The Vergecast - The problem with Suno and AI music

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

AI-generated music is suddenly everywhere. On social media, music streaming services, and elsewhere, stuff made on Suno is becoming unavoidable. The Verge's Terrence O'Brien joins David to talk about where Suno came from, whether it can truly change the way we create and consume music, and how we can and should respond to AI music. We also have some thoughts on whether these songs might someday be bangers. Further reading: X admits its broken algorithm made the site feel like a ‘battleground’ | The Verge The Pixel colors might rule this year | The Verge Pixel Watch 5 leak shows off four different finishes | The Verge New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium | The Verge Suno is a music copyright nightmare Suno leans into customization with v5.5 Nobody wants to tell me why they only listen to their own Suno slop Suno’s upgraded AI music generator is technically impressive, but still soulless Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Puerto Rico song. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're talking about AI music. Specifically, what happens when you can suddenly make a song with just a prompt, and then you can let other people listen to that song, either on the app that you use to make it, or you can publish that song and millions of others like it to every streaming service everywhere? How does that change the way we make and experience music? How does that change the music business? How does that change what music?

even is going forward. The Virgil's Terrence O'Brien is going to come on and we're going to talk all about it. But first, here's everything else going on on the verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, July 14th, 2026. The X algorithm is a disaster and it might be about to get at least a little tiny bit better. Nikita Beer, who's the company's head of products, said that the algorithm hasn't been considering whether you follow someone back when deciding who would show your posts to, and that your friends, your mutuals, were showing up less in your replies as a result. Beer said that this turned your replies into, quote, a battleground with people you don't recognize, which is a perfect description of the X experience. Beer and X appear

to be working on a bunch of changes designed to promote original content and stuff you actually care about rather than, you know, rage bait and Elon Musk. I'm not holding my breath on any of it. Meanwhile, we've gotten a very clear look now at the next generation of pixel and pixel watch. The big news here is colors. If some now deleted Amazon listings are to be believed at least, we're getting green, blue, purple, orange, black, and most of all, hot pink pixels, and black, silver, and two shades of gold on the pixel watch, plus some cool new band colors. Listen to me. If you've never bought a cool color phone, I promise you, it's worth it.

I have a green iPhone 17. I love it, and it's mostly because it's green. Finally, New York Governor Kathy Hokel signed the U.S.'s first statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers, all in order to give the state some time to figure out proper environmental and energy regulations. The moratorium is written to last up to a year, which is basically time to figure out how and whether data centers can be good neighbors. More and more people would just tell you the answer is no. You can need more about all of this at the verge.com. That's 90 seconds on The verge for Tuesday, July 14th.

The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus. Starring Emmy Rossum, Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus.

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So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. All right, let's talk AI and music. Joining me now, the Virgins Weekend editor, Terrence O'Brien. Hi, Terrence. Welcome to the show. Hey, David. Thanks for having me. So I want both Terrence O'Brien weekend editor of The Verge and Terrence O'Brien, gigantic musician and music nerd, who currently has his laptop stacked on a pile of CDs, to both join us for this show.

Do you think we can do that? I think we absolutely can do that. Okay, cool. I want to start by talking about Suno, which is the AI music platform that you've been covering a bunch over the last several months and really kind of over the last year. I think this company has become increasingly important in the music space. And I want you to start just for people who don't know by telling me both what Suno says it is and what Suno actually seems to be in the world right now. Because my sense is those are relatively different things at the moment. I mean, they definitely are different things.

If you would ask Mikey Schulman, the CEO of Suno, he would say that it's about democratizing access to the tools of creation. It's about lowering the barrier of entry for music making. Write a song with a prompt. Like, hooray, great creativity, right? Like, that's a pitch. I think Mikey Schulman kind of gives the whole game away, honestly. He very famously quoted as saying, people don't enjoy making music.

And then I would just say you don't belong making music. Yeah, if you don't enjoy making music, you don't have to make music. I think that's fine and fair. It seems to me that sort of my experience of Suno in the world right now is less that it is a completely creative set of tools for people to make music. And just practically speaking, a way for people to make really similar covers of existing songs. Like overwhelmingly the stuff I have experienced in the world is, you know, and we've talked about this bunch on the show, like a blues cover of a Taylor Swift song.

It's like a thing people want to make an experience and that stuff is out there in the world. that I would think is not at all what Suna would like you to believe that it's about both for like creative reasons and for sort of straightforward business and copyright reasons. But that's at least how I experienced, you know. Is that what you see out in the world too? Absolutely. I think like there is some of that fully AI generated like original music and I'm using quotes for those who are listening and not watching out there.

But I would say the most visible. use case, the most popular use case for AI and Suno or whatever other model you want to use, UDO, is these like genre transfer covers. There's Nick Harrison. I think they call him The Professor. He got very famous on TikTok and Instagram for a little while, making basically like, starting out with like yacht rock covers of songs and then eventually spinning off into other genres. And sure, the first time you're Oh, this cover of disturbed that sounds like Steely Dan sure is kind of funny. But how many times can you do that? And, you know, once you start digging into like the ethical stuff as you keep doing it,

it becomes a little bit problematic. I do think you could argue that most songs would sound better as yacht rock songs. But there's also something in that process that has tripped me up about Suno for forever is I think you can, can look at Suno as purely a creation service, right? Put it next to Sora and Mid Journey and all these other ways of making stuff. And I think at this point, if you want to make AI music, there are lots of ways that are not Suno to do that. Suno also seems to want to be a streaming service. Like it believes in some fundamental way that what you want to do is not only create music on Suno, but listen to music on Suno. And that all of this is the new way,

that we think about art and music is that it will be created by AI and listened to by you. I'm guessing the musician in you hates this reflexively, but I'm curious what you think about even sort of this thesis, that Suno can be one whole thought about how we make and experience music. I find that dystopian just to be, like the idea that you would make and listen to music on Suno and that's your whole destination is, I think, antithetical to the idea of art in general, would fundamentally destroy an entire industry. Like, if you want to, like, if you're making music and listening to your music on Suno, that's why do we have musicians?

Why is there a music industry? Why do we have other streaming services? That's like the very broad argument against it. But I think going back to this art thing, you know, I wrote a little bit about how nobody wants to tell me about why they listen to their own AI slop. After that came out, some people did reach out to me and start to, you know, volunteer to offer some explanations. Give me a little flavor of the case people made for doing this. It allows them to create personal art. allows them to put their experience in song in a way they might not have been able to before

for whatever reason that is. It's a story and an argument that sounds good at first brush. It's hard to argue with somebody saying, well, it's my art. I didn't have a way to get it out there. And it helps me or makes me feel heard. It allows me to exercise demons or whatever. And you're like, well, yeah, I have a hard time saying anything bad about that. But I would argue that that's not the point of art. The point of art isn't to, and the point of music isn't to necessarily allow you to exercise your demons for your own purposes. It's not about spitting your trauma back at you.

It's about connecting you to other people. The reason you like the music you like is because that artist makes you feel seen because you relate to them. It's about building empathy and connecting with other people. If you're dumping your diary entry into Suno about how you broke up with your girlfriend or you lost a parent and then you just like type a prompt along with it like sad country song or alt rock power ballad, I'd argue that it's an exercise in narcissism to a certain degree. And those people wouldn't want to say that. And I understand that they wouldn't like that. And they probably get mad at me for saying this.

But what you're doing is you're making art for one. You're not building connections. And that's the whole point of art. I don't know. It seems... It's a good distinction. And I think you're making me think back to when like SORA launched or when Meta decided that it was going to do a whole Facebook feed of just AI generated stuff. And I think I in general have kind of been dismissive of most generative AI art things.

Like I think they're nifty novelties that don't actually accomplish very much for people. Everybody seems to like make one studio Ghibli style piece of art and then move on with their lives. But there was something about we want to turn this into a community experience that like it did. It felt dystopian to me. And it is like this is such a fundamental misread of what people actually want to experience with each other. And like Sora flamed out. Nobody goes to, I don't even know if the Facebook AI feed still exists. Like the proof continues to be that people do not want the experience.

you're describing. Yeah. That actually, there is something to making things for yourself, right? Sure. Like, I, I'm, vibe coding proves it, right? Like, there are lots of people with,

with specific creative needs for themselves. Knock yourself out. This is why I'm so stuck on, I don't buy the idea of Sunoz's a streaming service at all, because the things that you make for yourself will never, ever feel the same to anyone else, because they just,

they just can't. And like, every musician talks about this cool moment where you make something, and then you release it to the world and it now belongs to other people. And it does seem to me that AI precludes that. Just the way in which we make things with AI tools does not seem able in a way to make that kind of connection. Absolutely.

And I think, you know, digging around in like the Suno subreddit or hanging around in the Suno Discord, people talk a lot about the music they've made with Suno and they share it. But nobody ever talks about listening to the AI music of other people. Right. It's all about what I've made, what I've released, and there is no connecting. Nobody wants to listen to the other AI slop people made. They just want to listen to their own. Right.

But there is an interesting thing happening there, which is that all of that stuff being made is flooding streaming services. And even if you believe that most people don't want to listen to it, and it seems like, statistically speaking, this vast quantity of AI generated music, accounts for a teeny tiny percentage of actual listening and that most of it is accidental or fraudulent in some way. Yeah. You still have a real problem in that all of a sudden actual artist's work

is about to get harder to find and it's being buried in just an avalanche of this AI slap that even if people don't want to listen to it as it comes on to streaming services, it is still going to cause huge problems for real artists, right? Absolutely. I think, you know, unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there is a really easy solution. there. I mean, like, from the user end, it seems like the easy solution is just we don't want it, so please take it away, or at least let us filter it out. I would, you know, kill for a button that just let me say, I don't want AI in my thing. So please just block it fully. Deaser and COBAs have

systems in place that will identify and flag AI generated content, but it doesn't remove it and it doesn't let you filter it, just puts a little label on it. And that's, you know, thankfully, they're doing some work to, like, demonetize and keep it out of their algorithmic recommendations, which means people are going to listen to it less. They won't put it in their curated playlists. But let's be fair, Dizer and Kobas are small potatoes. I mean, Spotify and Apple Music are essentially the game. And Spotify in particular seems potentially to be very excited about the idea of you and I listening to more AI-generated music because it doesn't have to pay royalties. That seems like a big victory for Spotify. It does. And I think, you know, Spotify is, Spotify's a weird case. Again,

having been covering this and following it for a while now, in some respects, Spotify is doing more than Apple to clean up, you know, the AI spam and AI generated content from its platform. Apple has seemed to have very little interest in addressing it at all. They've rolled out like a opt-in system where you can label it as AI or using AI if you want to, but it's not actually required and it doesn't change anything on the user end as far as I know. I think of those things as like Pinky Promise systems where it's like we would love it if you would tell us that this is made with AI. Like please, please be cool, everybody.

It doesn't accomplish anything for anybody. And Spotify is doing something similar, but at the same time also starting to roll out some more protections for artists themselves, where they can require that uploaded music be manually approved before it hits their profile, which the fact that this wasn't a thing beforehand drives me insane. The fact that literally anybody could just go on and upload music to a random artist, profile essentially is bonkers. So they are doing some work.

I would say probably not enough still, but they're doing something. But yes, they also, I think, are very excited about watering down the royalty distribution pool with a bunch of nonsense. Spotify has said as much that it is essentially happy to have music that is not made by and thus paid to people that like they're very clear about that. I mean, you think about like, do you remember that that whole kerfuffle about all the money Spotify was paying white noise generators? And how that became a whole, like, boy would Spotify love to just have all that be AI generated on Spotify and not have to pay anybody. Like, it makes sense. The simple business case

there, I understand for Spotify, it just leads down sort of inevitably gross, weird roads. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust.

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Editor Joe Khan, right now, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. If I'm an artist right now, am I looking at Suno and tools like it as what amounts to a spam problem? Like you're saying that maybe it'll bump me down search results, but fundamentally, the Spotify's and Apple Musics of the world are going to try to fight this thing. Or is this a real sort of fundamental existential creative threat to my work and, like, livelihood. I think it is a fundamental and existential threat to your creative livelihood as an artist. You know, there, again, it's some of these things that sound good on paper, but essentially guts the entire music industry middle class, because people will talk about how, well, now they'll use Suno to generate demos of songs even. Maybe it's not what they're going to release,

But rather than go into a studio and rent studio time, maybe rather than hire a session guitarist, maybe rather than work with a second songwriter, they'll turn to Suno. This is a well-known and well-documented problem in Nashville. But now that guy who was making a living, perhaps doing the occasional studio session and playing in a honky-tonged in a bar band, well, he's just lost a significant source of income. Right. What does he do? For the people who are at the top of the charts, for your Beyonce's and your Taylor Swift's, Suno at the end of the day is an annoyance because it is, let's be clear, stealing your music. Sure.

It is ingesting it and scraping it and turning it into ones and zeros for people to rearrange for their pleasure. You can make Suno generate a Beyonce song by saying artist rhymes with Shmishmante. You literally can just do it. It's just sitting there. Yeah. I mean, I've proven how broken their part. copyright filters are. There's an article on the verge.

You should go read it about how broken Suno's copyright filters are, in which there is an alarmingly accurate rendition of Beyonce's freedom. So, you know, for them, though, it is ultimately an annoyance more than anything else. And if you're at the bottom end, you're just playing shows at your local coffee shop because you like to play guitar and sing songs for your friends, it's not going to make a huge difference. But that middle class, that those people who are working, touring musicians who make a living at it, maybe not a great living, but make a living at it, they're in real danger. Let me tell you about this very specific version of this experience I've been having recently.

You're not on TikTok. I am not, which good for you. I am terminally on TikTok, and it's a real problem. I should preface all of this by saying this is all going to make me look nerdy and embarrassing in a bunch of ways that I'm fully comfortable with. Do you know the goofy movie? Yes. Okay. Do you know the song Eye to Eye from a goofy movie? Yes.

So I to Eye, one of the all-time great Disney songs. Shout out to Powerline. About, let's see, when did this come out? About a year ago, Disney put out an album called A Whole. new sound, which was basically a bunch of pop-punk remixes of classic Disney songs, which is a sentence made for me specifically. It's like all of my favorite things, all in one album. And the very first single they put out was this group called Magnolia Park covering eye-to-eye. This song sort of had a moment. It went around. People liked it. Magnolia Park kind of had a

moment on TikTok when this came out. The album did pretty well. And then, earlier this year, a cover of eye-to-eye starts going viral on TikTok. Let me just play you this cover. All right, Terrence, do you want to guess who made this song? I mean, that is AI. It is. Like, it's the moment the vocals kick in, you can tell.

Yes. This is so, so very AI. This song went like, like, like, very viral in one of the most fascinating ways and I think I've seen with AI music all over social media, which is song comes out and there are two immediate responses in the comments. One of them is this rips, put it on Spotify, I need to inject this into my vans.

And then under every single one of those comments is another comment saying, bro, it's AI. It's AI. And this one was really fascinating because every time you see this version, anywhere on TikTok, there will be hundreds of comments from people being like, why did you post this and not the Magnolia Park version?

That one's by people. Great question. And I love this because there are a bunch of people who are like, the argument is not even necessarily that that version is better, even though it transparently is. But it becomes this argument about human music versus AI music.

Like, let me just read you some of the comments on this video that I have here. And again, I picked this one completely at random. This is just a video that has this song. Magnolia Park is actually a band. AI is taking over. There are many AI bands and songs and more popping up every day.

Yes, it's good. However, an actual band will always be better. And then there's a response that just says, L take. It's very funny. You almost had me, but it being AI ruins everything. Man, it sucks how many people are just lying to themselves saying this version is trash because it's AI.

This version and Magnolia Park's version now exists. Just enjoy them both. Again, like, people are just litigating AI and art in the comment section of every single one of these videos. And over and over, there are also people who are like, I hate how much I like this because it's AI. I'm just curious how you feel about this whole. We've taken a Disney song,

we've turned it into something else made by people, and then we have just completely AIed the hell out of that second thing. And somewhere in that spectrum is either the absolute future of creativity or a perfect representation of how all of this breaks. And I, for the life of me, cannot figure out which one it actually is. I mean, I think it's, it's the latter. I think it's, this is how this breaks. I mean, I think this is a perfect example of how, you know,

Magnolia Park had this minor hit the album does fairly well, but Magdalia Park's not playing Madison Square Garden. No. Like, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about. that musical middle class where like, this is now taking, you know, money out of their pockets and they probably actually need this. This is a band that, again, let's be clear, Spotify doesn't pay you royalties unless you cross a certain streaming threshold. It's watered down when you start doing this. And, you know, there's royalties to be paid out

from TikTok. And now this has gone viral instead of their version. They're losing out on that. We can argue whether or not the technical quality is there. Like, does it sound good? I would argue no. But, you know, people can agree to disagree on certain things. But at the end of the day, it's just a machine spitting out code. It's not, I don't care what your prompt is. That band had a connection to that song.

Even if that connection was just as simple as, I remember that movie from when I was a kid. I loved that shit. Pseudo doesn't have an emotional connection to anything. I think it's preying on people's nostalgia in a weird way that is kind of gross, kind of cynical. And I think that's the best thing you can say about it. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. And I think the more I think about this one in particular, the more I think about sort of the way distribution is changing all of this, right?

because there are a lot of people who are coming to this AI cover of I-2-I and being like, oh, punk rock goofy movie covers, this rules. And they're not finding the better version of this that this is just ripping from. And I think it's a really strange thing. And this goes back to like, is this a spam problem or is this something more fundamental? That like TikTok is how we discover music now. It just is. It has been for a long time.

TikTok is how music is discovered for a generation of people. And the fact that you can just absolutely flood the zone with every AI cover of every song you can possibly think of, does change the dynamic in a way that is going to make it vastly harder for anyone else to get through just because they can't make music as fast as soon as can. Absolutely. And I think that this is one of the things that, like, when I talk about AI music with people who are maybe not even defenders of it, but just are at the very least less vehemently anti than I am, is I think stuff like this presents as kind of innocuous. It seems like a

harmless diversion. And, you know, I think there's a certain amount of it that does present as being primarily a spam problem. But I think the moment you start digging a little bit deeper, the moment you start actually like examining it, it becomes clear that it's actually a lot more than that. It is an existential threat. It's not just that, oh, it's a little bit of a spam. It's like you're saying, you can flood it and drown everybody else out. And that's threatening their livelihoods. This thing that might seem innocuous of, oh, I made a punk rock cover of a thing by telling Suna, well, there's an actual band that really did that. And now you're pushing them down, you know, people's feeds with your AI nonsense. And that's not to speak, again, of the ethical implications of how we train

AI, the environmental impacts of it, like just ignoring all of that stuff, which is incredibly heavy baggage to begin with. The moment you start scratching beyond the, oh, it's harmless genre transfers, it's, it's worse than that. Yeah, I tend to agree. And I think the more, the deeper down this well I have gone, the weirer it feels to experience any kind of AI music. And in a lot of ways, as it gets better and it, like you mentioned, you can sort of tell immediately as soon as the vocals come in, that it's AI.

That probably won't be true forever. And in a lot of ways, this whole thing gets more alarming as that is the case. I think there is a debate about can AI make good music? And then there's a debate about what happens when you're not really paying attention if you even notice the difference. And what everyone is responsible to do then, it just keeps, it just gets messier and messier as this stuff gets better. Absolutely. All right, we should get out of here. But I do, I want to leave you, Terrence, with the only truly great AI song ever written.

Would you like to hear it? Sure. Why not? There is but one. There may only ever be one. But let it be known that there is in fact one. And I'm going to play it for you right now. It's undeniable, Terrence. It's undeniable. It is objectively very entertaining. All right, buddy. Thank you for being here. Appreciate you coming on. Thank you for having me. All right. That's it for the show. Thank you to Terrence for being here. And thank you, as always for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, questions, feedback, if you have a favorite AI song that you feel ashamed for liking as much as you do

and you want to tell me about it, no judgment here. Call the hotline 866, Vervege 1-1. Send us an email, Vergecast at theverge.com. We love hearing from you. And as always, the best thing you can do to support all of this is go to the verge.com slash subscribe

and subscribe to the verge. It gets you all of our podcasts, including this one with no ads. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage. Terrence has been writing about Suno all year and has been writing great stuff. You can get all of that.

at the verge.com slash subscribe. Thanks in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Lacassio.

We'll see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.