Suno AI Reaches $300M ARR

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1:00You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from and start earning from ads like this, even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at RSS.com. Today we're talking about Suno AI. They are a huge AI music generation company. Jayden is a huge fan, a huge user of Sino AI. They recently reached 300 million in annual recurring revenue, which is a pretty insane number. So today we're gonna talk about this company and how you can actually make money with their software. So Jayden, why don't you tell them about our school community first? Okay, so every single week, Jayme and I record a bonus piece of content

2:02that we go and we post on the school community. And this week, Jayme recorded an entire tutorial on how he got a local business to rank on the first page of Google from, it was on the third before, by reading their site with lovable and his process and being able to do that and how he's spinning this into an entire business where he'll approach small businesses and redo their websites and get them to rank high and rank inside of Google Gemini, Google's snippet at the top and inside of chat GPT, inside of Google's search snippet at the top, the AI search snippet. So he got it to rank on all three of those places. It is super fascinating. As a case today, if you wanna check it out, join the school community, we drop videos like that every single week. It's $19 a month, you get incredible value as far as growing and scaling your business and how to start businesses, how to do it all with AI. So go check it out. The link is in the description to the AI hustle, school community. Okay, this is also a story that I am so thrilled about, the sooner one. And by the way, I just, I think it's so funny.

3:02Every time I hear anyone talking about AI music generation, like professionals are like in podcasts where they're talking about the future of AI blah blah. No one ever mentioned sooner for some reason. Everyone talks about UDO or there's some other startups. And Suno, I swear, is like the number one, they have a DAW, which is like a digital audio workplace, which is Suno Studio that's like incredible. It does all this amazing stuff. Like you basically can highlight different stems and be like, just generate the guitar for the song. Just generate the drums at this part of the song. Anyways, Suno is amazing. I don't know why no one ever talks about them. Evidently, users love them because they have just reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue, which is, I mean, it's a little bit below $30 million monthly recurring revenue. But they have two million paid subscribers. And I had been a paid subscriber for a million years of theirs. It's, yeah, it's just so good. And like no one gets close to it. It's so good. Sometimes I play for different services,

4:04even things from Google, like sometimes the Google VO model isn't like perfect at making videos or sometimes nano banana. I've just never been thrilled with nano banana, even their latest update if I'm being honest for image generation. So like there's all these different models for different things. Sometimes they're hit or miss. Suno is just a hit. And it's been a hit for a long time with music. So I'll stop showing them and saying how incredible they are. Jamie tells what you think is interesting about this story. I should really get a sponsorship from Suno. But I should honestly. So Jamie, tell me what's interesting about the story. And then I want to show everybody a case study of how much money I'm currently making from an album I made on Suno. Yeah, so Suno has been in the news for some, in the past for some negative press because there was lawsuits against them about where they're training their data from. They had a Warner music group lawsuit that they ended up settling. But realistically, Suno is not doing things much differently than other AI music generators

5:05except this one I think is geared more towards musicians. You can correct me if I'm wrong, Jayden. But like you had mentioned, they have, it's not just like, okay, generate me this song for this little jingle for my advertising. It's like, no, you can do fully produced music. You can generate, you know, just individual tracks for your music. You know, if you're a good singer and you have a really beautiful song you've written, but you don't have, you know, a violin player to play along and accompany you, you can actually have Suno just generate that to put on top of your song. So it's, I think it's really a unique, they have a unique value proposition specifically for musicians and small artists. And so I don't think, I think what's cool about Suno is they don't seem to be just, you know, ripping off music essentially there. They're creating a tool that's actually useful for humans. And I really like them, but what are your thoughts, Jayden? Okay, so I have actually been making music

6:06posted on Spotify for years since I was in college. I'm gonna actually share one case in particular of an album I posted on Spotify that was AI generated. I made this with Suno. In the last week, I've had 18,000 streams on this one album. And I'll give you guys the full spoiler alert. So if you go over on our school community, I have like a whole segment on how I do this. I talk a lot about AI music and this whole like thing, but I'll give you the spoiler. In the last week, I had 18,000 streams on this one album. And the spoiler is the exact category and type of music. It is a relaxing music to play to your cat. So if your cat is stressed out here, so it's basically just relaxing piano music, but I label it a whole bunch of different ways whether that's like baby sleep music or spa music or study music, like you do a whole bunch of things. Anyways, relaxing music for your cat is just really popular with people these days. 18,000 in the last week on this one particular album, 88,000 in the last month. And in the last year, it's done 861,000 streams on Apple

7:09and Spotify. And also, that's not even a full year because if you look at, I'm sharing my screen. So if you click the YouTube video, you can see the charts and everything that I'm sharing. But the first month that I posted it was about 30,000 streams then 68,000 and then 123,000 was the third month I posted it. And yeah, so I mean, basically, we haven't even done a full year. We still got three or four months to complete the full cycle of a year. So we'll figure out, I think I'll get over a million streams on this one album in a year and it is AI-generated, relaxing, piano music. And I like to be fair, it does sound good. I did a whole bunch of clever things which you could go see over my school community. I used like source files and a whole bunch of interesting stuff. I have a friend that's a great musician that has helped make original, relaxing, piano music that I license and use. And I've worked with Suno to do some cool stuff.

8:10So anyways, all this to say, you can actually, I mean, a million streams a year on this one album and I have lots of albums, lots of artists, lots of stuff I'm doing with this. You can actually make money and successfully Suno sounds great and can do a good job. So what is like a million streams? What is that translate to as far as income just for the people listening? Yeah, if you go join the school community, I have screenshots almost every month where I show how much money I'm making from this. So go check it out and I wanna publicly say how much money. But I have three different genres of artists that are all making lots of money. Go check it out, school community, check it out. So I think overall, this is an incredible tool. It is working good. You're right, they've had a bunch of drama in the past. And this particular story, like Suno just announced that they raised $250 million in funding three months ago. So from, and at the time, they had a $2.45 billion valuation for the company and they said they had revenue

9:13that was about $200 million. Annual revenue was $200 million. And three months later, after doing that round of funding, we're now at $300 million. So obviously this company is growing very quickly. I mean, that is a pretty insane growth rate to go from 200 to 300 million annual recurring revenue in three months. But they did have this $250 million to kind of help boost them forward. Now, I do think part of that money that they've raised is gonna have to be for settling lawsuits and other things like that. So it's a very highly contentious industry. And it's not like, they just waltz in and it's a walk in the park. They're basically battling to keep their business up and you wonder why there's not tons and tons of competitors in this space. It's because it's pretty hard to do what they're doing. And if I'm being honest, the way they're doing it is probably to scrape all the music in the world, probably from a pirate insight. This is completely unobstantiated speculation for entertainment purposes. Only don't sue me soon though. But if we look at what anthropic did, there is a theory that sooner could have just went

10:14to like a pirate in website, downloaded every song in the world, trained their model, like their model kicks butt on anybody else. How do they do that? I don't know. The theory is probably they did that. They're gonna get all the lawsuits. They'll get a slap on the wrist. They'll say, sorry, maybe they'll pay the artist, maybe they'll go and have to actually purchase the music. But by that point, their company has grown enough. It's been able to raise $250 million. They can pay the fines and they can also go and purchase all the music where they maybe couldn't have at the beginning. And now they're just the number one company because they were the first and fastest. And for anyone that thinks, oh my gosh, that's horrible, blah, blah, blah. And that's literally what anthropic did. They went and actually they got, they had to pay them over a billion dollars and fines. But they pirated every single book in the world off of a pirate website before eventually going and physically approaching a physical copy of every book and paying back all the writers and stuff. And that's how they had the best tone and the best creative writing capabilities on cloud for over a year. They were kicking chat to peace button and no one could figure out why. Okay, well, we figured out why. They had a much bigger data set that they were pretty

11:17sneaky on how they got. So in the world, I don't know how they do it. They have commercial licensing. You get when you create music here. So you're not going to get sued. You're not liable for anything. They take full liability. They're dealing with all the lawsuits from Warner Music. Personally, I don't really care what they do as long as I can make amazing music and it's a great creative tool. And in it is. And the last thing I'll say on this all is like, I have friends that are professional. I'm sure lots of people are very angry about my opinion on that. And I'm sorry, that's just my opinion on it. I could be wrong, but I just am happy with a shiny object tool that I can use. Okay, so I have a friend that is a music producer. He makes ad music for Apple Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Chase Bank, like a lot of these companies. He works at a big company that does this. And he used to do everything from scratch. I mean, he's a wizard. You watch him on, you watch him on some of these logic, for example, and his fingers are just like moving and clicking and dragging. It's insane to watch him work.

12:19Recently, I've been talking to him a lot about Suno, and he's said he's 10x how fast he can do everything. He'll come up with concepts and he gets Suno to just create the vocals for it. He doesn't have to go out and hire a singer to do it. He doesn't have to go hire a cello player. So anyways, he's able to do way more. His stuff sounds amazing. So professionals are really getting into this. It's not just novices like myself. There's professionals who do this as their career and they're becoming quite successful Suno as well. So no shocker, they hit $300 million now in your recurring revenue. Yeah, I mean, it's cool. I love these smaller, I would say AI companies who have a specific purpose they're creating their product for. And I think there's still lots of room for startups like this out there. Everyone talks about the AI bubble, and there's these big anthropic. You have open AI, you have Gemini. But if you can create a tool that is useful to a specific subset of people, there's still a lot of money out there, a lot of opportunity. And I think this company is a great example of that.

13:21So it'll be cool to see where they go as a company and also what other spin-offs come from it. So thanks for listening guys, and we'll see you next time. You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are, you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode, and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this. Even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at rss.com.