faster

Near the beginning of this long, fascinating, and deeply depressing video Adam Neely says that he doesn’t think Mikey Shulman, the CEO and prime hypeman of Suno, is evil. I dunno, I think he might be evil. A person who makes and advocates for anything this destructive will likely be one of the following:

Evil — happy to do any amount of damage to humanity as long as he gets rich;

Sociopathic — unable to consider the consequences of his actions for others;

Self-deceived — skilled at internally avoiding obvious questions about the validity of what he’s doing.

So being evil is not the only option here, but it’s definitely one of three.

There are so many bizarre things about this dude, but I was taken by one small thing: around the 8:40 mark of the video he says, “I know one person who is a songwriter who had a lull in creativity, and after finding Suno went from maybe making 50 songs a year to making 500 songs a year.” Now this is a ridiculous thing to say — but in an interesting way. Shulman knows so little about musical composition that he thinks that a person in a creative “lull” writes a mere fifty songs a year.

Let’s think about that. Consider Bob Dylan, whom some people think of as a prolific sngwriter. In his 65-year career he has composed roughly 700 songs. Pathetic! Even if he had experienced a lifelong “lull in creativity,” he’d have, by Shulman’s metrics, produced 3250 songs — and if he’d used Suno, why, he’d have knocked out 32,500 songs by now, with a few thousand more probably remaining to be processed by the Suno Song Extruder .

As absurd sales pitches go, Shulman’s is solid gold.

Anyway, you should watch Adam’s human-made non-extruded video. It raises many important issues and makes many important points, especially about the relative value of patience and impatience. Shulman loves impatience, because impatient people are his primary marks. “Faster is obviously better,” he says, a comment he doesn’t seem to think applies only to music composition. Maybe he has the same view about eating, talking with friends, and sex. Faster! And then what?

But the most vital claim Adam makes, I think, is this: the arrival of AI slop machines like Suno will dramatically accelerate something that’s already well underway, the widening chasm between live music and recorded music. When musicians recorded live in studio, the gap between that and live performance was very small; now it’s vast and getting vaster. And as Adam says, people will always want to experience live music — and perhaps will value it all the more because of the contrast to an increasingly slop-dominated world of recordings. (Especially in human-scale venues where lip-syncing and pitch-correction are impossible.)

I happened to come across Adam’s video yesterday just after watching Julian Lage and his bandmates perform “Something More” — what a beautiful song, and look at that, it’s just four people in a room making that beauty happen. I only wish they were coming my way sometime soon.