Behind the Blog: The TikTok Ban and Joyless AI

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss enjoying things in the AI industry and the TikTok ban.

JOSEPH: I’m going to talk about Emanuel’s great piece CEO of AI Music Company Says People Don’t Like Making Music. Here is the key passage:

Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don’t enjoy making music.

“We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people,” Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. “And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] 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.”

Please go read Emanuel’s whole piece. It’s short and gets straight to the good points of, among other things, that the pursuit of the challenge is one thing that draws people to learn an instrument. Shulman says with his AI tool, they could make the music industry as big as the video game industry, ignoring the fact that some of the most popular video games are specifically about a hard challenge, as Emanuel says.