Inside Suno’s $2.5 Billion Bet That AI-Made Music Is Here To Stay

Today on Forbes, inside Suno's $2.5 billion bet that AI-made music is here to stay. On a frosty February evening in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mikey Schoelman is spinning up a new song. His electric bass guitar hangs idly on a nearby wall. A 61-key synthesizer and drum kit remain untouched a few doors away. Instead, he types a few sparse phrases, pedal-steel guitar, country-americana folk, acoustic guitar, into his startup Suno's AI music generation software. A few seconds later, a song comes to life. Fluid guitar strums and human sounding vocals with a smooth southern accent soar over an upbeat tempo. It's instantly catchy, like if Ella Langley met Lana Del Rey. The tune isn't a chart-topper or a summer hit, but it's evidence enough for why more than 100 million people have now used Suno to make music. Suno created songs have gone viral on TikTok, debuted on Billboard charts, and racked up millions of streams. Over seven million songs are made on the app every day, catapulting it to the top of the Apple App Store's most downloaded music apps in April, surpassing Spotify. CEO Shulman, who is 39 years old, says, quote, "The technology finally allows for billions of people to be creative, to have the fruits of their labor, to feel fulfillment in a different way." He calls it, quote, "new form of consumer entertainment." But that's come at the cost of professional musicians. In its early days, Suno said that it trained its AI model on tens of millions of copyrighted songs scraped from the internet, triggering fierce backlash. In 2024, some 200 artists, including Katy Perry, Billy Eilish, and Nicki Minaj called out AI companies for training their models on artists' work without their permission. In July 2024, Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and the Recording Industry Association of America, hits Suno with a massive lawsuit, alleging that it illegally downloaded millions of copyrighted recordings from YouTube to train its model, without getting permission from rights holders or providing compensation. An industry executive told Forbes, quote, "It's a copyright chop shop." Suno has denied the claims, and the lawsuit is ongoing. Shulman says, quote, "What we do is illegal. It's like listening to a lot of music and learning from it." Instead, he argues, "Suno is simply leveling the playing field." There's an unfair asymmetry in the music world. Music production has historically been limited to a small pool of savants. Most people just consume, listening to music or singing along at concerts. But Shulman, who admits his average at playing the drums and guitar, says the lack of technical skill shouldn't stop anyone from becoming a musician. Now with AI, that's possible. The music industry's griping hasn't stopped the four-year-old startup from becoming a smash hit success. The startup's annualized revenue tripled from $100 million in October, about $8 million that month, to $300 million in February, about $25 million that month. In 2025, the startup's revenue was about $150 million, Forbes estimates. VCs are sold too. Suno has picked up $375 million in funding from top-tier investment firms, like Menlo Ventures, Light Speed Venture Partners, and Matrix, nabbing a $2.45 billion valuation in November. This year, the startup returned to the Forbes AI 50 list, which spotlights the most promising AI startups in the world, after debuting in 2025. Today, more than 2 million users hand over anywhere from $8 to $24 per month, so they can generate and download hundreds of songs. They also own the commercial licenses to their creations. Most people feed their own lyrics or pre-recorded voice memos into the system, then add a short description of the style and genre they want it to produce. Obvious might use it to add a drumbeat to vocals, or adjust the pitch of their voice. Despite the outcry, some professional music producers and songwriters are on board, using the program as a demo machine of sorts, where they paste pre-written lyrics into the software to generate different ideas for a track before refining it further. But they're doing it under the radar. Shoman says, "We've become the ozemic of the music industry. It's like everybody's on it, and nobody wants to talk about it." But while Suno might be fun for aspiring songwriters and people who want to make a customized song for their mom's birthday, does anyone actually want to listen to AI music? Is it even good? And what does AI slap a vacation mean for the human artists, struggling to make it in an increasingly saturated music industry? For full coverage, check out Rashi Shreeva Stavis' piece on Forbes.com. This is Kirin Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.