Suno, an AI-powered music creation app gaining attention for its ability to create amazingly good music, has raised $125 million in Series B funding.
Suno counts venture capital firms among its investors Lightspeed Venture Capitalalso invested in Stable artificial intelligence and all fieldsa virtual universe company backed by music stars Nas and lil baby.
Other investors include venture capital funds Founder Groupand Nat Friedmana technology executive and investor best known for his role as C.E.O. GitHub. He is a consultant to halfwayan artificial intelligence technology platform that generates images.
Just join them Daniel Grossa colleague of Friedman’s who led the A.I. apple and serve as a partner Y-combiner.
“We launched our first product eight months ago, allowing anyone to create songs with simple ideas. It’s still early days, but Ten million People are already using Suno to make music,” Co-Founder and CEO Mickey Schulman said in a blog post announcing this round of funding.
“While Grammy-winning artists use Suno, our core user base consists of everyday people making music – often for the first time.”
According to sources quoted by The Information, The round gives the two-year-old Massachusetts-based company an implied value of US$500 million.
The newly raised funds will be used to expand the company’s staff, which as of earlier this year had only 12 employees.
Suno’s popularity has soared since its launch rolling stones An article earlier this year described how AI technology’s ability to create authentic-sounding music has unsettled some creators. This algorithm uses Open artificial intelligenceChatGPT generates lyrics and uses its own proprietary algorithms to generate music and vocals.
However, there is growing speculation that Suno’s models were trained using copyrighted music without the copyright holder’s permission.
In a guest column for MBW, Ed Newton-Rex,founder well traineda non-profit organization that certifies ethically trained artificial intelligence, lists striking similarities between Suno-generated music and copyrighted songs, such as Queenof bohemian rhapsody, Abbaof dancing queen and oasis‘ Don’t look back angrilywait.
Founder of Suno – Shulman, Georg Kuchko, Martin Camachoand Keenan Freibergwhich used to be artificial intelligence startups Jianxiang – Emphasize that unlike some other generative AI models, Suno does not allow users to request music composed in the style of any particular artist.
However, the company’s early investors Antonio RodriguezVC company partner matrixTell rolling stones He is prepared for the possibility that Suno will face lawsuits from music labels and publishers.
He described it as “a risk that we have to underwrite when we invest in this company because our wallets are so thick that we’re going to get sued behind these people…”
He added, “If we had a deal with the record labels when this company was launched, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think they need to be able to produce this product without restrictions.
As artificial intelligence has become more popular in the past few years, there has been an increase in lawsuits from rights holders accusing AI developers of copyright infringement. In one high-profile case, universal music group Joins several other music companies in lawsuit Anthropic Artificial Intelligenceclaims its Claude chatbot plagiarized copyrighted lyrics.
Other such lawsuits involve allegations that artificial intelligence copied books and newspaper articles.
However, many AI developers—including Google — Artificial intelligence investors believe there should be a “fair use” exemption from copyright laws for artificial intelligence training — just as educational materials in many countries are subject to limited exemptions from copyright laws.
“While Grammy-winning artists use Suno, our core user base consists of everyday people making music – often for the first time.”
McGee Schulman, Suno
However, music industry groups and Newton-Rex argue that this exemption would not be appropriate in the context of training AI models that could produce content that competes with the copyrighted material they were trained on – like music that could be created of artificial intelligence.
So far, courts have not made any clear rulings on whether AI training should be exempt from copyright protection.
A number of jurisdictions – notably the EU – have advanced legislation that might address this issue.
European Union Artificial Intelligence Act These include provisions requiring AI developers to seek permission from rights holders to use copyrighted material to train their models. However, legal analysts pointed out that the Artificial Intelligence Bill includes certain copyright exemptions provided for in EU law, such as for research purposes.
The bill’s copyright requirement only applies to what the law calls “general artificial intelligence.” Some legal experts say it’s unclear what qualifies for the term and what doesn’t.global music business
