Suno’s Mikey Shulman on Why Creation Is the New Entertainment

Published 2026-05-13 - Runtime about 36 min - Watch on YouTube

Mikey Shulman argues Suno is not AI Spotify but a creative entertainment product: creation is the fun. That matters now because the digital music experience has barely changed in 25 years, while AI finally makes music-making social, interactive, and accessible at consumer scale.

What Matters

• Suno trained on raw audio as sound waves at 48,000 samples per second, not music theory, because discrete 12-tone constraints would cap creativity.
• The core bet was autoregression over diffusion: full songs and storytelling mattered more than crisp 10-second clips.
• Music is not a scale problem like LLMs; there are no right answers, so preference data and RL matter more than benchmark chasing.
• 90% of Suno users create something on a given day, which means the product treats creation itself as entertainment.
• Shulman says Suno is strong at country and pop, and weak spots still exist where the ceiling rises but the floor remains bad.
• He sees value in pairing with Warner because most music will carry some AI, and artists should not be split into AI and non-AI worlds.
• A near-term bet is a truly interactive concert where audiences make music with the artist, not just receive a performance.
• Product-wise, Suno prioritizes songs, voices, and social co-creation over background music, because a song is a story and a shared signal.