Mikey Shulman, the co-founder and CEO of AI music platform Suno, has reflected on his controversial opinion last year that most people “don’t enjoy” making music, and it seems he has some regret.

Shulman made the comment during an interview on the 20VC podcast last year, when he claimed that most people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music because of how time consuming the process is, but also because it “takes a lot of practice” and “you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software”.

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Shulman was met with significant backlash from musicians, who felt the labour of making music is a labour of love, and that it should be time consuming. Looking back on the controversy now in a new interview with Billboard, Shulman admits: “I really wish I had chosen different words.”

He doesn’t expand much more on his thoughts within the piece, but does add, “I do have a lot of respect for music.” Elsewhere in the interview, Shulman has shared his vision for the future of Suno, stating that it is working on to create a “verticalised” service, incorporating a TikTok-like social media feed known as Hooks, a streaming service, and a number of different music tools to target “anyone from “Grammy winners to grandmas”.

“When we talk about ‘verticalising’ inside the company, it’s not like we want to smush TikTok and Spotify together,” he adds. “Those two things already exist, and that is not going to reap a lot of benefits … I’m thinking, ‘How do I make discovery way better than it is now?’ Because we are able to do something no one else can do. [The point of Hooks] is to get you off of the feed, playing with content and remixing it. That’s the kind of discovery that doesn’t exist right now.”

Shulman also tells Billboard that Suno doesn’t have a “fixed pie mentality” when it comes to its place in the music industry: “We want to grow the pie and make the music industry even bigger.”

The post “I really wish I had chosen different words”: Suno CEO reflects on his controversial comments that most people “don’t enjoy” making music appeared first on MusicTech.