That news probably didn’t go down well with the handful of record labels that sued Suno in late June, arguing that the company’s tool can only generate tracks because it chewed through countless of their copyrighted songs to learn how. (Suno, for its part, has called its technology “transformative.”) Still, the app remains live and free to download — at least for now.
And since the app was released a few days ago, what started as a silly experiment to generate catchy journalism-themed songs has become a minor obsession of mine. It turns out that creating full-length songs on a whim using AI is a real treat, but it’s also started to reshape my relationship with music in ways I didn’t like.
Here’s what Suno can do and why I felt a little unsettled after living with it.
Getting started with Suno is easy: just create an account, decide if you want to pay extra to create more songs each day, then start entering 200-character prompts.
Generating these songs can take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on whether you’ve paid for a higher level of service or not, and your requests will always generate two tracks for you to review.
Your musical tastes are probably different from mine, but I already knew what I wanted my first attempt at a new theme for the Washington Post to sound like. Bright, squeaky guitars were a must, as were sinuous, adventurous bass lines and journalistic lyrics.
But when I asked Suno to create just that, it produced a pair of generic pop-funk tracks that used the words “bright and jangly” as lyrics rather than instructions.
TO CATCH UP
Stories to keep you informed
[Listen for yourself: Washington Funk 1, and Washington Funk 2.]
Maybe that genre didn’t suit him. Then I gave Suno the following prompt to see if he could copy a specific artist: “Early 2000s Paramore-style pop punk, very energetic, female vocals, lyrics about the Washington Post.”
None of the resulting tracks immediately struck me as a Paramore pastiche, but that may be because Suno completely ignored my request for female vocals. Still, the songs sounded like something I would have listened to in high school and featured a surprisingly catchy chorus:
Telling stories we need to know
From the city to the world and back
On its pages, no turning back”
[Listen for yourself: Postamore 1, and Postamore 2]
I wanted to keep those lyrics (plus a few edits) for my final attempt, so I opened Suno’s “Custom” mode and pasted them back in for another go. (It’s worth noting that if you want Suno to create a song around a full set of lyrics, its website reminds you to only use AI-generated lyrics; the app doesn’t bother to mention this.)
Now let’s move on to the rest of the instructions. Going further seemed like the right decision, so I asked for the music style to include the following elements: “j-pop, math rock, female singer, anime theme, instrumental intro, guitar solo at the end of the song”.
And for the first time, Suno’s results felt like they fully embodied what I’d given them in the prompt—except when both tracks abruptly stopped, went silent for a moment, and restarted the fake guitars for one last pass.
[Listen for yourself: Washington! Post!! OP1, and Washington! Post!! OP2]
Okay, so none of them will ever truly replace the Washington Post March — but if there’s one that has a chance, it’s Postamore 2.
After finishing my AI journalism song series, I found myself playing around with Suno, creating silly little songs with nonsensical lyrics, and trying to recreate the unique song styles I loved.
But it didn’t take long for me to feel like I was using a little too much and share the results. My wife was having a rough day, so I sent her a lovey-dovey AI song, complete with our silly little names, to cheer her up. I concocted some truly horrible rap lyrics and sent a friend four Suno songs built around them in a row.
And then it hit me: I could easily see myself continuing to write songs and send them to people as cavalierly as I send emojis.
Music is a force for good, for pleasure, healing, activism, and reflection. Wasn’t this whole generation of sloppy music somehow serving to devalue music in my life?
Max Vehuni, one half of indie-pop duo Slenderbodies, dissuaded me from that.
“Music is a way for people to express themselves,” he said. “If it’s another way for you to communicate with your wife, I think that’s really cool.”
Vehuni, clearly, is no AI music doomer—he’s experimented with Suno and similar services for personal projects and says he sees incredible potential for AI as a tool to enhance an artist’s songwriting and production.
He also quickly admits that while Suno is being sued for allegedly using copyrighted music as training data, this process isn’t entirely different from what humans do.
“Artists draw a line and say, ‘I’m OK with artists and humans being influenced by me. But if a computer is influenced by me, that’s not OK anymore,'” he said. “Is that something you can agree with or not? I don’t know.”
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other things that worry me. The rest of my lingering unease, for example, comes from the fear of harming the artists I love by generating music that sounds a little like theirs, but isn’t.
Fortunately, Vehuni said Slenderbodies makes most of its money through touring and the band is fortunate to have a fan base that will support it during the “post-AI musical apocalypse.”
Choosing to directly support the artists you care about is therefore more important than ever.
But he worries that record labels could offer their catalogs of copyrighted songs to AI companies in exchange for access to models that can create synthetic music for which they wouldn’t have to pay royalties. Or that streaming services could create and promote their own synthetic artists and pocket the revenue. (He’s not alone in wondering this, by the way.)
It’s still too early to tell how this will all play out. Regardless, tech giants, the music industry, and the rest of us have no choice but to continue fighting against artificial music intruding into our lives.
“We took it out of the box, and I don’t think we’ll ever really put it back in,” Vehuni said.
