I’m extremely conflicted about Suno the AI music generating site. And I mean that in the most literal sense. On one hand, I can easily imagine myself getting really into it. Over the years, I have generated—there’s that word again—a ridiculous amount of useless song lyrics that were never going to become actual songs. They were little verses, choruses, hooks and fragments that amused me for a while and then simply sat there because I don’t have a band, a producer or a recording studio. Historically, that was where the process ended. You could write all the lyrics you wanted, but unless you had some musical ability or knew the right people, they remained lyrics rather than songs. Suno changes that equation in a way that is enormously tempting to me.
The appeal is obvious. I could sit down, write lyrics about artificial intelligence, heartbreak, Richmond, the end of the world or whatever other subject happens to be rattling around in my head, and then actually hear something resembling a finished song come out the other side. That’s kind of amazing. For someone who has written a lot of lyrics without ever really having a practical way to turn them into music, a tool like Suno suddenly closes the gap between writing words and hearing a song. I can absolutely see myself losing an afternoon to that.
And yet I also kind of hate what this technology could do to music.
The nightmare scenario is obvious: the music industry gets absolutely flooded with AI slop. Not thousands of songs, but millions upon millions of songs, generated cheaply and instantly in every imaginable genre. Songs engineered to imitate whatever style is currently popular. Songs designed to game recommendation algorithms. Songs that sound enough like Taylor Swift or Radiohead or Fleetwood Mac to scratch the same itch without technically being copies. At some point, the supply of music could become effectively infinite, and I’m not sure anybody really knows what happens to culture when that occurs.
The problem, of course, is that bad AI music isn’t much of a threat. If it sounds fake, derivative or just plain awful, then human musicians don’t have much to worry about. The much more interesting—and much more unsettling—possibility is that AI-generated music becomes genuinely good. That’s why a song like “I’m Upping My P(doom),” as interpreted by Mexicat, gets my attention. It’s actually a bop, as the kids say. And I find that much more disturbing than if it sucked, because once AI can consistently produce music that people genuinely enjoy, the conversation changes completely.
At that point, one of the obvious secondary effects would be some kind of fusion between a music generator like Suno and a streaming service like Spotify. I don’t necessarily mean those exact two companies, but the model seems inevitable. Spotify already knows what you listen to, what you skip, what you replay and what genres you suddenly become obsessed with for two weeks. It probably has a reasonably good model of your taste already. Add generative AI to that and suddenly Spotify doesn’t merely have to recommend music to you. It can make music for you.
Imagine opening Spotify a few years from now and finding a song that didn’t exist ten seconds earlier. The system knows that you like a certain tempo, a certain kind of vocal, a certain era of production and a certain emotional tone. Maybe it knows you’ve been listening to a lot of early Talking Heads lately, or melancholy Radiohead, or 1980s synthpop. Instead of searching its catalog for something close to what you might want, it simply generates a new song tailored to those preferences. If you don’t like it, you skip it, and the next one is adjusted accordingly.
That would represent a pretty profound change in the relationship between audiences and music. Historically, an artist created something first and an audience discovered it afterward. Even Spotify’s recommendation algorithm still operates on that basic model. The song already exists. The system merely tries to figure out whether you might enjoy it. Generative music reverses that relationship. The listener comes first and the song comes afterward. Instead of asking, “Which existing song would this person like?” the system asks, “What song should exist right now for this person?”
That is both fascinating and deeply weird.
It also raises another possibility that I think could become important: some of these bespoke songs might escape their original audience. Imagine an AI generates a ridiculously catchy song for one person. That person shares it with friends. Somebody posts it online. Suddenly millions of people are listening to a song that was originally created for an audience of one. There is no particular reason that couldn’t happen. In fact, if enough personalized music is being generated, you’d expect at least a few songs to accidentally turn out to have mass appeal.
Celebrities could make this even stranger. Imagine Taylor Swift using generative music tools to create songs for herself, perhaps about things happening in her life. Maybe she generates dozens or hundreds of little experiments that nobody else ever hears. A song about Travis Kelce. A song about some argument. A song about waking up in Paris. A song based on something funny one of her friends said. Most of them remain private, but every now and then one of them absolutely bangs, so she releases it.
Would Taylor Nation care that an AI had played a major role in generating the song? Maybe. But maybe not as much as we assume. Part of Taylor Swift’s appeal has always been autobiographical. Fans aren’t just listening to a melody; they’re listening for clues about her life, her relationships and her emotional state. If Taylor released a song and said, “This is what I was thinking about last Tuesday,” I suspect a lot of people would still be fascinated by it, regardless of how much of the music itself was generated. At that point, the song becomes almost like a social-media post with a chorus.
That could create an entirely new category of popular music: songs that begin as personalized artifacts and later become public entertainment. And once again, I can’t decide whether I find that thrilling or horrifying.
That’s the problem I keep running into with generative AI in general. I can imagine all these wonderful creative possibilities at exactly the same time that I can imagine the technology bulldozing the economic ecosystem that allows human artists to make a living. Those two ideas aren’t contradictory. I could personally get enormous enjoyment out of Suno while also believing that Suno, or technologies like it, might be disastrous for working musicians. In fact, that tension is probably the most honest way for me to think about it.
What worries me most isn’t that AI-generated music will remain an inferior substitute that audiences grudgingly accept because it’s cheap. The more unsettling possibility is that it becomes really good. Good enough that you tap your foot. Good enough that you replay the chorus. Good enough that after a while you stop asking whether a human being made it. If we ever reach that point, the cultural consequences could be enormous.
Maybe human musicians will remain valuable precisely because they’re human. Maybe live performance becomes more important in a world saturated with synthetic music. Maybe people begin to treat concerts and bands the way we now treat handmade goods: as something valuable partly because we know a person actually made them. I hope so. There is something about a group of people in a room playing instruments together that feels difficult to replace completely, even if a machine can generate a perfect song in thirty seconds.
And yes, I still desperately want rock music to come back in a big way. Give me guitars. Give me drums. Give me some strange new band making too much noise and producing something I didn’t know I wanted until I heard it. That’s one of the things I fear losing most in a world of perfectly personalized music: surprise. The best art doesn’t merely satisfy your existing taste. Sometimes it changes your taste.
If every song is generated by an algorithm that already knows what I like, I may end up surrounded by music that is perfectly pleasant and perfectly optimized and never challenges me at all. That’s an odd possibility: infinite music, all of it tailored to my preferences, and somehow the whole thing becomes a little boring.
So I’m still conflicted about Suno. I can easily imagine playing around with it and loving it. I can imagine finally turning all those ridiculous lyrics I’ve written over the years into actual songs. And I can also imagine looking up a few years from now and realizing that the music ecosystem has been overwhelmed by billions of synthetic tracks that nobody quite knows what to do with.
I’ll probably use it anyway.
And I’ll probably feel slightly guilty while I do.
Welcome to the future.
