AI for the Music Makers - Innovating with Intelligence

Welcome to the third installment in the Innovating with Intelligence series to kick off 2025. My goal with this series is to inspire and navigate a world with AI integrated in mainstream culture.

Today, I’m looking at AI for the music makers — musicians, producers — this one’s for you.

Most notably, Suno AI.

What is Suno?

Suno is an application that uses generative AI to write music, and I’m not going to lie — it’s pretty damn good.

Suno uses their own LLM called Bark to power this software, and it’s completely open source. With the power of Bark, Suno can take a prompt and transform it into a song complete with lyrics, instrumentation, and full production, leaving you with a streaming-ready master in less than a minute.

Wow.

As you can imagine, Suno has caused disruption amongst creatives, many challenging the ethics of this software (which seems to be the norm amongst AI models).

And to the skeptics credit — I understand your perspective. With the recent news of Spotify replacing genuine artists’ tracks with AI generated music on their playlists, it’s sickening to think that society has further dumped music into a ‘commodity’ category.

Additionally, confirmation of Suno using copyrighted material in their LLM is cause for some ethical debate on what should and shouldn’t be used to train these models, although, that debate is common amongst AI conversation, and one that I am going to refrain from today.

To make matters worse, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman has ruffled feathers with a recent statement, stating that “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now.”

This creator disagrees. In fact — With AI, I think it’s the most enjoyable times to make music.

Anyone that understands the music industry knows that hit songs are not typically written by one person. They are carefully crafted by a team of experts. An artist will have songwriting sessions with writers and producers who will then turn the song into a full production. From there, tracking, mixing, and mastering engineers take over to make the final cut of the song, which is what you hear on the radio.

Writing hit songs is a numbers game. I recently listened to an interview with legendary rock producer Howard Benson, where he talked about the art of writing hit songs, and the harsh reality that for every hit, there are several flops — even for him.

But Paps, what about the independent artist? We don’t have access to teams of songwriters and producers…

I would argue that you do — with Suno. I believe that Suno is a brilliant tool for songwriting. In fact, Howard also touched on AI in this interview, agreeing that Suno has impacted his workflow positively. Instead of spending time listening to countless records to find inspiration, we can prompt Suno and have it spit out inspiration for your next single. And the better the prompt matches the visualization in your head, the better the result.

To be clear, I’m not saying just copy and track what the AI gives you, but using it to inspire something completely new and original.

With AI being introduced to producer workflows, I think that songwriting amongst the independent and “lower level” industry artists is going to get significantly better. By freeing up time from scrolling through loop libraries, your music archives, you can now focus on being in your “Genius Zone”, the biproduct being creating more original art.

And knowing that hit songs is a numbers game, the ability to create more means more chances at the table to land that big hit.

Depending on perspective, Suno can be looked at as an enemy, or how I view it — a tool. I don’t think it is going to replace musicians, but rather help them write better songs. And let’s be real — everyone knows an aspiring local band that could benefit from writing better songs, mine included.

If Spotify thinks it can replace us, then let them, and watch them burn it to the ground. Remember, we as consumers also have a say here in what products we use and who/where we distribute our art to.

Anyways, my mug is almost empty so I’m going to wrap it up here today. If you’re a creator, I hope that this gave you an interesting perspective on how we can use these tools to be more creative than worrying about creativity diminishing at the hands of AI.

Use your tools. Write better songs.

Paps.