🔵 How Suno poses as a third-party to try and hype its product

Is it wrong? Not technically... but it certainly suggests desperation.

Yesterday, our Head of Growth here at MU, Charlie Biles, flagged an ad he’d been served for Suno, everyone’s favourite generative AI music creation platform.

It looked like this:

As you can see, this is not an ad from Suno itself; the company has instead decided to present as some kind of music editorial brand/website, thus presenting this as third party hype for its platform.

Oh and just to prove that, you can browse the company’s ads here, and you can see that the owner/operator of this Waveform Watch brand is Suno itself:

With my cynical marketing hat on, passing yourself off as a third party of some kind is pretty clever; it basically suggests that someone (in this case, a brand you’ve not heard of, but which presents as authoritative) is considering this product worthy of your time. Psychologically that’s crafty, as it bestows credibility on something that you might otherwise have been dismissive of.

However that is also the point to keep in mind here: when products are great, they have far less need to hoodwink you into validation. They simply sell themselves. Has Apple ever run an ad from a fictional brand, espousing the merits of its products? Of course not.

Ultimately then, one might argue this only reflects the desperation of Suno to drive adoption, ideally (one imagines) to push up user numbers and therefore paint positive pictures for investors.

About those investors… As each day passes, AI moves closer to an extremely grim bubble status. Not just any bubble either; one currently rated as being seventeen times the size of the dotcom bubble, and four times the size of the US subprime mortgages nightmare. Over $1.2 trillion of high grade debt is now tied to AI. Yesterday the Bank of England voiced concerns about the way this is headed, and just this morning, JP Morgan’s head was warning of a US stock market fall, commenting that AI was “appearing stretched” with an increasing risk of “a sharp correction”:

“The way I look at it is AI is real, AI in total will pay off,” he said.

“Just like cars in total paid off, and TVs in total paid off, but most people involved in them didn’t do well.”

He added some of the money being invested in AI would “probably be lost”.

I agree on this point; I don’t feel that AI is a complete dud. Within Motive Unknown we are finding amazing uses for it (and it has to be said, Notion remains the only company I am seeing deliver truly useful, applicable AI within its product - take note Google and Slack!), and beyond that I keep running into great ways AI can help with productivity and creativity, particularly within music via products like the Synplant synth’s incredible genopatcher, or RoEx’s amazing Mix Check Studio platform, something I am constantly making use of in my own music work.

This piece from The Oatmeal might be one of the most nuanced and brilliant takes on the whole struggle with AI and art, and articulates the issues in a manner I’ve thus far failed to master. Make time to read it.

However this view that AI should be all-pervasive is where the issues creep in, and generative music is - to me anyway - one such example.

Suno might step up to argue otherwise, but from where I am sat, the very nature of its advertising reflects that it is having a tough job selling this prospect in to people, and - as this threat of a bubble looms - it might be running out of road to prove its worth to investors.

Have a great day,

D.

🎶 Listening to “Hip Hop Electro 21”, (or is it just “Hip Hop 21”, as Discogs suggests? The artwork confuses on that point!), one of the legendary Street Sounds comps from the eighties. This particular instalment is from the period when hip hop was almost exclusively a funk break, often slowed down, with some thick 808 bass drops over it, and then the MC. Raw, heavy and brilliant. Case in point? Sir Fresh & DJ Critical’s “Sir Vere”. Play LOUD and thank me later.

📖 Reading “Taylor Swift fans are ‘fed up’ with her ‘capitalist’ approach to music”. I could only read it thinking “thank god - FINALLY!”, given I have written much on Swift’s approach to juicing the maximum possible amount from her fans.

📺 Watching “YouTube is shutting down my channel” by Davie504. Davie is a very popular bass-playing YouTuber, and it seems he too is now suffering at the hands of spurious copyright claims against his work. We’ve seen all manner of creators flag this issue of late (Rick Beato being the largest, I suspect), and it feels like we’re moving to a point where YouTube really needs to address this somehow.

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Remix, anyone?

On the basis I tend to assume it will be met with mass ambivalence, I tend to forget to mention my own musical work, which is pretty daft when I’m actually quite proud of it. Here’s a remix that dropped recently of South African-based producer Custodian. Reggaeton house vibes anyone?