The contrast, of course, is striking: On one side, a startup built on the idea that anyone can create a song in seconds. On the other, people traveling across the ocean to spend a week doing it the slow way.
But after spending the week far away from Silicon Valley, both physically and metaphorically, I’m not convinced either vision settles the bigger questions about AI music.
In a blog post announcing the new funding, Suno wrote that its initial focus was simple—to allow more people to experience the joy of making music. “In recent months, we’ve seen Suno become part of culture in ways that continue to surprise us,” said the post. “Family members are turning text threads, group chats, and inside jokes into songs. People are writing songs for birthdays, graduations, and even work events. Viral trends helped propel Suno to #1 in the App Store’s Music category in dozens of countries.”
It cited meaningful use cases such as patients in hospice care using Suno to leave songs behind for loved ones; therapists helping teens navigate mental health challenges through music creation; caregivers for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s creating personalized songs tied to memories and familiar voices.
Demand isn’t the only uncertainty: Sumo and its competitors are trained on vast numbers of human-created songs, and the legal battles over whether that training is lawful are far from resolved.
The scale of the dispute has only grown. When the record labels first sued Suno in 2024, they alleged the company had trained on roughly 560 copyrighted works. Last month, they sought to amend their complaint to claim that more than 61,000 additional songs were used without permission. Meanwhile, both Suno and Udio have asked courts to keep the size of their training datasets confidential, arguing that the information could help competitors build rival products.
For now, investors appear willing to look past those legal uncertainties. Suno remains one of the most popular music apps in the world, and according to fundraising materials obtained by Billboard, users were generating more than 7 million songs per day at the time of its latest financing.
Menlo Ventures, which led Suno’s Series C last fall, said in a blog post that it was “thrilled” to double down on Suno in its latest round, and pointed out that “Every major consumer platform is built on a new behavior. TikTok made short-form video consumption mainstream. Netflix changed how we watch TV. Suno is doing something different: making creation itself a form of entertainment.”
Suno appears to be banking on future partnerships with the music industry, including a new music model. “We believe there’s a huge opportunity to create new experiences for fans while helping artists reach audiences, build community, and unlock new creative and economic possibilities,” the company’s blog post read.
Whether or not Suno succeeds, I suspect music will continue to exist on a spectrum of technology use, which has existed since recorded music began with the invention of the phonograph. Even among my cohort at the château, there were songwriters who routinely relied on online beats, digital recording software, pitch correction, social media distribution, and countless other technologies. Musicians have always adopted new tools when they found them useful.
With that, here’s more AI news.
