TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Dr. Ostrich feat. Dan Boeckner

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

Dan Boeckner’s back to discuss the ongoing march of AI through the music industry, and whether or not companies like Suno really do “democratise creativity.” Also, we look at U.K. institutions segregating trans people and going :/ Get the whole episode on Patreon here!   TF Merch is still available here!   *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Dan, do you think that it would be better if being a musician was something that wasn't because everybody was a musician and therefore being a musician wasn't distinctive? You know, I've been doing this for 20 years and it wasn't until I downloaded Suno and made the worst version of wake-up possible that I realized what a privileged piece of shit I've been most of my life, you know, when I quit my job at the call center to make $8,000 a year touring in a van, I was taking that away from other people who might not be as good at singing or playing guitar or might not have the capacity, same capacity as I do for like bad food and sleeping on the floor of a shitty hotel with eight other people, you know? Yeah, you've been, you've been hoarding that sort of touring musician lifestyle away from the rest of us. I've been like a dragon on a pile of treasure, you know, hoarding that experience. So I think it's good that the thing that makes me different is completely eliminated from the earth.

And, yeah, we got to equalize it. Let's go. Yeah. But crucially, it's going to be equalized in such a way where everything, all the music that it's going to make is quite bad. We made bad music. Just we've automated the front bottoms. imagine this I'm a live touring

Suno musician and what I do is indistinguishable from just getting prompts at an improv show You know how people get really mad at like EDM musicians for being like he's just got a laptop up there but what if he actually did he was just like playing Tetris on there

or like Minecraft you know what honestly I'm sick of these touring Suno musicians up there with their laptops writing prompts anyone can write a prompt. I think they need to democratize it. I think the audience should be able to write prompts when a Suno musician is on stage.

Doing a kind of Twitch plays Pokemon concert where like everyone had one concert go or one vote for what the kind of music being generated is. And what I hate also is like so many times when there's like a really buzzy Suno musician like a boiler room or whatever you like boiler room Tel Aviv or you know, I heard that Kevin Spacey just played that

Kevin Spacey did a Sunno set Boileroom Tel Aviv. You joke, but I do not know about this. I do know that he moved to Israel. Yeah, Kevin Spacey has been filmed doing like a song and dance tap routine in Tel Aviv, like on stage. Is he dressed as Francho Tuchman?

I wish you would have kept the thing, yeah, be like, as the song and dance routine about the founding of, about the foundation of an independent Croatia. I just hate when it's like, it's so clear that they're not typing in the prompts live. They're just copying a string of prompts from a word document and like that's

not like real pseudo playing. It doesn't feel the same. It's like vinyl. You can kind of hear you know, in this sort of texture of the sound. This is this, this is a company that is now valued at 2.45 billion having been raised. Not for long. I'm looking at that and in the other screen I've got all of your like since 2009 metrics. I love adding to that threat. He was doing a Frank Sinatra cosplay rather than a Franus Hesgman cosplay. That's a shame. So Suno is raised a quarter billion from Menlo Park Ventures among other funders at a 2.45 billion valuation.

I hear the sound of Googling Kevin Spacey Tel Aviv, Frank Sinatra. Yeah, look, what you're hearing approximately maybe 16 hours after we record this is tens of thousands of other people Googling the same thing around the world. Yes. No, so it's, that's the, this is the company. Suno co-founder and chief executive, Mickey Schulman, said the company's aim is to bring interactive music tools to the average person. Quote, there's a really big future for music where way more people are doing it in a really

active way. It's doing the kind of like everyone has a play, a novel, a song inside them, but in an evil way. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's like everyone has a play, a novel or a song inside them, but you shouldn't have to do anything to get it out of you. Yeah, I mean, it's not yours, really.

Everyone has the capacity to have a computer, like, remix a bunch of songs that stole from everybody else who already knows how to make music. And maybe you could say that that's actually going to, you know, dissuade people from making their own music. But, you know, it's fine. I wouldn't think so. No, no, no, it's fine. Here's the thing, right? Like, if I get into Suno, then maybe that'll help me build my confidence and get over my anxieties and my sort of, like, my chronic guitar allergy and enable me to actually, like, find where. ways to adapt around those things and to make music in many ways.

It's a lot like starting doing heroin so that you can then move on to injecting medicine into yourself. Well, you know, it'll help people like me. I was born with a condition where when I play, you know, you might not know it to listen to my music, but when I first picked up the guitar, all I could play were Steve Vi riffs. Just like, and, you know, it's a disability. I think fellow sufferers of what I like to call Meg White syndrome will be gratified to know that actually you will be able to drum in time with yourself. Exactly.

I could have skipped all the training, you know, all the condition breaking I did by using Suno. I wasted my life. Bruce, so it's sad to see that realization. I hope no one ever does an AI podcast. Certainly that doesn't exist already. So basically, right, what's happened is as soon as Suno resolved. or as it became clear that it was going to resolve its lawsuit with Warner Music Group, this appears to be when the funding was then, let's say, more forthcoming.

Because Warner used to be suing Suno saying, hey, it seems you're stealing the songs that we have used our position as a monopsonist to basically price gouge musicians for, and that now Spotify has started stealing from us, but in a way that, as a monopsonist, in a way that we've been able to come to accommodation with, But now you're stealing everything from us as well. And we're going to have to come to an accommodation.

And so what they've done is Warner and Suno. Soono is by far the biggest. Second Biggest is Udio. The card game? But that's not all. They've come to an agreement where now Warner is going to get paid by Suno and then presumably artists are going to get paid even less. Oh, okay.

Because the thing is the thing that always benefits artists or any supplier of any commodity is more middle. man. More middlemen and of course a devaluing and commodification of the final product. But the thing is that this middleman brought his infinite theft machine with him, which is really going to streamline the whole process. My favorite David Foster

was, I'll infinite theft. Infinite theft. Warner and Universal and Sony were kind of teasing this idea that you could, as an artist on one of their labels, that you could cut a deal with Suno and, you know, openly license your stuff to Suno for analysis and copying.

And that would somehow, through like Rube Goldberg style financial network trickle back to the person who actually wrote the songs. So the announcement they said Warner and Suno today announced a first of its kind partnership

that will open new frontiers and music creation, interaction and discovery while both compensating and protecting artists. So when we said it wasn't going to be good, I hadn't read that yet. I didn't know that that's what they were doing.

Oh, okay. Yeah. And the wider creative community. You know, artists, songwriters, and the wider creative community. I love those guys. Big fan. I hate when they keep adding letters

to the wider creative community and I can't keep up with the shit. Too many flags in the bio. Robert Kinsel, CEO of Warner, said, The Landmark Pact with Suno is a victory for the creative community that benefits everyone.

We've seized this opportunity to shape models that expand revenue and deliver new fan experiences. AI is actually pro artist when it adheres to our principles, committing to licensed models, reflecting the value of music on and off the platform.

When we get our cuts, it's, you know, sort of compliant with our values. Oh yeah. CEO of Warner Music Group, Robert Kensel, absolutely a member of the creative community and someone whose voice should be heard. Yeah, absolutely.

He's like ahead of the creative community, you know, because he's the CEO of a company that I assume creates a lot of creative stuff. And look, if you're in the creative community and you don't have like the ability to create anything, then you have to, that's to the front, suits to the front.

That's right. That's right. You're doing progressive stack, but for people who don't know how to create stuff. They've been doing DEI in the music community for years, you know. Yeah, in the music community, they spell it A&R. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Hiring people with little to know musical ability or taste or understanding of what goes into making a record and putting them in charge. And providing artists and songwriters with an opt-in for the use of their name, image, likeness, voice, and compositions in new AI songs. So that's the, that appear, they, hey, you can opt, you, it's an opt-in. You can opt-in. It's literally, yeah, it's literally an all. opt in and you will not be punished for not opting in. This is a good time for me to announce the new Arcade Fire six album concept box set Save Our Ostriches. It's got a really like velvet sunset sound to it or whatever the fuck the name of that band was.

Yeah. And so like basically like Suno is going to make a few changes to the platform. They're not really worth talking about here. It's going to make it slightly less appealing. But crucially, because you know, I'll have to pay for downloads, it's going to kill what used to be Spotify infinite money glitch. Again, Warner's like, hey, that's supposed to be our scam. You're fucking with our scam. Spotify's saying, hey, that's supposed to be our scam.

You're fucking with our scam. Which is you use Suno to generate an AI song that is just barely musical enough to meet Spotify's threshold for uploading. Then you hire that ClickFarm company from Andresen Horowitz. And then you just have the ClickFarm listen to it 20 million times. It's a beautiful thing because like if the economy is a big circle already, then all you you've got to do to get rich is make yourself a smaller circle. Yeah, well, quite.

Just one extra bubble in the bubble bath, you know? What could go wrong?