Mikey Shulman

Mikey Shulman is the co-founder and CEO of Suno, the Cambridge, Massachusetts startup whose text-to-song generator became the breakout consumer product of AI music. A Harvard physics PhD who led machine learning at fintech firm Kensho, Shulman and three colleagues founded Suno in 2022; its tools let anyone type a prompt and receive a fully produced song.

The quote that launched a thousand replies

On the 20VC podcast in January 2025, Shulman argued that traditional music-making is a chore for most people — “it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice” — concluding that “the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.” Musicians erupted; the practice-is-the-point ethos of the craft made his framing read as contempt for the very people his product claims to empower.

By March 2026 Shulman was walking the framing back — regretting the words, not the thesis that music creation should be radically easier. Meanwhile Suno fights a June 2024 lawsuit from the major labels via the RIAA, which accuses it of training on copyrighted recordings at massive scale; Suno has argued its training is fair use. The case, alongside the parallel suit against Udio, is among the defining copyright battles of generative music.