Thievery or innovation? The music industry grapples with AI
By BRENT CRANE
Comedian Bill Stiteler didn’t follow a conventional path to pop music stardom. In fact, he doesn’t really see himself as a musician at all.
A couple of years ago, Stiteler began creating jokey “realistic walk-up songs” for Major League Baseball players using Suno, an artificial intelligence music generator. The clips helped boost his follower count on Instagram. But his first certifiable hit came when he applied the same irreverent tone to travel and asked Suno to compose a song about a vacation trip.
His AI-assisted ode to an island, “The Puerto Rico Song,” has nearly 20 million Spotify streams, millions of views on YouTube and a licensing deal that earns him royalties (he won’t disclose dollar amounts). In June, Puerto Rico’s tourism board flew him out to record a music video. “It’s a wild place to vacation,” his AI singer belts. “Slot machines in the bus station.”
Stiteler, 37, has produced dozens of ticklish AI ditties about cities, often obscure ones (Altoona, Pennsylvania; Morgantown, West Virginia; Manchester, New Hampshire). He writes the lyrics for what he calls his “pseudomusic”; Suno does the rest. “I’m not an artist,” he said. “I’m a fartist.”
The process gives him “such impostor syndrome about this musician stuff,” he added. “Musicians work their entire life. But I make this freaking AI Puerto Rico song and it’s smoking, like doing really well.”
The music industry has similarly mixed feelings about AI tools like Suno, which have set off a debate — and several lawsuits — over how to monetize the growing tsunami of AI-created tunes.
“Some folks believe that AI music should be eradicated,” said Rob Jonas, CEO of Luminate, a music industry analytics company. “Others believe that music is not about how it’s made but how it makes you feel. If AI creates the same emotional reaction that organic music does, then it’s music.”
Suno (Hindi for “listen”) was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2022. Since then, around a dozen AI-generated songs have appeared on the Billboard charts. Deezer, a European music streaming platform, said in July that AI-generated songs accounted for half of its total uploads. Spotify, in partnership with Universal, is allowing users to pay to remix certain songs using AI.
Over 100 million people have made music with Suno, the company says, each producing an average of 42 songs per month. Two million users pay up to $30 a month for more advanced features, like splitting a generated track into isolated vocals and instruments. For a few weeks this year, Suno was the most popular download in the music category of Apple’s app store. (Apple Music announced in August that it would soon require AI music to be tagged as such.)
There are competitors: Udio, Riffusion, ElevenLabs. But Suno, which has raised roughly $1 billion from the likes of Bond Capital and Union Square Ventures, with a $5.4 billion valuation, is the clear leader of this emerging industry. Many artists find the rise of such platforms scary. But in the telling of Mikey Shulman, Suno’s CEO, no one should be afraid.
“The purpose of Suno is to allow the whole world to feel creative fulfillment,” he said. “In the future, this will be present in a lot of different domains. We do music.” (Not all artists are afraid: “It’s a new tool for creativity,” hip-hop titan Dr. Dre told The New York Times this month. “I’m embracing it.”)
The labels and artists who see Suno as mostly a threat portray AI music less as another creative tool than another iteration of Napster-esque thievery. A hacker who breached the startup and shared findings with 404 Media accused Suno of illegally scraping songs from YouTube Music, Genius, Deezer and others. (The hacked data “involved outdated source code that is no longer in use,” Suno told the publication. In a statement, a spokesperson said that Suno’s models were “trained on publicly available music files on the open internet.”)
Even before the hack, major labels made similar accusations against Suno. In 2024, the Recording Industry Association of America, on behalf of Sony Music Group, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, sued Suno, accusing the company of training its models on copyrighted recordings without permission. Warner settled over a year later; Universal and Sony are still litigating. A parallel RIAA suit against rival platform Udio has since been settled by Universal and Warner, leaving Sony alone in court.
“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim that it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work, and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay, set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all,” Mitch Glazier, the head of RIAA, said in a statement at the time.
In any case, if you can’t beat them, join them. Last November, Warner announced a partnership with its former litigant. Warner artists, from Ed Sheeran to Charli XCX, can now individually opt in to let Suno use their names, images, likenesses, voices and compositions in AI-generated songs. Suno also acquired Songkick, the concert-discovery platform, from Warner as part of the deal. Most significantly, Suno is developing a “licensed model,” trained on Warner’s catalog.
“We view our participation as the ability to shape the future and protect our artists and songwriters while at the same time creating new opportunities,” Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl said. “The alternative is to just sit and watch.”
Some music businesses are choosing not to engage at all. In January, indie streaming platform Bandcamp decreed an outright AI ban. The platform has no formalized system of identifying offenders. Rather, the company’s editorial director, J. Edward Keyes, said, You know it when you see it. “It really is the difference between sugar and artificial sweetener,” he said.
But millions use Splenda and Sweet’N Low. Will listeners enjoy artificial music, too? Will they pay for the pleasure? Luminate concluded in a recent report that a majority of Americans they polled “are tolerant — feeling either comfortable or indifferent of AI use in music they consume.” Billions of dollars are betting that remains so.
