Can an AI music company make nice with human artists?

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**Megan McCarty Carino** (0:31)
Can an AI music company make nice with human artists? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.
The AI music company Suno wants to partner with independent artists. It's launched an incubator program called Suno Spark to provide grants, marketing support, and of course, Suno AI tools to unsigned musicians. Tatiana Cirisano is here to discuss. She's vice president of music strategy at MIDiA Research, which consults in entertainment.

**Tatiana Cirisano** (1:15)
What's obviously really complex about Spark is that Suno is sort of aiming to partner with artists and offer support to them at the same time as it is battling lawsuits for its use of artists' music and training material. So there's a lot of complexity there. And I think, you know, it's understandably drummed up some controversy.
But there's also some interesting points to me about how it also signals Suno moving from being a platform for creation where its impact sort of starts and ends with creation towards being a company that actually participates in an artist's journey post-creation, moving across the value chain into marketing and artist development and things like that. Yeah.

**Megan McCarty Carino** (1:57)
Sort of looking at the positive case for this, what could a partnership between an AI music company and an independent artist provide for those artists?

**Tatiana Cirisano** (2:11)
With generative AI creative tools, lowering the barrier to entry for making music, that has offered democratized access and offered a lot of artists that maybe wouldn't have been able to get their start to even start making music in the first place. But what's been interesting about that, as well as just the lowered barrier to entry over time, is that it also means making great music is just the first step. You also have to get heard.
And that's become increasingly difficult to do, right? With the growing volume of songs and artists that are out there. And so providing any sort of tools, whether it's funding or marketing support, or really artist development, which is something that many in the music industry feel has been lacking. Providing that to independent artists at a time when they're feeling it's harder than ever, I think, to break through, there's obviously value in that. So I think that's sort of the positive case.

**Megan McCarty Carino** (3:04)
Yeah, it sort of reminds me of what we hear about a lot in sort of the business world of AI tools. Well, they might sort of replace certain jobs. But if you're an entrepreneur and you have a good idea and you want to execute your good idea, it gives you all these tools to sort of do things on your own that you wouldn't have been able to do.

**Tatiana Cirisano** (3:22)
Yes, totally. And I think we're seeing that in AI. But it also, like you said, with the fear of being replaced for some of these roles, like it comes with a lot of positives and negatives, I suppose, along with any other technological disruption.

**Megan McCarty Carino** (3:36)
Well, let's talk about that, the potential replacement of artists by AI, which is sort of an implicit kind of characteristic of Suno's business. Why do you think they're looking to actively work with human artists rather than just maybe creating AI artists?

**Tatiana Cirisano** (3:57)
Yeah, I mean, I think that they are trying to reframe the narrative a little bit and send this message to the music industry and to artists that we're not here to replace you. We're here to support you, to open up new ways of music making, to support you in not only your craft, but in your career. So I think there's definitely sort of a message being sent as part of this.

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