top | item 40431812

Suno has raised $125M to build a future where anyone can make music

44 points| whitej125 | 1 year ago |suno.com

82 comments

order

ein0p|1 year ago

It’s a fun service and an impressive demo, but to “make music” I need a lot more control than just entering the lyrics and describing the style. That said, there are some awesome examples there already, even with the current limitations, so I’m hopeful. Apparently so are their investors.

kadushka|1 year ago

If you're looking for control, check out https://www.aiva.ai It's MIDI based, and provides a piano roll interface for editing.

QuercusMax|1 year ago

So this is just using voice synthesis and some sort of "AI" to put lyrics over a backing track? Can't imagine anything lasting or worthwhile will come out of this.

mtalantikite|1 year ago

This is about generating something to consume though, not make? Making music is about so much more than the end product. It's the path not the destination etc. You learn so much about life when you have an artistic practice in general (not just music). I'm perfectly fine embracing AI tools, but clicking some buttons to generate a song isn't making music.

chefandy|1 year ago

Ostensibly, many folks here philosophically believe either that amalgamating other people's art is tantamount to making art, or that the artistic process is irrelevant. I think many of the former are inexperienced artists that see generative AI as simple art tools. From that vantage point, it's tough to understand how many specific, artistically consequential decisions other people made to create the end product, and have a hard time understanding why people who make those decisions are rankled by people copping them. The latter seem to think tech + art = neat regardless of the context, economics, etc. Either way, I think I've seen exactly zero people budge on either stance. My gut says folks with those perspectives are probably over-represented in SV-focused spaces.

beej71|1 year ago

Agree. Or, put another way, "How is this fun?"

jbgreer|1 year ago

In the free tier, Suno owns all of the Output. I'm wondering when someone will make a song, realize it's pretty good, and attempt to recreate it after creating a paid tier account.

Subject to your compliance with the terms of this Agreement, if you are a user who has subscribed to the paid tier of the Service, Suno hereby assigns to you all of its right, title and interest in and to any Output owned by Suno and generated from Submissions made by you through the Service during the term of your paid-tier subscription. If you are a user of the free tier of the Service then, as between you and Suno, Suno owns all Output generated from Submissions made by you through the Service, and, subject to your compliance with the terms of this Agreement, Suno grants you a license to use such Output solely for your lawful, internal, and non-commercial purposes, provided that you give attribution credit to Suno in each case.

tapoxi|1 year ago

Well the output isn't created by a human, so this concept of a license is invalid. You can't copyright something generated by AI.

japhyr|1 year ago

Wow, we're all used to data grabs and IP issues. But that seems to play out a little differently in the music world.

Ideas in tech are cheap, it's usually the implementation that matters. With something like lyrics, that doesn't seem to be the case.

p0w3n3d|1 year ago

Not make but generate. The time comes when music played by real people, even with mistakes, will be valued more than electronically generated performance.

Thus spoke me

A_D_E_P_T|1 year ago

> The time comes when music played by real people, even with mistakes, will be valued more than electronically generated performance.

Robin Hanson recently said something to the effect that this might be the last era of human-dominated artistic production. As such, that works produced in these days -- these final days of the human arts -- might be especially prestigious and valuable in times to come.

I believe it. Suno is shockingly good already, and it's only going to get better. The curtain on human composers is probably going to drop faster than we think.

danielk1994|1 year ago

It blows my mind how well Suno works. It's one of the few products I tried lately that exceeded by expectations by a wide margin. As an amateur songwriter who is a bad singer, hearing its interpretations of my songs was beautiful. The implications of this for the music industry is pretty disruptive.

tomdell|1 year ago

I would be surprised if Suno is very disruptive to the music industry.

It has extremely impressive output for a music generator, and it is very fun to play with - but people will always want to hear something new, and something real.

I don't think that music fans are going to connect with completely AI-generated music without a real personality and story behind it - and good, original music will always be more impressive to people and likely more successful than an AI-generated amalgamation of what already exists.

jackienotchan|1 year ago

Random anecdote: I've created a Suno song as an anniversary gift for my girlfriend. She was absolutely mindblown by it as it's an earworm song with many of our memories.

Always good to be aware of our small tech bubble here and that things we take for granted already, might not even be close to adoption :)

ein0p|1 year ago

I’ve created a few variants of a song for a singer/songwriter friend of mine using his lyrics. His mind was likewise blown, and it gave him some fresh ideas on how to improve his song

miika|1 year ago

Anyone can already make music

spacechild1|1 year ago

Unfortunately it takes time, dedication and some amount of talent. How inconvenient!

/sarcasm off

hackermatic|1 year ago

I don't think the Big Three record labels will want to stop this, even if it's massive copyright infringement, because it's not a threat to their business model. Labels create a whole ecosystem around a limited set of artists through marketing and tastemaking, then capture multiple revenue streams (streaming, licensing) for the few artists who people mostly play and pay for. They aggressively persuade musicians to sign away the rights, so the labels control the terms of payment, and they work together with a tiny group of companies in streaming/radio/etc. who have the same self-interest.

Everything outside that structure is an afterthought. The occasional indie hit songs and labels have failed to upend the music industry power structure for a century (they tend to get acquired if they get big enough). Tons of people making songs mostly for themselves will only dilute the power of smaller players.

The labels will probably extract some licensing fees off the stolen copyrighted training data, but they famously don't care about their musicians earning a livelihood.

relaxing|1 year ago

The tastemaking ecosystem is now dominated by Spotify, who only cares about paying less to license content.

Even outside streaming, the labels should care about AI-generated works edging out material from their own catalogs for licensing opportunities.

robxorb|1 year ago

For greater control, higher quality audio results and less censorship, but with the downside of being a bit fiddly, there's Udio. It's otherwise functionally similar:

https://www.udio.com/

(Not affiliated, nor have used either much - based on first impressions playing around and listening to others results.)

pnw|1 year ago

I'm really intrigued with both Suno and Udio as to how the music is represented internally.

Does the model build up track by track vertically, which would then lend itself to a more capable product for professionals, an AI powered DAW if you will. Or is it building a linear stream of all the sounds beat by beat e.g. horizontally?

FWIW I got consistently more musically pleasing results from Udio than Suno. Although occasionally Udio would sing AI gibberish.

unclebucknasty|1 year ago

This kind of mission of "enabling anyone to do X" seems to undermine the value it claims to provide.

So, if anyone can make music, then what's the value of being able to make music?

But, if what it enables still requires some rare talent or significant learning to make good music, then how is that different from today? And, well, anyone can already make bad music.

Or maybe I'm just in my greybeard "get off my lawn" mode today.

ipaddr|1 year ago

Everyone should make music. Singing to yourself doesn't make it valueless. Singing with family and friends provides great value.

You were sold a lie that only certain people make good music and you need to spend money.

scop|1 year ago

Does anybody know whether these services prevent a user from copying an instrumentalist's specific style? For example, let's say I input:

> "make a song with Johnny Cash singing about X"

That would result in IP/copyright issues, no? I don't really know the legal specifics here, so grant me some slack if I am not using the correct language. But, assuming that input does create a legal problem, does the same apply to these sort of prompts:

> "with a guitar solo by Zakk Wylde"

> "with drum fills like Thomas Stauch"

etc...

Are there similar legal protections around instruments as the voice?

robxorb|1 year ago

I tried it and sometimes it worked, other times it complained an existing artists name was in the description and wouldn't allow generation.

IronWolve|1 year ago

Suno has some advantages and cons, it can make any music style and can render 2 minute songs in seconds. Its lyric generator is also a tad nicer than others right now. Vocals are horrible, I think about 25% of the vocals sound nice.

Its training on musical styles gives it a lead, its vocals needs much improvement.

Its a great tool for creativity, but its a tad far from music ending up in my playlist due to vocals. For now. Instrumentals, i can totally see using it for background music in videos, themes, trailers, etc.

robxorb|1 year ago

Having used it a bit, I'd agree - but when it does good vocals, they have typically been very good. When it's failed it often is because it keeps layering on more "takes" in what ends up as a thick mess. Seems to progress worse as it goes if it does it.

dimitrisnl|1 year ago

I want to like this but I can't. Can't explain why.

searine|1 year ago

It is kind of crazy that "BBL Drizzy" of all things set a precedent. Using AI to create an incomplete song and then a real producer using it as a royalty-free sample to create an actual hit song.

I could see this paradigm becoming insanely popular with indie artists to make high quality / low skill backing tracks for their vocals.

CuriouslyC|1 year ago

If you want to see how AI music is going to play out, just look at how AI images have played out already. AI tools are used pretty ubiquitously now by digital illustrators, who use it to flesh out or quickly build up a prototype from hand drawn outlines, then add finishing flourishes to make it look "human."

sergiotapia|1 year ago

Uber fought transportation in huge cities. Very mafia/gang/backdoor dealy right? They ultimately won or bribed the right people.

Isn't the music industry like 10x more gangster? Will guys with bats go into the Suno CEO's office and hang him by his heels over the balcony?

I wonder how it plays out.

mjr00|1 year ago

Pop musicians that make a lot of money are 80% the result of marketing/branding/image and 20% music.

Major acts like Taylor Swift are a lot more threatened by AI being used to generate pictures of her having sex at a Chiefs game than they are by AI creating Swift-sounding music.

CuriouslyC|1 year ago

They're gangster but with lawyers. They'll get the algorithm to generate a bunch of stuff that's dubiously similar to stuff they own, then sue Suno for $200M.

norwalkbear|1 year ago

The big acts have been computer gen or inspired music for 10 years.

jsheard|1 year ago

Yeah I've heard this story before. What's actually going to happen is that Spotify and every other music streaming service will be filled with 50 million functionally identical AI generated songs made by people looking to scrape off a few cents when people listen to them by accident.

ein0p|1 year ago

Spotify is already filled with “10 million of functionally identical songs” made by people “looking to scrape off a few cents”. The state of the art, such as it is, could hardly be any worse.

orthecreedence|1 year ago

Right, this will probably end up being like how autotune was for singers.

I don't really want "anyone" to make music. I want people who are good at making music to make music. Yeah we should remove barriers for those people, but honestly nothing beats practice and dedication. Tech seems more and more focused on regurgitation instead of creation.

api|1 year ago

We were already there a few years ago before the generative AI boom.

I'm starting to wonder if this stuff is actually going to make real art "hand made" by real people more valuable in some ways because it'll stand out from the mountains of auto-generated trash. Problem will be finding it.

ipaddr|1 year ago

Spotify recently changes terms to only include songs with certain numbers of downloads (1000) for payouts eliminating this strategy.

eurekin|1 year ago

Multiyear long spotify listener.

I think it's already flooded with spam from non real artists. I had weekly discovery playlists, where I did downvote all of proposed songs... Each new set was still coming with most boring, uninspired, flat and predictable structure (and abstract cover art), which for me is an exact equivalent of those NFT images.

The images are designed to be a set of replaceable elements that have to follow the same "joint structure". Once you see it, all charm is lost and that vague "why does it look so funny" feeling is simply replaced with disappointment.

gunsle|1 year ago

Yeah, music streaming is already way overcrowded with actual humans making music, I don’t see how this will ever actually take off.

beej71|1 year ago

Humans pushed the game of Go in new directions after AlphaGo bested us.

Maybe this will happen with art. In any case, I'll still listen to human-generated music.

--Glass is half full department

arecurrence|1 year ago

I don't understand all the hate. I've been listening to this all morning and it's fantastic.

Sure, it's not going to trend on Apple Music... but it's the best we've ever done and a genuine step above previous efforts.

divan|1 year ago

Highly recommended video from Adam Neely – Why AI is Doomed to Fail the Musical Turing Test

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8NyEjB_XeA

GaggiX|1 year ago

I haven't watch this 26 minutes long video but I have already seen AI music being used as like theme song of indie games and people do bot realize it's AI, even under a Youtube video that just upload the music.

EDIT: The video only claims that AI would not be able to pass a "Musical Direction Test", but a blind Turing test only on output, yes.

norwalkbear|1 year ago

After using udio, I disagree heavily

thefaux|1 year ago

Sure, anyone can make music so long as they pay the Suno tax. While I appreciate the technical achievement, this kind of technology disempowers as much as it empowers. The process of automation inherently devalues the process that is being automated. It is easy to say this doesn't matter if the process being automated is meaningless or unimportant to you.

Making music is not just about whether a song measures up to some objective standard of goodness. It is about the process of connection and sharing between the musician and audience (which I mean in a broad way -- it could be another musician in the band). There are many amazing musical experiences that I have had that are not possible except in a live experience. My concern is that these kinds of tools will dissuade people from participating, in no small part because ai music is better than what most people can produce -- by the standards of recorded music. Why should I even try if I can't even come close to an ai?

In a worst case scenario, and I'm not saying this will happen, ai generated art (not just music) creates a doom loop where people stop making art themselves. Communities formed around participation in art wither away and we lose the ability to make art ourselves. We then become solely reliant upon ai for art, which means that art will primarily be consumed through the human -> ai interface rather than the human -> human interface. I'm not opposed to people experimenting with ai but I am worried about it replacing the human -> human interface and, frankly, the last 20 years of social media give me ample reason for those concerns.

spacechild1|1 year ago

I'm already dreading the days when bandcamp and spotify will be flooded with AI generated garbage...

greenthrow|1 year ago

Using "AI" to launder copyright theft of artists' life work is one of the most evil things "tech" companied have done yet. And that's saying a lot.

sdan|1 year ago

the filter between slop and good music increases

everyone|1 year ago

I mean anyone can already pirate Ableton and make world class music if they are so inclined.

spacechild1|1 year ago

But they'd still need to invest some time and effort. How dare you!

luqtas|1 year ago

$125M? opens the website, super excited to check what's their plan with the pedagogy of teaching computer music to realize it's AI, again, probably violating copyright