You're never gonna believe this, but a CEO of an AI music company hates making music. Suno AI co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman recently spouted off possibly one of the dumbest opinions of 2025 on the The Twenty Minute VC podcast, stating that most people hate making music.
"We didn't want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators ten-percent faster, or makes it ten-percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music, you have to build something for a billion people. That is, first and foremost, giving everyone the joys of creating music. And this is a huge departure of making music. It's not really enjoyable to make music now," said Shulman.
"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."
If you don't like the process of making music, guess what? You don't get to make music. I don't get to become a world-class chef – or even a hobbyist chef – if I don't attempt to grasp the basic of cooking and food science. Why is it the same with music? Why should someone who writes a prompt in two minutes be put in the same league as someone who's played guitar for even six months and just wrote their first song?
Not to mention whatever Suno is coming up with is likely stolen from actual copyrighted material. Which brings me to my second point – a lot of these AI companies are just drawing from a pool of pre-existing music, a very good chunk of which they never got permission to take from. So whatever you're "creating" with something like Suno is a pale imitation of something that already exists.
And I know some of you are about to comment "yeah well, musicians are inspired by other musicians! How is that different?" Because those people still put in the work to get good at what they do, and inspiration and theft are two different things. Oh, and shout out to Shulman calling musicians "content creators." Really shows where your heart is at, dude.
Honestly, the original headline for this article was "AI Music Company CEO Hates Music & Musicians," but can't that be said about all of them? Shulman's opinion is straight up bullshit, and so it Suno's practices.