People Are Making AI Songs Just for the Fun of It

When Mike Mignano, a former podcast startup founder who is now a general partner at venture firm Union Square Ventures, was asked to name his biggest miss as an investor, he pointed to Suno, the startup building artificial intelligence for music creation.

He had met the founders at the earliest funding round, the seed round when a startup first raises outside money, after being introduced by another investor, and passed on a check of about $200,000 to $250,000 for about 1% of the company. He later called the decision a lack of imagination. What he missed, he said, was a new way people use the product, which Suno's team calls creative entertainment.

"People are coming into Suno. They're making music for the pure joy and entertainment value of making music," Mignano said.

By that, Mignano argues, people are not using Suno to try to become professional musicians. They are making songs because making them is fun, with no greater plan for the music. He said it is similar to what he sees with coding assistants like Claude Code, image generators like Midjourney, or tools that let people make games on a computer with no aspiration of becoming a game developer.

The idea grew out of his own history. As the founder of Anchor, a company that let anyone make a podcast, he had watched what happened when a creative medium was democratized. People made podcasts in order to get distribution and eventually make money, he said. He went hunting for every team applying AI to music because music had never been fully democratized, and then met Suno co-founder Mikey at a restaurant near his home in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Mignano said they hit it off instantly. Mikey, a former musician, was deeply passionate about making creative expression and self-expression easier, and Mignano was struck by how well the team understood both the models and their vision for the world.

When asked what he was underwriting at $5 billion, Mignano said Suno has what he loosely called unlimited upside potential. He compared it to generational platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter, which democratized video and writing. He said he once assumed Suno would need to grow beyond a creation aid and develop an audience side, with creators on one side and listeners on the other. The model in his mind was Spotify. Now, he believes the making itself is the point.

"You're making music to make music."