Suno

Generating high-quality music has always been a challenge, especially when you need to do it quickly, cheaply, and without professional equipment or music training. With the rapid need for accessible, AI-powered creativity tools especially among younger, digitally native consumers who want to express themselves in new ways, companies like Suno are leading the pack!

Under the leadership of CEO Mikey Shulman, Suno is paving the way for creativity. Suno is a music generation platform that uses generative AI to allow users to produce a full-length song — with lyrics, instrumentals, and vocals — in seconds by simply typing a prompt for the song.  Artists, creators, and even regular users can produce music with Suno without the anxiety associated with the technical complexity and not needing to buy expensive software. Suno offers a simplified experience of music generation for everyone to generate new music of varying genres and styles, and moods. You can compose a melodic ballad, a trap beat, a sea shanty, etc. Suno has created AI models that synthesize music that sounds realistic, in seconds! The goal is to democratize music creation for Gen Z, millennials and any other creator who are typically left from the traditional music industry.

After entering a prompt, Suno’s platform generates a complete, produced song based off of the prompt- including realistic vocals with harmonies, verses, choruses, and multiple instrumental layers. The AI-generated songs can then be downloaded, shared, and edited. Suno is available within a web app and recently integrated with Discord, making sharing and collaborating on music even easier. One of Suno’s most touted features is its “Custom Mode” which provides users with more control over the genre, instruments, vocal style, and song length. Suno also has a “Story Mode” in development that will allow creators to string songs together into conceptual albums or playlists that tell a narrative. The company emphasizes experimentation and encourages creativity; it is widely used in meme culture, indie musician, and social media content creator spaces. To sustain ongoing development and grow its offering, Suno offers a Pro subscription tier that allows users to generate a higher volume of generations per day, higher-quality exports, and commercial licensing options for users who want to use their music in a professional capacity.This includes YouTubers, indie game developers, podcasters, and others who need custom music at very little cost to them.

Suno’s Pro subscription plan provides more generations, better quality audio, and commercial licensing. The pricing on Pro will start at $10-30 per month depending on the option. Although Suno generates some non-subscription /paid project revenue, the bulk of its revenues will be from subscriptions (with offerings for both casual users and professional users). Suno has demonstrated significant velocity already with millions of songs generated to date and around $45 million in annual recurring revenues in year one snapshotting an extremely scalable, high-margin model in the artificial intelligence creativity category. Suno launched late 2023, and raised $125 million series B funding in early 2024 from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Founders Fund, and received a valuation of over $500 million. This funding round will be used for scaling the business, improving the AI music models, and ability to enter a global market. The company employs 60+ people with offices in Boston and San Francisco and remote offices in Europe and Asia, demonstrating a growth mindset for both international and cross-cultural music innovation.

While emerging AI music creation apps such as Udio, Boomy, and Soundraw gain traction in terms of awareness, Suno is likely the most accessible, authentic, and distinctive AI music creator due to its voice synthesis. In addition, the social element of community, creativity, and fun, gives it the cultural cred particularly with younger generations. While its competitors focus purely on tools for loop-based creation or backing tracks (that is, stuff they license), Suno focuses more on creating complete songs (including vocals) that are often indistinguishable from music composed by human musicians. In addition, Suno doesn't have pay-per-download pricing, and instead offers its subscription plans transparently, which reflects its commitment to accessibility. Finally, the company plans on expanding internationally, and developing more integrations for music creation and editing tools as well as continuing to build an AI music ecosystem for non-professional and professional users alike.

In a recent interview regarding the future of Suno, their leadership emphasized the focus of the company: “We want to make music creation feel like magic — something anyone can do, anytime, with just a few words” Considering the focus on AI innovation and user creativity, Suno will continue to lead the AI music space. As the platform grows, it is likely to alter the way that people think about making music and sharing music, not as a privilege for the trained few, but as a creative outlet for anyone. With a wide array of users, visionary leadership, investor support, and a clear path for scale, Suno is building the future of music, a future where creativity has no limits, and everyone has a voice.

Click here to access Suno's website.