Press return to see results.
cmd / ctrl + k to open and close.
Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change by Kyle Devine. Verso Books, 256 pages. 2026
For a brief moment in January 2025, Mikey Shulman was the most hated man in music. The cofounder and CEO of Suno, a generative artificial intelligence platform that in some ways does for music what OpenAI’s ChatGPT does for text, made an appearance on the podcast 20VC to discuss the company’s vision. Suno, Shulman claimed, offers an egalitarian approach to audio creation, providing fans who may have once primarily encountered music as casual listeners with the opportunity to become active participants in the compositional process.
“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he told the show’s host, Harry Stebbings. “It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument, or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.” His comments sparked predictable outrage on social media, where listeners collectively scoffed at the gall of this heinous CEO. What is music if not enjoyable to make? And what kind of pleasure could possibly be derived from an audio recording produced in a matter of seconds—without arduous hours in writing sessions, practice spaces, and recording studios, all of which have historically been needed to realize an artist’s vision?
