Rosie Nguyen, the head of creators at AI music platform Suno, brought up a very relatable problem on X recently: It’s so expensive to sing. “I grew up singing,” she wrote, “But wanting to be a musician in 2006 required resources that a low-income family didn’t have. My parents couldn’t afford to get me any instruments. They couldn’t pay for music lessons. They couldn’t get me into studios.”
Luckily for all of us, Nguyen says that the problem is solved now thanks to Suno. “I am beyond proud and honored to get to work at a company that is enabling music creation for everyone,” she wrote of Suno, which recently completed a $250 million funding round that values the company at $2.45 billion. And it’s understandable why the firm is valued so highly—not just because it has solved the long-standing problem of finally making the act of singing, a free thing, affordable, but because its platform is getting a lot of use.
In a vast ocean of cynical marketing ploys this has got to be one of the most unbelievably cynical marketing ploys I’ve ever seen. A tool to replace human musicians isn’t valued at $2.45 billion because investors want to help poor children realize their dreams. https://t.co/F78G1OjvtP
— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) November 25, 2025
According to Billboard, which obtained investor presentation materials from Suno, its users are generating about seven million songs per day and, over the course of two weeks, create as many songs as are currently available on Spotify. Its users, mostly young men, spend more than 20 minutes per day producing their own music, which is something young Nguyen could only dream of. Now, anyone can become a music artist—a thing that Suno apparently doesn’t value at all, considering the company has only paid $2,000 in total on music used to train its models, per Billboard.
That figure is so low, not because Suno hasn’t used the work of other artists to train its model. No, the whole platform and the work that it spits out is built entirely on the music that was made by creatives who had to find ways to learn to play all on their own. According to a pitch deck that was allegedly sent to investors, the company has only spent $2,000 on training data because it’s just been scraping songs for free, allegedly by ripping them from YouTube. That is the claim of major music labels Sony, Universal, and Warner, who are currently suing Suno for copyright infringement “at an almost unimaginable scale.” Similar suits have been filed by labels in Denmark and Germany, as well.
You are a fundamentally craven and evil person. You and your tech ilk are a burden on humanity. You have all squandered your precious lives making NOTHING. I pray for your immense suffering. https://t.co/trBhSEEwqs
— Haus of Decline (@hausofdecline) November 25, 2025
Billboard notes that despite the fact that these lawsuits hang over the head of the company, its investor pitch deck makes no mention of them, nor any plan to license music to continue to train its model. Seems like the plan is to just truck along, vacuuming up as much data as possible. So finally, the act of making music is affordable. All it took was completely devaluing the product of that creative process.
