Julius Young — Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Vantage
Suno has 550,000 monthly searches. The labels are suing. And the music business still hasn't answered the only question that matters.
The music business has a new music problem. AI is generating music people are actively seeking out, at scale — Suno draws 550,000 monthly queries. The tool does not replace the experience of listening to a great artist. It replaces the experience of needing a specific type of music for a specific purpose. That is a market. And it is a market the labels do not own.
The lawsuits are real and the grievances legitimate. AI companies trained on decades of copyrighted recordings without licensing or compensating the human creators whose work taught the models. Universal, Sony, and Warner have all joined litigation. Those cases will take years to resolve. But the lawsuits are a rearguard action, not a strategy. While the labels litigate the past, the AI companies are building the future. The infrastructure layer moves before the cultural layer does.
The question the labels have not answered is the only one that matters: in a world where AI can generate competent, functional music on demand, what is the value proposition of a hit record? The artists who will thrive are the ones who understand that their value is not in producing sounds — AI can produce sounds — but in carrying meaning, context, and identity that no model can replicate. Related: Who Killed the $0.003 Stream? and Who Owns the Song?