On a frosty February evening in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mikey Shulman 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 7 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.

“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,” says CEO Shulman, 39. He calls it a “new form of consumer entertainment.”

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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, Billie 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 hit 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. “It’s a copyright chop shop,” an industry executive told Forbes.

Suno has denied the claims, and the lawsuit is ongoing. “What we do isn't illegal,” Shulman says. “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 he’s 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.

“We've become the Ozempic of the music industry. It's like everybody's on it and nobody wants to talk about it.” Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno

“We've become the Ozempic of the music industry. It's like everybody's on it and nobody wants to talk about it.”

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, Lightspeed 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 prerecorded voice memos into the system, then add a short description of the style and genre they want it to produce, like “melancholic indie pop” or “soft pop piano ballad.” Hobbyists might use it to add a drum beat to vocals or adjust the pitch of their voice.

“Consumers don't experiment with tools,” says Menlo partner Amy Wu who led Suno’s $250 million Series C funding round. “They will only use a product if it's bringing them joy, really adding value to their lives.”

Despite the outcry,........

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