CEO Of AI Music Company Says People Don’t Like Making Music
posted 3 days ago #
If you haven't read this 404 Media piece covering Suno AI CEO Mikey Shulman's dumb remarks about music creation, I suggest you get your eyeballs on it! Here's the meaty bit:
Look, I am not quick to criticize AI technology - I'm often an advocate for it and rally behind how it can make many insurmountable goals achievable for many folks. For instance, making music! I'm not a musician and don't have a lifetime of training and experience to help me do so. Tools like Suno and its ilk make that possible. I've used Google Labs to create music beds for my own podcast. I get the utility. All that said, I think this guys remarks are tone deaf and he clearly drank the VC investment Kool-Aid. Suno couldn't even exist without all of the musicians that came before it - a truth for all training data.
The larger point that's interesting to ponder here is the idea that technology should remove all friction. That certainly seems to be the position Shulman is making. Find audio editing laborious? Use AI instead. But the difficultly of learning an instrument is exactly why it's rewarding. Drawing is hard but you get better over time. This is true for all creative endeavors, even for those that have preternatural talent. Lowering the barrier for entry can be a good thing but as I get older, I find the argument towards removing all friction to be rather childish.
“We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 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,” Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. “And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] 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.”
Look, I am not quick to criticize AI technology - I'm often an advocate for it and rally behind how it can make many insurmountable goals achievable for many folks. For instance, making music! I'm not a musician and don't have a lifetime of training and experience to help me do so. Tools like Suno and its ilk make that possible. I've used Google Labs to create music beds for my own podcast. I get the utility. All that said, I think this guys remarks are tone deaf and he clearly drank the VC investment Kool-Aid. Suno couldn't even exist without all of the musicians that came before it - a truth for all training data.
The larger point that's interesting to ponder here is the idea that technology should remove all friction. That certainly seems to be the position Shulman is making. Find audio editing laborious? Use AI instead. But the difficultly of learning an instrument is exactly why it's rewarding. Drawing is hard but you get better over time. This is true for all creative endeavors, even for those that have preternatural talent. Lowering the barrier for entry can be a good thing but as I get older, I find the argument towards removing all friction to be rather childish.