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Generative AI music company Suno has raised $125 million in its latest funding round, according to a company blog post. The AI music company is one of the rare startups that can generate voice, lyrics, and instrumentals together, and says it wants to bring about “a future where anyone can make music.”
Suno allows users to create complete songs from simple text prompts. Most of the company's technology is proprietary, but for lyrics and title generation he relies on OpenAI's ChatGPT. Free users can generate up to 10 songs per month, while the Pro plan ($8 per month) and Premier plan ($24 per month) allow users to generate up to 500 or 2,000 songs per month, respectively. “General commercial conditions” are given.
In its announcement, the company named investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners. Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Matrix and Founders Collective. Suno also said it is working closely with a team of advisors, including 3LAU. Aaron Levy, Alexander Wang, Amjad Massad, Andrei Karpathy, Aravind Srinivas, Brendan IribeFlosstradamus, fred eltham, Guillermo Rauch and Shane Mack.
Suno is generally considered to be one of the most advanced AI music models on the market today, but in past interviews the company has not disclosed what material is included in its training data. It was.Expert ed newton rexThe founder of Fairly Trained and former VP of audio at Stability AI warned in a recent article. world music business Given how the music was able to be generated using a copyright-like model, it seems likely that Suno was trained using copyrighted material without his consent.
recently Rolling Stone Company and investor stories antonio rodriguez He said that Suno's lack of licenses with music companies was not a concern to him, saying the lack of such licenses was “a risk we had to take when investing in the company, because we quickly It's a big deal that will likely result in a lawsuit.” …Honestly, if this company had been signed to a label when it started, I probably wouldn't have invested. I think we needed to create this product without any constraints. ”
However, Suno representatives have previously said that their model does not allow them to create music using prompts such as “Radiohead-esque ballads” or adopt the voice of a specific artist. .
Many AI companies, including OpenAI, argue that unlicensed copyright training is “fair use,” but the legality of this practice has yet to be determined in the United States. new york times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for training on its copyrighted archives without consent, credit, or compensation, and Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, and other music publishers accused OpenAI of training on its large-scale language models. filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for using the song's lyrics in training.
In a Suno blog post, CEO Mikey Shulman “Today, we are pleased to announce that we have raised $125 million to build a future for music where technology amplifies, rather than replaces, our most precious resource: human creativity. .”
“We released our first product eight months ago, allowing anyone to create songs with just a simple idea,” he continued. “It's still early days, but 10 million people are already using Suno to create music. While Grammy Award-winning artists use Suno, our core user base is is made up of everyday people who create music, often for the first time.
“We've seen producers dig into crates, friends exchange memes, and streamers collaborate on songs with stadium-sized audiences. We've seen dozens of artists who have lost their voices. After years on the sidelines, we've helped bring lyrics back to life. We've seen teachers spark their students' imaginations by turning lessons into lyrics and stories into songs. Just this past weekend, with a little help from Suno, we received heartwarming stories of mothers who were moved to tears by the songs their loved ones had written for them.”
