Looking closer: Suno AI

What the generative AI music startup's success means for the industry

Suno, founded in 2022, has quickly become a major player in the AI music creation industry. The platform allows you to create full, realistic sounding music tracks with a simple text prompt (and optional lyrics). With newly significant funding, their music creation technology is likely to cause significant disruptions in the music industry-at-large.

Listen for yourself:

Suno just recently secured $125 million, aimed at accelerating product development, expanding their team, and enhancing their models. This round brought Suno’s total funding to over $224 million since its inception in 2022, reflecting strong investor confidence in Suno's potential to disrupt the music industry and generate substantial revenue.

The Business

Suno’s stated mission is to democratize music creation, making it accessible to everyone, regardless of their musical background. The platform enables users to generate complete songs using simple text prompts. Suno’s model can produce songs with vocals and instrumental tracks, catering to various genres and styles. Their business model includes a tiered pricing structure:

• Free Plan: 50 credits/day (equivalent to 10 songs), Suno retains copyright.

• Pro Plan: $8/month, 2,500 credits/month (500 songs), users hold the rights to their creations.

• Premier Plan: $24/month, 10,000 credits/month (2,000 songs), users retain full rights.

Suno retains copyright of songs created under the free plan, while users hold rights to songs created with paid plans.

The Tech

Suno’s technology hinges on two primary AI models, Bark and Chirp, which are trained on extensive datasets of music and speech. These models enable the generation of realistic, high-quality audio. While documentation is available for early versions of these models, information on the latest iteration, v3, is less available.

Suno integrates advanced machine learning techniques, including deep learning, to ensure the output is unique and musically coherent.

• Bark: Bark is a transformer-based text-to-audio model that can generate a wide range of audio types, including multilingual speech, music, background noise, and nonverbal sounds such as laughter and sighs.

• Chirp: Complements Bark by handling instrumental tracks and background music. While specific details about Chirp's architecture are less publicly documented, it likely integrates similar advanced machine learning techniques to ensure high-quality audio generation.

The Criticisms

Suno faces several criticisms regarding the authenticity and ethical implications of AI-generated music. Critics argue that AI cannot capture the emotional depth and cultural significance inherent in genres like blues or jazz. Concerns also arise about the potential dilution of the creative process and reduced opportunities for human musicians. Legal and copyright issues surrounding AI-generated music are contentious, with questions about ownership and originality persisting.

Authenticity