One of Suno’s earliest investors is Antonio Rodriguez, a partner at the venture-capital firm Matrix. Rodriguez had only funded one previous music venture, the music-categorization firm EchoNest, which was purchased by Spotify to fuel its algorithm. With Suno, Rodriguez got involved before it was even clear what the product would be. “I backed the team,” says Rodriguez, who exudes the confidence of a man who’s made more than his share of successful bets. “I’d known the team, and I’d especially known Mikey, and so I would have backed him to do almost anything that was legal. He’s that creative.
Rodriguez sees Suno as a radically capable and easy-to-use musical instrument, and believes it could bring music making to everyone much the way camera phones and Instagram democratized photography. The idea, he says, is to once again “move the bar on the number of people that are allowed to be creators of stuff as opposed to consumers of stuff on the internet.”
potential. “Music, as made by humans driven by extraordinary circumstances … those who have suffered and struggled to advance their craft, will have to contend with the wholesale automation of the very dear-bought art they have fought to achieve,” Reid writes. But Suno’s founders claim there’s little to fear, using the metaphor that people still read despite having the ability to write. “The way we think about this is we’re trying to get a billion people much more engaged with music than they are now,” Shulman says. “If people are much more into music, much more focused on creating, developing much more distinct tastes, this is obviously good for artists. The vision that we have of the future of music is one where it’s artist-friendly. We’re not trying to replace artists
“I think that ultimately, it allows a lot of ad agencies, film studios, networks, etc., to not have to go license stuff.”
