a massive opportunity across domains, e.g., music and technology, quantum mechanics and low-temperature microwave engineering.
Connected via mutual friend Harrison Chase, an early Suno Discord user. Pre-ChatGPT, back-of-the-envelope math showed generating good music was couple of orders of magnitude away in compute, model size, capability because audio is unwieldy, not discrete like text. Started building to make sense of audio, not produce it. Early breakthroughs enabled music generation.
Math was correct, but breakthroughs compressed audio efficiently, requiring less compute. Initial music was terrible, e.g., 12.5-second clips that didn't always follow lyrics. Inspired by Midjourney, launched Discord bot; many enjoyed it, confirming viability. Despite advice against music business, stayed up late having fun, a strong signal.
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