CEO of AI Music Company Says People Don't Like Making Music

Best take on AI I have seen:

“I don’t want AI to do my writing and Art so that I have more time to do laundry

I want AI to do my laundry so that I have more time for writing and art”

This guy clearly doesn’t know any musicians. The starving artist archetype exists exactly because people will sacrifice everything to be a musician.

Absolutely terrible take.

Creating music that you yourself love -- even music no one else will ever hear -- is a peak human experience that I wish everyone got to experience.

The joy of creation is truly wonderful for its own sake.

Can AI help that creation, just like other "synthetic" techniques for making music (not least - the synthesizer)? Definitely.

But for me at least, the less of me (i.e. other people's samples, stock sound effects, DAW gimmicks) that's in my music, the less rush and joy I get from it. The less it feels "mine". But that's all very subjective.

Which takes me back to why this is such a dismal take. Why wouldn't this dude point to how making music is a creative joy, and AI can help bring that joy to more people by lowering the barrier to entry?

Despite all its worth, Suno doesn't approach the problem well.

After a few laughs and cheap replicas, people realize that it's damn hard to produce a good sounding, creative piece. Suno almost always adds noise and you can feel most of this is coming from fingerprinting.

With Suno and Udio, you lose control. You can generate starters and helpers but sooner or later, you want real control. That's not editing a section and having a conditioned piece of garbage seemingly fitting to the rest. No, control means completely changing progressions, sudden but calculated change of beats, removing any instrument for the shortest time and putting it back with razor-sharp studio detail.

I know a few of these are already addressable, you can take the output, separate into channels (if it's simple enough), quantize, edit and have a good one. Yet, you're not really supported anymore. What should have been was these other core music production software to get cheaper and/or far more effective.

Suno and Udio is a top-down approach. Maybe one day Logic Pro, Ableton, Melodyne etc. will fill in the details up to this point, coming from the ground up with AI, I don't know. We're not there yet and it just brings down the mask of mainstream music industry with its all-repeating shallow beats marketed to hell. Hearing mainstream was awful but it suddenly got even more awful.

Relevant clarification from the CEO in question: https://x.com/MikeyShulman/status/1878600121333457351

"Music" in this case has such a high quality bar. Truly, the delta production value of popular music today vs. even 20 years ago is huge. So our standards are higher, and if you're a solo musician trying to reach these high standards you will most likely burn out and hate the process.

But maybe I'm over-thinking it. Musicians have told stories of giving up everything for their music over and over again. It can be one of those tortured loves.

I see these tools as another instrument or a synth. It should let 'me' create something rather than just do one-shot text-to-music. I would like to have a piano with intellisense (predict next few notes after I play my dumb keys), does this exist yet?

I would go one step further and say even with tools like Suno and Udio people don't like making music.

People simply want to enjoy good music other people put their time in to create it, and I think that is a good thing.

Clearly that non-creative didn’t even touch an instrument nor had an inspiring jam with some friends.

'most people' meaning, all us non-creatives. Clickbait.

As a drummer myself I don't mind much about the type of music Jojo Mayer plays for, but not only he's reached an unmeasurable level of technicallity in his playing but also he's uttered a gem of wisdom that applies so hard for this era:

"If we surrender the thing that separates us from machines, we will be replaced by machines. The more advanced machines will be, the more human we will have to become."

(I found out this quote by pure sheer of luck while doing some stuff with ConTeXt - it happens it's included in its sample texts)

The best line of the article: "Pretending that typing a text prompt into Suno makes one a musician inflates the worth of that output and the company."

You are basically sharing fused search results.

This is an interesting but wrong statement:

> "It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music."

I'm also a musician myself (see e.g. http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1317) and I have many friends who are (professional) musicians. Learning an instrument is a lot of work and sometimes indeed tedous, but I think every (true) musician can confirm that nothing compares to the joy when the band "clicks" and the musicians toghether experience the moment when great music arises. The only reason that (professional) musicians occasionally lose the joy of making music is their existential dependence on their profession and the pressure to get a decent income with the mostly low-payed gigs (if any at all). But that has nothing to do with the music itself.

Tools like Suno are more suitable for and more likely to please people who have not learned the craft of music, and ultimately tend to lead to musicians having even more existential stress and thus losing the joy of music even more quickly. But we can't stop progress.

PS: I'm surprised that and I don't understand why the post was flagged; it is definitely a topic that's interesting for "hackers", and as engineers and technology enthusiasts, we should not close our minds to the implications of our work.

I love AI and I love making music, but I find music generators like Suno vaguely gross. It can make better music than me and I probably couldn't tell it's AI, but it's an emotionless experience. Text-to-music feels more like replacing humans than empowering them.

This guy clearly has never picked up an instrument and persevered to the point where it's actually joyous to play and make art with.

He clearly picked up a six-string one day, strummed it a few times, failed at a G chord and said his fingers hurt.

"It's not really enjoyable to make music now [...] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music."

- Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI

Further reading:

UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Suno, Inc.

https://ia600409.us.archive.org/11/items/gov.uscourts.mad.27...

From the article: "It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software"

Music creation (like many things) is an intensely personal process. The feeling of accomplishment COMES from the blood, sweat, and tears that you put into crafting a new piece. It does not come from the ability to type "4-voice hurdy-gurdy fugue in d-minor (vocal accompaniment by Grandmaster Flash)" into a textbox and sip your latte while an AI cranks out song after song on an assembly line.

An AI assistant lessens the fear of the blank page. It gets you started creatively so that you can work and it offers ideas which, even when they are bad, can lead you to something creatively satisfying. The important thing is that the AI is only an assistant and not the complete author. The human has to guide and tweak and rewrite a TON.

I wish AI companies' CEOs would leave creatives alone. They really know nothing about artists' journey, struggle, development, ups and downs... the whole story that makes artists interesting and lets fans connect with them.

I'd love to be able to upload audio / have it analyzed in the DAW and then for ai to create riffs on it. SUNO is amazing at this - but it's useless without the midi output / DAW integration.

Even if the process isn't particularly pleasant, the result often is. Unlike with AI, whose output is often bland.

In my experience making music, specially the more experimental kind, is therapeutic for the musician.

Art is an expression and representation of its creator. AI can neither self-express nor self-represent, so it can’t make art. It can create pretty images or pleasing melodies, but it’s still not art.

I picked up the cello about a year ago and already it's more enjoyable than most other things I do. The idea of replacing that with AI is silly. Why stop doing something I love?

> And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.

Hot take: he's not wrong, but his phrasing is weird.

His quote was not about "musicians" but people with no musical background - he's not even assuming the hypothetical person can even play an instrument. And yeah, for a person with no musical background or knowledge, making a song from scratch would be pretty miserable.

As a counterpoint though, the kinds of people who do want to make music generally have self-selected themselves into a group who have some abilities to do so.

Counter-counterpoint: I literally just had a conversation with a friend (and amateur musician, mind you) and he said he just wished for a Metalcore version of a classic Christmas playlist. He's not going to go through all of the effort of making that by himself, just for himself to enjoy.

Music is becoming extremely personalized, and even the concept of a band is dying. So this very well could be the future of music.

my music sucks and I love playing it

A machine can’t do self expression for you.

Replacing self expression with an LLM is just hollowing yourself out, it’ll be evident to you and everyone else when you’re not behind a screen.

Music is about a bunch of people in a room sharing a feeling and a beat and creating and enjoying something beautiful. People are addicted to their media feeds, their screens, their ragebait and clickbait, and do you know why? Because they don’t have real people, friends, in the room sharing real time. Music can do that, AI is a perversion of it.

The latest wave of capitalism is that they have successfully invaded our personal relationships and replaced and monetized them. Let’s not do that to music too.

There's something so dull at this point when people mention "impact", "billions of people", etc. Just another thirsty CEO trying to extrude money from the system. Who can blame him. Idk, it's just boring is all I can say.

But I don't think he's wrong necessarily. A friend of mine always said, "The artist of the future will only have to point." I imagine things will continue to progress towards that until we arrive there, wherever that is or whatever it flips into.

In other words, I don't know where it's going, but it's definitely going there.

Probably AIs don’t like it either. We should stop making music altogether then.

People who use AI to make music don't like making music.

People who do make music sure don't like it when Ai is trained on their copyrighted recordings without their permission and for $0 compensation. What is happening is the music version of the game played by amazon with its vendors. See a hot new thing trending, fine tune train you model on it and then release an ai "artist" to compete with a real group to steal their popularity. Just like Amazon sees a particular flashlight is popular they come out with their own version of it and bury the original while highlighting their own product at the top of search.

I'm surprised not to see anything about David Cope, who is the real master of AI produced music. Cope works mostly within the classical tradition, using AI to produce work in the style of great composers like Bach, Mozart etc. To my ear, it lacks the brilliance of the originals, but some of it is quite good. Certainly several orders of magnitude better than Suno's AI slop.

I think some people will never reach a sufficient interest in music to where they can produce songs that reach their level of taste. But those people can be far more experienced and interested in a different craft, like programming. So services like these are there to make up the difference in interest for those who don't want to try hard in one domain, but don't see their lack of interest as a problem. It's just a consequence of limited attention budget to devote to so many crafts, and serves as a form of automated outsourcing.

Cultivating interest in something you're not interested in is hard. Especially when you care more about N other things already. People who use services like these to produce "slop" wouldn't have produced any songs in the first place otherwise, and I feel a lot of them couldn't force themselves to if they tried. At one level, if the creator is personally satisfied with the output then the bar has been cleared, regardless of what others say. And it's hard to judge someone for choosing programming over music but wishing they could dabble in the other with some level of efficiency. At some point, if you put the bar low enough some people are going to be intrigued, push button and receive song, as nothing will stop them from doing so anymore. That's the point of the bar being lowered.

However, I think the calculus changes when those people start to give themselves the air of human artists and upload their songs to streaming. This I believe deserves critical observation since in my opinion art is more than being a human pumping out songs like a factory and watching numbers go up. It's a form of elaborate communication between parties and peer communication is fundamental to our species. So when machines speak for people, a lot of social assumptions that have existed for centuries are overturned. Anyone could have been a human factory pumping out songs detached from the artistic process of reflection the past few decades, but spending hours instead of seconds producing things in such a vacuum is pretty soul-draining, so it was a disincentive for people wanting to do so.

I believe the two types of creative output (handmade and AI) have different "qualities" to them. I do not think either can be equated in terms of this "quality". One is deliberately produced and one is randomly stumbled upon. I think we need a new term for the AI era that encapsulates this "quality" of intention in creative output, without the negative implications of a word like "slop".

I absolutely can't stand this sort of drivel from people who have never had the pleasure of partaking in a truly creative activity and experiencing how that feels. To them it's just something to be optimised away and automated for the 'benefit' of bringing it to the masses.

"Thief says people didn't like what he stole from them."

Seriously, fuck this guy. Making music is one of the greatest joys humanity has.