A contrary thought about AI Music

[Reid Rosefelt]

Suno raised 125 million to fund their company.

The only money coming back is a $10/month plan or a $30/month Premier Plan. What percentage of their customers are just using the free plan? I think the vast majority use Suno for free.

AI takes an enormous amount of processing power, so every time somebody generates a free song, Suno pays for it. Maybe it's only a few cents, but the more people who use it, it can add up. The more popular it gets, the more staggering the loss.

Is Suno ever going to generate enough money to pay off the 125 million they raised? I can't imagine how that's possible. I suspect we will be hearing that they will go back for another round of funding.

Eventually building a brand like Suno means they can launch an IPO. The founders will be billionaires overnight, but it will not be a business in the sense of something that makes any money. It will continue to be an enterprise that loses tens of millions of dollars every quarter. Unless it becomes popular enough to be a business that loses hundreds of millions every quarter. (Like Twitter.) This would reduce the stock price.

If there ever is somebody who comes in and says I am going to tear this down and turn it into a business that actually makes sense, then they will have to charge a lot more for subscriptions. Maybe a $100 a month. And no free plan, or maybe just a free plan for a month.

At the same time you have to consider what AI music will be used for. Will it become something that makes money? Or will it continue to lose out to music made by human beings, who can perform and tour, and most importantly, use the regular media and social media to build a fan base. AI can't do any of those things. You can generate a billion songs, but you can't make anybody listen to them.

If Spotify has an AI band and they promote it, then sure. But the things that AI music can't do are the only things that matter. Create original music nobody's ever heard before. And get the word out through the force of a human personality.

 

[David Cuny]

I agree.

I think the novelty of being able to have AI generate songs for people will remain. And it's a useful tool for the hobbyist looking to generate ideas, or create an arrangement for lyrics.

But with a rise in "AI slop", and a plethora of free AI music, the value proposition of AI music will diminish.

By way of analogy, would you rather get a gift of a drawing done by a person, or a gift of AI artwork?

I don't see a user base supporting this in the long run at the level they need.

 

[Nekujak]

The way I see it, there are several factors in play here...

The most obvious is the money aspect. Suno, and other AI ventures, don't actually need to be profitable as long as they can continue to raise capital. Tech companies don't pay their investors back with revenues. Investors make their profit by cashing in shares. So AI companies simply need to demonstrate growth and innovation to boost their valuation, and then, as Reid pointed out, take the company public with a bang.

What happens after that, doesn't really matter to those who invested and built the tech - they already made off with their sack of gold. The road is littered with dozens, probably hundreds, of busted hi-tech companies that burned brightly for just long enough to make a few people rich, and then crashed. But even though the companies themselves expired, the talent they cultivated and the tech they developed lives on and continues to thrive in other guises.

Right now, Suno is simply the consumer-facing side of their tech. It's the most visible and accessible implementation of their generative music technology, and is the perfect vehicle for creating buzz and headlines, all of which help drive up valuation and attract investors. But it's not the only card they have to play.

Additional revenue opportunities lie in the realm of licensing the technology for other commercial uses. This includes clients like Spotify and other DSPs who are already going down the Perfect Fit Content road, replacing artist music with targeted AI-generated music. Other licensing opportunities include stock music libraries, ad agencies, television networks, and yes, even film production companies. Basically, anywhere music is traditionally bought and utilized. It's unclear what the economics of this will look like, but it may be a more lucrative play than Suno's current consumer storefront.

We have yet to see the full potential of generative AI. Very soon, I believe we'll be able to feed a finished movie to an AI engine, and in a matter of minutes, it will generate a perfectly suitable score - either as finished audio, a notated score, or MIDI files. The same goes for TV shows, commercials, trailers, etc. This is an attractive proposition to clients who currently pay to support the entire music creation and curation infrastructure.

Regarding AI slop and AI fatigue... the problem is, people are already listening to, and enjoying, AI-generated music on streaming platforms without realizing it's made by AI. And I believe AI music has already crept into TV programming - we just don't realize it. As musicians, we're more sensitive to musical integrity, but your average listener isn't that discerning. After all, it didn't take very long for everyone to accept MP3s on earbuds and laptop speakers as the norm for audio quality. And don't get me started on the unending plethora of AI-generated narration on nearly every YouTube video these days, which unfortunately, is also quickly becoming the accepted norm

Most non-creatives I know, especially younger folks, are intrigued and impressed by AI-generated things, whether it's artwork, music, video, or text. The general public is gradually becoming desensitized and acclimated to AI, thanks to things like prominently displayed AI-generated answers in Google searches, and approachable engines like ChatGPT that can quicky yield useful results. Even my tech-phobic mother, who still hasn't grasped how to copy-paste content, loves ChatGPT!

As long as there's interest and demand, the economics will work themselves out. It's very common for the tech sector to go through periodic shakeouts and consolidations, but the technology lives on regardless (remember all those popular search engines that went defunct, yet searching never went away: AltaVista, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, HotBot, Infoseek, etc.). For better or worse, generative AI is here to stay, and will only become more pervasive in everyone's lives

 

[Tim Nash]

Ai is already having a negative effect on education. Enrollment in universities will fall off a cliff as so many graduates won't find work because of AI. My son is in grade 12 and most of the students in his class are looking at the trades instead of university. You think people are dummied down now, just wait 5 years. The entire house of cards falls when 50% are unemployed as is predicted. AI music is the least of my worries. As for the arts, a system for certifying the art as real or AI can quite easily be set up. The likes of a Taylor Swift, sir Paul, Bono, Bruce etc...... have more than enough money to create a non profit organic music website, if they really wanted to give back to the real arts.

 

[Reid Rosefelt]

What bothers me as much or more than AI is people slop. As far as I know the 120,000+ songs added each day to streaming services are largely added by human beings. (And that figure is a few years old.)

There are the people I read online wondering if 300 songs a month is enough. There are videos out there explaining how to write a song in a minute.

These people have zero interest in doing the thing that Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton, Billie Eilish, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen try to do: writing the best songs they can. I don't know what they think they're doing.

When these scumbags want to hear music, do they listen to music by somebody good? Or do they put on a playlist of a few hundred piece-of-shit songs they threw together in minutes?

Technology makes it possible for people to create infinite "songs" in a short period of time. I don't care. Let them make a hundred million "songs" a day, as long as they keep their turd-like oeuvre on their hard drives. But when all these assholes upload their mountain of cruddy useless mush onto streaming services, it makes the musical haystack bigger than the Milky Way. It makes it impossible for musicians who are actually trying to write well to be discovered.

If AI had never been invented, you'd still have IA. Infinite Assholes.