Is Prompting Really Music? Inside Suno’s Rise and the Industry Backlash

The AI Music Revolution Meets Industry Resistance

The music industry is experiencing a seismic shift. Suno, an AI music generation platform, just secured a massive $250 million funding round, catapulting its valuation to an eye-watering $2.45 billion. But this financial triumph comes with controversy attached and a CEO whose comments about “active music creation” have musicians and critics up in arms.

At the heart of the debate is a simple question: Does typing a text prompt into an AI system constitute genuine music creation? Suno CEO Mikey Shulman thinks so. Many musicians vehemently disagree.

A Funding Boom Amid Legal Battles

Suno’s Series C funding round, announced in November 2025, was led by Menlo Ventures with participation from existing backers including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Founders Fund. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup plans to use the capital to enhance its tools for more sophisticated song creation, including advanced editing and customization features.

This financial success story has a darker undercurrent. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), along with major labels Universal Music Group, Sony, and Warner Music Group, filed lawsuits against Suno alleging copyright infringement. The accusation? That Suno illegally trained its AI models on copyrighted music ripped from platforms like YouTube without permission or compensation to artists.

Despite these legal challenges, investors are betting big on Suno’s vision. The company’s platform, which launched widely in December 2023, uses generative AI to produce complete songs vocals, instrumentation, and lyrics based on simple text inputs. Users can request anything from “a metal song about baseball” to “a jazz rap track with Rhodes piano and trumpet solo at 96BPM,” and Suno’s AI will generate it in minutes.

The CEO’s Controversial Stance

Shulman’s comments to The Wall Street Journal have ignited fierce debate. “There is a really big future for music where way more people are doing it in a really active way, and where it has a much more valuable place in society,” he stated.

But what exactly does “really active” mean when you’re simply typing words into a text box?

For Terrence O’Brien, Weekend Editor at The Verge and a musician himself, the suggestion is downright insulting. “As a musician myself, I find the idea that asking an AI for a ‘live band, jazz rap track with Rhodes piano, a trumpet solo and gravely vocals at 96BPM’ would be considered ‘really active’ downright insulting,” O’Brien wrote in a scathing response.

The criticism cuts to the core of what it means to create music. Traditional music creation involves years of practice, understanding music theory, developing technical skills on instruments, and cultivating creative instincts. It’s a process of trial and error, of learning from mistakes, of developing a unique artistic voice.

Suno’s approach bypasses all of that. You don’t need to know how to play an instrument, also you don’t need to understand chord progressions or song structure. You just need to describe what you want, and the AI does the rest.

From Simple Prompts to Studio Tools

To be fair, Suno isn’t just about push-button music generation anymore. The company recently launched Suno Studio, a more sophisticated offering that resembles a traditional digital audio workstation (DAW).

Suno Studio allows for audio transformations you can hum a melody and turn it into a trumpet sound, or record live audio to lay down a guitar solo. It includes stem separation tools and deep editing capabilities for fine-tuning AI-generated tracks.

But even this more hands-on approach is primarily designed for editing songs already created using Suno’s prompt-based system. And while chopping up AI-created tracks certainly requires more involvement than simply pressing a button, critics argue it still doesn’t constitute genuine music creation.

There’s also the question of accessibility. Shulman claims Suno is bringing “interactive music tools to the average person,” but access to Suno Studio requires a Premier plan starting at $24 per month or $288 annually. By comparison, FL Studio starts at $99 with lifetime free updates, Ableton Live Lite comes free with many budget MIDI controllers, and GarageBand is pre-installed on every Mac.

A Surprising Industry Pivot

Perhaps the most shocking development in this saga is the music industry’s sudden embrace of the very technology it was suing.

In late November 2025, Warner Music Group announced a groundbreaking licensing deal with Suno. Under the agreement, WMG will allow users to create AI-generated music using the voices, names, likenesses, images, and compositions of artists who opt into the program.

WMG, which represents superstars like Ed Sheeran, Twenty One Pilots, Dua Lipa, and Charli XCX, says participating artists will have “full control” over how their likeness and music are used, though specifics remain vague.

“These will be new creation experiences from artists who do opt in, which will open up new revenue streams for them and allow you to interact with them in new ways,” Suno announced. Users will be able to “build around” an artist’s sounds “and ensure they get compensated.”

As part of the deal, WMG dropped out of its lawsuit against Suno. This follows similar moves by other major labels. Warner had previously settled with AI music maker Udio, while Universal Music Group ended its litigation in favor of a licensing agreement. The “ethical” AI music platform Klay has also struck deals with UMG, Sony, and WMG.

The Value Question

Shulman’s claim that AI-generated music will increase music’s value in society raises fundamental questions about what we mean by “value.”

“In what way does enabling the endless creation of what is technically music without skill, thought, or effort increase its value?” O’Brien asks. “Feeding the art of countless people who worked hard perfecting their craft to a machine, and allowing anyone who can string a few words together to whip up some approximation of said art, hardly seems like it’s valuing music at all.”

Basic economics suggests that scarcity creates value. When something becomes easier to produce and more abundant, its value typically decreases. As Nick Canovas of the YouTube channel Mic the Snare argues, “recorded music is no longer special” when “anybody can just generate music within a few seconds based on a prompt.”

This flood of AI-generated content doesn’t just devalue AI music it potentially undermines the value of all recorded music. When listeners can’t easily distinguish between human-created and AI-generated tracks, and when the market becomes saturated with algorithmically produced content, what happens to the musicians who spent years honing their craft?

Some streaming platforms are already taking action. Deezer, Qobuz, and even Spotify not exactly known for artist-friendly policies are taking steps to reduce the visibility of fully AI-generated music and removing some of it from their platforms.

The Democratization Myth

Proponents of AI music generation often frame it as democratizing music creation. But critics argue this misses the point entirely.

“This is not democratizing access to the tools of creation that has already happened,” O’Brien writes. “You can create music for free, or very cheaply right now with your computer or cellphone. Decent guitars and synthesizers are cheaper than ever.”

The tools for music creation have never been more accessible. Free and low-cost DAWs, virtual instruments, and online tutorials have genuinely democratized music production. Anyone with a computer and dedication can learn to make music.

What Suno offers isn’t democratization it’s elimination of the creative process itself. It’s a way to bypass skill development, effort, and the cultivation of creative instincts. You don’t learn anything about music by typing prompts into an AI, you don’t develop as an artist. Lastly you don’t build the foundation that allows for genuine creative expression.

Technical Capabilities and Limitations

From a purely technical standpoint, Suno’s capabilities are impressive. The platform’s v5 model can generate remarkably realistic-sounding music across various genres. A partnership with Microsoft integrated Suno into Copilot, allowing seamless music generation within the AI assistant.

Users on social media have shared examples of Suno creating everything from metal tracks to jazz compositions, often with surprising quality. The AI can handle complex requests involving specific instruments, tempos, and vocal styles.

But technical proficiency doesn’t equal artistic merit. As O’Brien noted in his review of Suno’s upgraded AI music generator, it’s “technically impressive, but has all the soul of a PowerPoint presentation.”

Music isn’t just about hitting the right notes or following genre conventions. It’s about human expression, emotion, and the ineffable quality that makes a song resonate with listeners. It’s the imperfections, the personal touches, the lived experiences that inform artistic choices.

The Copyright Conundrum

The legal battles surrounding Suno highlight broader questions about AI training and copyright law. The RIAA and major labels allege that Suno trained its models on copyrighted material without permission essentially using the creative work of thousands of artists as raw material for its AI without compensation.

Suno maintains its models are safeguarded against plagiarism, but the company has been notably opaque about its training data. Thousands of musicians have signed open letters demanding transparency about what material was used to train AI music generators.

The recent licensing deals suggest a path forward, but they raise new questions. If artists opt in to having their voices and styles used for AI generation, how much control do they really have? How will compensation work? What happens when an AI-generated song using an artist’s likeness becomes a hit who gets credit?

The U.S. Copyright Office has already ruled that purely AI-generated art can’t receive copyright protection, adding another layer of complexity to the legal landscape.

What This Means for Musicians

For working musicians, the rise of AI music generation represents both opportunity and threat. On one hand, the licensing deals could create new revenue streams for established artists willing to license their voices and styles.

On the other hand, the flood of AI-generated content could make it even harder for human musicians to get noticed and make a living. If clients can generate “good enough” music for a fraction of the cost of hiring a composer, why would they pay for human creativity?

The impact may be felt most acutely by session musicians, composers for commercial projects, and others who rely on steady work rather than superstar status. These are the professionals who might find their livelihoods most threatened by AI tools that can generate background music, jingles, and soundtracks on demand.

The Road Ahead

Suno’s massive valuation and successful funding round suggest that AI music generation is here to stay, regardless of the ethical debates surrounding it. The company plans to use its new capital to develop even more advanced tools and to build next-generation music generation models using licensed music from Warner Music Group.

Starting in 2026, Suno will require users to have paid accounts to download songs, with each tier providing a specific number of downloads per month. This shift toward a more robust business model suggests the company is preparing for long-term sustainability.

The music industry’s pivot from litigation to licensing indicates that major players have decided to work with AI rather than fight it. Whether this represents pragmatic adaptation or capitulation to inevitable technological change remains to be seen.

The Fundamental Question

Ultimately, the debate over Suno and AI music generation comes down to a fundamental question: What is music creation?

Is it the end result the audio file that plays when you hit the play button? Or is it the process—the learning, the experimentation, the creative decisions, the human expression that goes into making that audio file?

If music creation is just about the output, then perhaps Shulman has a point. AI can generate technically proficient music, and users who prompt that generation could claim some role in its creation.

But if music creation is about the process, about the development of skill and artistic voice, about human expression and emotion translated into sound, then typing prompts into an AI system falls woefully short.

As O’Brien concludes, “What Suno is offering is a way to bypass the development of skill, the effort required to make art, and the development of creative instincts. In short, Suno is doing away with the creative process entirely.”

The $2.45 billion question is whether society will accept that trade-off and what we’ll lose if we do.