Suno's $5B Bet That Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here’s a paradox that should keep every musician up at night: the company that generates a Spotify catalog’s worth of songs every single day just doubled its valuation to $5 billion. And its CEO’s best defense? Comparing himself to a weight-loss drug.

Welcome to the most confusing week in AI music history.

The $5 Billion Elephant in the Room

Suno, the AI music generation company that has attracted a staggering 100 million users — and landed a spot on Forbes’ 2026 AI 50 list — is reportedly nearing a close of a funding round that could value it at more than $5 billion, more than double what it was valued after its last funding round in November.

Let that sink in. The new funding round comes six months after Suno raised $250 million at a valuation of $2.45 billion. In six months, this company doubled. This round is expected to close in the coming weeks and will likely raise above the $250 million mark.

What’s fueling this rocket ship? Pure, staggering usage. Suno users generate more than 7 million songs — the equivalent of Spotify’s entire music catalog — every day. And since rolling out to the public in 2023, more than 100 million people have used Suno to create music and more than 2 million people have signed up as paid subscribers.

Those are numbers that make VCs swoon. But here’s where it gets interesting — and deeply weird.

”The Ozempic of the Music Industry”

Suno’s CEO Mikey Shulman has a gift for metaphors that reveal more than he probably intends. “We’ve become the Ozempic of the music industry,” he told Forbes last week. “It’s like everybody’s on it and nobody wants to talk about it.”

Think about what that metaphor actually says. Ozempic works. People use it. But there’s a stigma attached — a sense that you’re taking a shortcut, that you didn’t earn the result. Shulman is essentially admitting that the music industry’s relationship with his product is built on shame.

He sees Suno as a way that musicians can take shortcuts in creating music. “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music…. When you get people one-on-one, they’re just more comfortable admitting it.”

This is a remarkable statement from the CEO of a company valued at $5 billion. He’s essentially saying: your creative process is a chore, and we’re the shortcut you’re embarrassed to admit you’re using.

According to a source familiar with the matter, multiple music industry investors are involved in the ongoing Series D round, and music industry investors have been putting money into each of Suno’s rounds, although most of them ultimately keep their support of the still-controversial AI music firm private.

The Ozempic parallel runs deep. The very industry suing Suno is quietly investing in it.

The Numbers That Don’t Add Up

Here’s where the paradox becomes impossible to ignore. While Suno doubles its valuation, actual listeners are moving in the opposite direction.

Music fans are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with AI songs, according to a recent report published by the music and entertainment insights company Luminate. The decline is especially notable with young listeners who are part of Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

The study compared attitudes towards AI use in music creation from May to November of 2025. It found that overall interest dropped from -13% to -20% during that time period.

Read that again. Interest didn’t just stall — it actively declined. And the people who hate it most? The greatest decline comes from Gen Alpha and Gen Z in particular, falling from net -6% to -16% during that period.

That’s the very demographic every music company on Earth is desperate to court. The young listeners who live on TikTok and Spotify are the ones pulling away fastest.

When it comes to music, Luminate’s report found that sentiments are particularly negative towards new songs created by AI in the style or sound of an existing artist. Which is, you know, literally Suno’s core product.

44% of All Music Uploads Are Now AI

Meanwhile, streaming platforms are drowning. Deezer announced that AI-generated tracks now represent 44% of all new music uploaded to its platform. The company said it’s receiving almost 75,000 AI-generated tracks per day and more than two million per month.

That growth curve is almost vertical. Deezer reported receiving around 60,000 AI tracks per day in January, up from 50,000 in November, 30,000 in September, and just 10,000 in January 2025, when it first launched its AI-music detection tool.

From 10,000 to 75,000 in sixteen months. That’s a 650% increase.

But here’s the kicker that tells you everything about the current state of AI music: The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of those streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.

Let me translate: nearly half of all new music is AI-generated, almost nobody is actually listening to it, and most of the “listeners” who do engage are bots running streaming fraud schemes. The company states that most listeners of these AI streams are themselves AI, further blurring the line between human-created and AI-produced music.

It’s AI making music for AI to listen to. We’ve achieved the world’s most expensive echo chamber.

The Real Cost to Artists

This isn’t just an abstract business story. Nearly 25% of musicians’ revenues are at risk due to generative AI, a figure that could amount to as much as $4.6 billion by 2028, according to a recent economic study conducted by CISAC and PMP Strategy with participation from Deezer.

The royalty dilution problem is real. In recent months, artists and advocates have raised concerns about how a spike in AI content on streaming services can affect how much real musicians get paid. That’s because Spotify, Apple Music and several other companies rely on a pro rata model: if an artist’s catalog accounts for a certain percentage of total streams on the platform, that’s the percentage of total royalty payouts they receive.

Even when AI music gets demonetized on platforms like Deezer, the sheer volume of it creates friction in the system. It clogs discovery algorithms. It makes it harder for human artists to surface. And on platforms without Deezer’s detection tools? It’s the Wild West.

Speaking of which — Deezer started tagging AI tracks at the platform level in June 2025, becoming the first streaming platform to do so. Over the course of 2025, Deezer tagged more than 13.4 million AI tracks on its platform. They deserve credit for leading on transparency. Other major streaming services, such as Spotify and Apple Music, take different approaches to AI-generated music, often combining the use of filters to identify low-quality AI music with other transparency efforts left up to the distributors.

The Industry’s Double Game

What makes this moment so fascinating — and so frustrating for working musicians — is the double game being played at every level.

Suno’s success has come with pushback from the industry, and every major record label has sued the company for allegedly training its AI models on copyrighted music. Warner Music Group settled its lawsuit with Suno in November, striking a partnership through which Suno will develop “new, more advanced and licensed models.”

So Warner sued Suno, then settled, then licensed the technology, and WMG execs haven’t hesitated to underscore their revenue expectations for the Suno pact.

Meanwhile, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group separately announced licensing deals and settlements with then-Suno competitor Udio, and as part of UMG’s particular agreement with Udio, the rival AI platform would pivot its business away from creating new AI-generated songs from simple text prompts to being an AI-powered remixing platform for existing music.

The labels are simultaneously fighting AI and profiting from it. The artists caught in the middle are the ones losing sleep — and royalties.

What Suno Wants to Become

Shulman has been dropping hints about Suno’s vision beyond simple text-to-song generation. He said an artist like Taylor Swift could release an interactive version of an album with lyrics or samples fans could access with an extra fee, or release unfinished versions of songs fans can use AI to complete.

“I like to think of us as trying to make the next format for recorded music,” he said. “The format of the future will be interactive. It should be social, meaning you’re doing it with other people.”

That’s an ambitious pitch. But Luminate’s findings indicate that people are least comfortable with AI usage to create new music that mimics the sound or style of existing artists. Schomer says building audience trust in those new features could pose a real challenge.

Suno wants to build interactive fan experiences on top of artist catalogs. The fans, apparently, don’t want that.

Why This Matters for Music Video Creators

If you’re an independent artist trying to build a career, this landscape creates both a threat and a massive opportunity.

The threat is obvious: more noise, harder discovery, potential royalty dilution. But the opportunity? Authenticity is becoming the ultimate differentiator.

When 97% of people can’t distinguish AI music from human-made music in a blind test — a Deezer survey revealed that 97% of people couldn’t hear the differences between AI and human made music — your visual identity and storytelling become more important, not less.

This is exactly why music videos matter more than ever. In a sea of AI-generated audio slop, a compelling visual narrative is the thing that says “a real artist made this, and they have something to say.” Whether you’re working in hip-hop, pop, indie, or EDM, the artists who pair their music with distinctive visuals are the ones cutting through the noise.

The irony? AI itself is the best tool for creating those visuals quickly and affordably. Using AI for music videos is fundamentally different from using AI for the music itself. One replaces the artist; the other empowers them. A tool like OneMoreShot.ai lets you take your song — the one you actually wrote and recorded — and create stunning visuals for it in minutes, at a fraction of what a traditional shoot costs.

The Smart Artist’s Playbook for 2026

Here’s how to navigate this bizarre moment:

1. Use AI as Your Visual Studio, Not Your Songwriter

The data is clear: audiences are increasingly suspicious of AI-generated music. But AI-generated visuals for your human-made music? That’s a superpower. Check out our complete guide to AI music videos to see how artists across every genre are doing exactly this.

2. Invest in Visual Identity

When audio alone can’t prove authenticity, your visual brand becomes your signature. Whether it’s a lo-fi aesthetic, a country storytelling approach, or a K-pop visual spectacle, having a consistent visual language is what separates real artists from AI ghost accounts.

3. Lean Into What AI Can’t Replicate

Live performances. Personal stories. Behind-the-scenes footage. The human connection that makes fans fall in love with an artist. AI can generate 7 million songs a day, but it can’t generate a single authentic relationship with a fan.

4. Make Music Videos for Every Release

Seriously, every single one. Learning how to make AI music videos isn’t optional anymore — it’s table stakes. With tools that let you generate professional-looking videos in minutes, there’s no excuse to release a track without visuals.

Where This Is Heading

As music companies continue to resolve their lawsuits with AI companies like Suno and Udio and reach new licensing deals, those deals could have a significant impact on consumer sentiment. The next twelve months will determine whether AI music becomes a legitimized, licensed layer of the industry or whether the backlash forces a reckoning.

“There’s more and more concerns about jobs, and I think that Gen Z are probably among the biggest receivers of some of that messaging around contraction of job opportunities [and] entry level jobs,” Schomer says.

The generation that was supposed to embrace AI music the most is the one pushing back the hardest. That’s not a blip — that’s a signal.

Suno might be worth $5 billion to investors. But to the listeners who actually decide what succeeds? The verdict is still very much out.

The Bottom Line

We’re living through AI music’s most contradictory moment. The investment dollars are screaming “this is the future.” The consumer data is whispering “we don’t actually want this.” And artists are caught in the middle, trying to figure out which tools help them and which ones threaten to replace them.

Here’s our take: use AI where it amplifies your creativity and skip it where it replaces your artistry. For music videos, AI is an absolute game-changer — it democratizes visual storytelling in the same way affordable recording software democratized music production two decades ago. For the music itself? That’s still your job, and your audience wants it to stay that way.

Ready to create a music video that proves there’s a real artist behind the audio? Try OneMoreShot.ai and turn your song into a visual story in minutes — no film crew, no six-figure budget, no shame required.