Bloomberg Screen Time

Mikey Shulman on why creating will beat consuming

Mikey Shulman· Co-Founder and CEO of Suno at Suno
·~7 min·English·Bloomberg
MultimodalAI CompanyBusiness Strategy
TL;DR

Suno CEO Mikey Shulman argues AI's real promise in music is turning passive listeners into creators -- which means running a music company, partnering with labels on co-creation, and rejecting the idea that more compute alone wins.

01Core Mental Model

Creating Beats Consuming

<strong>Thirty minutes making something beats passively consuming it</strong> -- Shulman bets the future of entertainment is active, not passive.

When you spend thirty minutes making music or making anything, you just feel so much better than the way we're entertained today of just consuming stuff. And we think in the future, everybody will be entertained creatively in this way.

— Mikey Shulman, Bloomberg Screen Time
Key Insight
Shulman is quietly redefining Suno's competitor as passive consumption itself -- Netflix and Spotify, not other AI music tools. If everybody enjoys being creative, the market is everyone currently just watching.
02Identity

A Music Company, Not a Tech Company

<strong>The industry obsesses over tools and utility and forgets fulfillment</strong> -- Shulman says Suno builds for human delight, not for technology's own sake.

There's so much focus on tools, on utility, on the enterprise, and there's not enough focus on what I think is a fundamental part of being a human, which is fulfillment, creativity, fun, entertainment.

— Mikey Shulman, Bloomberg Screen Time
Key Insight
This is positioning as much as philosophy. Framing Suno as a music company sidesteps the 'is this even real music' debate and anchors the product to a need -- fun -- that predates and will outlast any single model.
03Scale

The Whole World Is the Demographic

<strong>100 million people have used Suno</strong> -- Shulman describes a worldwide audience, in a product that works in every language.

It's every gender, every race, every country. We work in every language. Music so universal, so it's not surprising to us that we see this all over the world.

— Mikey Shulman, Bloomberg Screen Time
Key Insight
Breadth is the evidence Shulman leans on for the creativity thesis. A user base this wide shows reach -- though reach alone is not proof that making music appeals to literally everyone, which is the stronger claim he is reaching for.
04Industry Shift

From Hostility to a Human Behind Everything

<strong>The music industry started hostile and is now building with Suno</strong> -- and Shulman says people are increasingly willing to show how the tools amplify their creativity.

about how it is helping them amplify their creativity, about how there's actually a human behind everything.

— Mikey Shulman, Bloomberg Screen Time
Key Insight
The 'human behind everything' line does cultural work: it reframes the authenticity worry by insisting the art still has a human source. Whether that settles the harder copyright and authorship questions is left open -- it answers a feeling, not a lawsuit.
05The Product

Remix Your Favorite Artist

<strong>Label deals are not about selling tracks -- they build co-creation</strong> that lets fans remix, cover, and mash up the artists they love.

Imagine, you can take the music of one of your favorite artists and start to play with it and remix it or cover it or mash it up with something else or otherwise change it in a way that has you feeling like you are cocreating with your favorite artist.

— Mikey Shulman, Bloomberg Screen Time
Key Insight
Co-creation reframes the rights question from permission to participation: a fan who remixes an artist expands the catalog rather than pirating it. That is the argument -- if the rights are actually cleared -- for a label to become a partner instead of a plaintiff.
06Opportunity

Voice and Likeness as Upside

<strong>Licensing a voice is an opportunity, not only a threat</strong> -- Shulman says it is a chance for partners to build differentiated music products.

The amazing thing is, again, there is finally the ability to build differentiated products in a world of music that has had a little bit of stagnation actually today.

— Mikey Shulman, Bloomberg Screen Time
Key Insight
Calling the format stagnant is a quiet challenge to the streaming giants: the same catalogs, the same playlists, the same passive loop. Shulman's wedge is not better recommendations but a different verb -- build, not play.
07Governance

Nobody Writes the Rules Alone

<strong>No single party should decide what counts as AI music</strong> -- and Shulman argues it is good there are no firm rules of the road yet.

we don't want any single party, whether it's an AI platform, a media platform, a set of rights holders. We actually wanna make these decisions together.

— Mikey Shulman, Bloomberg Screen Time
Key Insight
Leaving the rules unwritten is itself a position. 'Decide together, later' keeps the options open while the technology and its uses are still moving -- a stance that tends to favor a fast-moving entrant over anyone who would rather lock the definitions down now.
08Economics

Between Streaming and AGI

<strong>Music cannot be solved by throwing compute at it</strong> -- Suno sits between streaming's near-zero costs and the AI labs' scale-it-all bet, in a regime of its own.

we're not in the regime of, let's say, streaming where the marginal cost of serving our stuff is so small. But we're also not in the business of general intelligence where we just need to throw as much compute as possible at our problems, and they'll all get solved.

— Mikey Shulman, Bloomberg Screen Time
Key Insight
This is the sharpest strategic claim in the interview. Shulman's 'music has no right answers' implies the scaling-law logic that rewards the biggest compute budget may not carry over -- which would make Suno's moat taste and product as much as raw model capability, a very different company to build and to value.