Mikey Shulman’s feedback arrive because the controversial AI music startup gallops towards a reported $5 billion valuation.
If Suno is the Ozempic of the music trade, then a $5 billion valuation is what the before-and-after picture seems like.
Within the weeks forward, the AI music startup is anticipated to shut a Sequence D funding approaching that worth, in accordance with Axios. Previous to the information of the bloated valuation, Suno co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman reached for that pharmaceutical metaphor when describing the trade’s contentious relationship together with his service’s generative AI instruments.
“We’ve turn out to be the Ozempic of the music trade,” he advised Forbes final week. “It’s like everyone’s on it and no one desires to speak about it.”
The brand new determine dwarfs the $2.45 billion valuation Suno commanded simply six months in the past when it raised $250 million, although each main report label has sued the corporate for allegedly coaching its AI fashions on copyrighted music.
Suno permits customers to generate full songs, together with lyrics, vocals and instrumentals, from easy textual content prompts. Since launching publicly in 2023, greater than 100 million individuals have used the platform and over 2 million have signed up as paid subscribers, Shulman stated earlier this 12 months. Its customers produce a staggering 7 million tracks each single day, a tempo at which they collectively create as a lot music in about two weeks as Spotify’s complete catalog.
Spotify just lately introduced the introduction of a ‘Verified’ badge to assist customers differentiate between human artists and AI creators. Shulman desires to break down that distinction solely.
“I don’t need to get to a world the place there’s a distinction between AI-generated music and non-AI generated music,” he added. “It’s all going to have AI in it someplace.”
Shulman’s feedback come after an explosive look on a enterprise capital podcast in January 2025, when he claimed that most individuals discover the music creation course of “not likely pleasant.” Suno has positioned itself as democratizing music creation, however artists prevalently argue the platform exploits and bastardizes their creative labor to flood streaming platforms with AI slop, finally diverting royalties and posing an existential risk to their livelihoods.
Almost 25% of musicians’ revenues are in danger resulting from generative AI, a determine that might quantity to as a lot as $4.6 billion by 2028, in accordance with a latest financial examine performed by CISAC and PMP Technique with participation from Deezer. The streaming service stated AI “represents a colossal, even important, problem for the music creation sector as a complete.”
