Suno is free. Does the company see its users as employees who train it?

[Reid Rosefelt]

Meta just announced a new program that I find chilling. Everybody who works there has to let each keystroke and mouse click be documented by Meta's AI. There is no opting out. So everybody at Meta is being forced to train the tech that will cause a large portion of them to lose their jobs.

I have often wondered how Suno and the like can afford to offer a free service. The cost for them is in the millions or billions. Every single time somebody makes a song, they are paying for it. I have no idea what. It could be a penny, it could be a dollar. That never made sense to me.

The only business that makes sense in ALL AI companies is enterprise. If AI music is to work as a business (which remains to be seen), billions will come from making songs for Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and the like. Clear as much non-star music as possible out of streaming and take all the money. Under no circumstance take any songs from unknown musicians.

Is it possible that very user is an employee of Suno? Each time they make a song, are they helping train the algorithm. Handing over their humanity? Making Suno just a little better at destroying the dreams of all aspiring songwriters?

That's the only explanation I can come up with. Why pay people, taking a loss each time, to put their songs up there? They are paying for the data.

What do you think? Too harsh? The new Meta policy really made me think.

 

[Nekujak]

Meta just announced a new program that I find chilling. Everybody who works there has to let each keystroke and mouse click be documented by Meta's AI. There is no opting out. So everybody at Meta is being forced to train the tech that will cause a large portion of them to lose their jobs.

If I were an employee of Meta, what I'd be more concerned about is the invasion of privacy, knowing that the company has access to everything I'm doing on my computer.

The last tech company I worked for used Slack for all intra-office communication, and the company had full access to everyone's chats. It made you feel like Big Brother was watching over everything you do and say. You eventually get used to it and don't consciously think about it, but it's always in the back of your mind.

Meta is upping the ante by adding AI monitoring and analysis to the equation, which could end up being more oppressive.

In terms of using their employees to train their tech... that's actually not uncommon. Many tech companies "eat their own dog food" as they put it, effectively having employees use the company's products to report bugs and make feature suggestions. I think that kind of feedback would be more useful to a company than training AI from keystrokes. But maybe I'm wrong.

I have often wondered how Suno and the like can afford to offer a free service. The cost for them is in the millions or billions. Every single time somebody makes a song, they are paying for it. I have no idea what. It could be a penny, it could be a dollar. That never made sense to me.

The only business that makes sense in ALL AI companies is enterprise. If AI music is to work as a business (which remains to be seen), billions will come from making songs for Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and the like. Clear as much non-star music as possible out of streaming and take all the money. Under no circumstance take any songs from unknown musicians.

With burgeoning tech companies, earning a profit is usually not the primary goal. Showing growth and user adoption is far more important, because that's what excites investors and drives up stock prices. Investors is where these companies get most of their money.

If Suno were only earning money from subscriptions, they'd have been bankrupt long ago. The money that fuels the business comes from investor dollars.

As far as streaming services go, it's difficult to say just how much revenue can be squeezed from that stone. In the case of Spotify, they generate their own AI tracks to displace human-created tracks, as a way of saving money by not having to pay out royalties. It's not clear to me where Suno fits into that picture and how much they actually earn from it.

Is it possible that very user is an employee of Suno? Each time they make a song, are they helping train the algorithm. Handing over their humanity? Making Suno just a little better at destroying the dreams of all aspiring songwriters?

That's the only explanation I can come up with. Why pay people, taking a loss each time, to put their songs up there? They are paying for the data.

It's certainly true that all AI engines learn something from each user interaction. That's why ChatGPT, Claude, etc. offer a thumbs up/down icon after every response. Every interaction helps to refine an AI engine, just as we humans learn something from our interactions with others. I don't think there's anything particularly nefarious about it with respect to AI companies, it's simply the nature of the tech.

Is Suno bad for us songwriters? For songwriters who are trying to earn money from their songs, absolutely. For everyone else, perhaps not so much. If I'm just making songs for my own creative pleasure, it really doesn't matter to me what Suno is doing. But if I'm trying to sell my music, and have to compete with millions of AI-generated tracks that took only a few seconds to create by someone who knows nothing about music... then yeah, Suno is the embodiment of Satan.

 

[Reid Rosefelt]

Is Suno bad for us songwriters? For songwriters who are trying to earn money from their songs, absolutely. For everyone else, perhaps not so much. If I'm just making songs for my own creative pleasure, it really doesn't matter to me what Suno is doing. But if I'm trying to sell my music, and have to compete with millions of AI-generated tracks that took only a few seconds to create by someone who knows nothing about music... then yeah, Suno is the embodiment of Satan.

I'm all over the place on AI. Most of the time I just think, if it makes somebody happy to use it, let them have their fun. I don't know how it impacts what I do. I certainly have no illusions that there will be any profits from my songs. Just a big money pit that I do for love.

But I still would like to be up on all the streaming services so that people can easily find me, even if it's for free. I look forward to the day when it is actually up there.

 

[BDT]

But if I'm trying to sell my music, and have to compete with millions of AI-generated tracks that took only a few seconds to create by someone who knows nothing about music

Even before AI came along, I had to compete with millions of other tracks, so nothing has changed for me.
I’m just as unknown as I was before.
With AI, I might be a bit more unknown though

 

[Nekujak]

Even before AI came along, I had to compete with millions of other tracks, so nothing has changed for me.
I’m just as unknown as I was before.
With AI, I might be a bit more unknown though

Heh, so true. But before, we were competing with other talented musicians. Now we're also competing with our neighbor's 10-year-old kid who never picked up an instrument in his life, and many others like him. It's a little disheartening

 

[BDT]

It's a little disheartening

For me, that’s actually liberating, because since I know that no one listens to my stuff anyway, it’s mentally easier for me to just do whatever I want.
Like, writing a 5-minute song that doesn’t contain a single rhyme, or a song whose title includes 6x the word "Fυck", causing YouTube to flag it as "18+" (it hasn’t been released on Spotify yet. I had to switch distributors to get it on there Long story...).

 

[Reid Rosefelt]

The world of introducing songs to the public has been a state of change long before AI was in the picture.

When I was a teen there were albums in a small record store. I could spend an afternoon in there looking at covers and if something intrigued me, there was a booth in the back and I could listen to it.
I could listen to all the Top 40 on my radio. Every single one. And friends would recommend things to me. That's how I found out about The Who, Jimi Hendrix and The Velvet Underground. I'd go over to a friend's house and they'd play it for me. There were shows on TV, from Dick Clark to Ed Sullivan.

When I got older there were Big Box stores like Tower Records. No way you could really study all of this stuff. But it was divided into categories, which made it a little easier to explore. I read reviews. And at the stores I went to there were listening stations for the music they were pushing. When I moved to New York I heard music in clubs, both live and on record.

Then there was Napster and mp3s. I gradually transferred my music to portable devices. I listened more when I was out and about than at home. Eventually there was iTunes, which really hurt the idea of an album, as you could buy separate songs. This hurt the money that musicians could make from their music. But people were still paying for songs.

But iTunes was a massive sea of songs. It became harder to discover music I liked in that sea. I was older and stopped reading Rolling Stone. When I saw the Grammys or SNL, I often didn't know who these singers and groups were. They weren't aimed at me.

How could anything I wrote be noticed on iTunes? You need to perform. You need to be young, and if possible, beautiful. I had no idea how to get one of my songs up on iTunes without a record deal.

Spotify and the streaming services did away with the idea of making money from music unless you were really big. Streaming services were just a place where I could send somebody a link and they could hear my music. Soundcloud. YouTube.

But I'm doing a project where I'm spending a year on five songs. Spending a ton of money. I want those songs up on Spotify, Apple, Amazon and the rest. Totally unlike the hundred or so songs I've written since I was a teenager, these are the best I can do. A large part of the inspiration for this project was me starting to listen to new music again. Billie Eilish and Lorde and Lana del Rey and yes, Taylor Swift, inspired me. I was excited about the craft of songwriting again.

AI is simply the latest thing to make the choices of songs from that little record store to a list that is almost infinite in size. I am nostalgic for the days where I'd be only competing with all the people like me--independent songwriters doing the best they can. I'd take on that challenge, because I am putting a lot of time, giving it my all, and I don't know how many people are doing that.

In 2026, you have to be more a marketer than an artist. Luckily that's what I am. I spent 50 years in the film business marketing foreign and independent films. I ran a web business. I was a consultant for buying ads on Facebook for many years. I was a YouTuber for a long time. These experiences are not enough, but they are a start. I have a strategic plan for my five songs. I don't see the point in writing a song without an idea for how you can get it out there.

I believe in my songs, and I believe that if certain people hear them, they'll like them. It's honestly not about numbers. When I made YouTube videos, every now and then there would be one video that connected with one viewer, and they wrote me about what it meant to them. And that made it all worthwhile for me.