Welcome to Stems, a weekly newsletter on music, media, and tech written by Nathan Brackett, former editor at Rolling Stone and content exec at Amazon Music. Subscribe here for free to get every new issue in your inbox every Friday.
High Noon at the Suno Corral
Universal Music and the AI company are fighting over walled gardens and future royalties. But will Suno be held accountable for its past?
If you’ve ever seen the original Westworld, you’ll remember that this scene doesn’t go well for the non-robots.
This is the moment Suno raised all that venture capital for: The AI music company has been flooding Meta and TikTok with ads (are you getting buried with them? I am); spending millions on Google search placements; funding Grammy week writing camps; and adding marketing and industry-relations headcount.
It comes after a strong holiday season in which Suno’s web traffic grew by tens of millions (see chart below) and they announced a deal with Warner Music that didn’t tie their hands – even as their main rival, Udio, has seen its traffic tank after signing a deal with Universal Music in September that prevented users from downloading their AI song creations.
Add to that a public war of words between UMG and Suno over whether AI-generated tracks should live behind a "walled garden” or in "Open Studios." UMG and Suno have their next appointment in court in March, which might lead some to conclude that this will be a high-noon legal showdown with the world's largest record label to determine the fate of AI music. But there are plenty of scenarios where this settlement could greatly help Suno, moderately help UMG, and leave lots of artists and songwriters in the lurch.
The first question mark is whether Suno will be let off the hook for their original sin: scraping enormous swaths of the world's recorded music catalog, without permission from, or any payment to, artists and songwriters. That wholesale hoovering is the foundation of Suno’s business to this day. From what we can see, Warner Music has made peace with that, in exchange for the opportunity to make money off future AI features with WMG artists. Meaning that at some future date, Ed Sheeran fans might be able to make songs using Suno’s Ed Sheeran Mode. UMG has talked tougher, saying that they won’t allow Suno to “use artists' content and brands to create derivatives where you're going to compete with the artist on other platforms.” But at the end of the day, we don’t know what their goal is — to lock down all downloads off of Suno, like they did with Udio? Or do they just want to prevent Billie Eilish fans from putting ‘Billie Eilish Mode’ songs on Spotify, and are okay with everything else?
The Stems position is that you have to figure out a way to have Suno pay artists for the mass ingestion of their work, in a way that feels transparent and equitable. The music that Suno's model was trained on is the product of millions of hours in studios and rehearsal spaces, and countless years of musicians learning their craft. That music is the foundation of two very prosperous years and a $2.45 billion valuation for Suno. The labels convincingly demonstrated this in their original filing, which showed how Suno prompts can produce absurdly close versions of Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" and Jason Derulo's producer tag. Suno has been able to retrain their model to eliminate some of these obvious infringements, but not even the company is claiming that their model is now only trained on licensed music.
Just as concerning: Suno is talking to the majors because they have the clout and resources to sue. But close to 50% of the music industry — and presumably a similar share of the music these models were trained on — is the work of independent labels and artists. Suno could walk out of a UMG settlement with a partially licensed model and claim that they are fully compliant. And worryingly, the majors haven't released any of the financial terms of their settlements so far — as we saw with the original Spotify licensing deals, there is a very real possibility that the majors end up with equity or other favorable terms in any settlement, and artists end up with much less.
It all starts with songwriting attribution in AI models, a problem that can make your head hurt, but which lots of companies are working on. Getting all the relevant parties to agree to a standard will be hard, but believe it or not the music industry has solved similarly brain-bending problems—figuring out how to get songwriters paid when their songs were on player pianos or the radio in the early 20th century.
Without that kind of accountability, the alternative is what one observer has called "theft with a business plan," and, for Suno, "partial settlements with those who had the power to demand them." Which is not exactly the high noon the rest of us imagined.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this; email me at [email protected]
America Needs Bill Graham Presents
Catching up with a larger-than-life memoir
“Not even an audiobook version?”: Graham’s estate, run by his two sons, does not appear to be a hive of activity.
I finally read Bill Graham & Robert Greenfield’s Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out, the 1992 autobiography-slash-oral history of the legendary rock promoter, and can’t recommend it enough for anybody interested in the music industry or, heck, America. Graham revolutionized the concert industry in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, ending the era of the fly-by-night pop package tour and ultimately inventing the era of stadium and festival rock. He elevated the rock show into a listenable, theatrical experience with high-quality PA systems, light shows and decent backstages where artists were treated with dignity. (Paul Tollett and Goldenvoice are his most obvious inheritors in the concert world.)
But Bill Graham Presents is also the story of an incredible American immigrant life. Born in 1931 as Wolfgang Grajonca in Berlin, Graham was placed by his mother in a Berlin orphanage at age eight to protect him from the Nazis,
then sent to France; he would never see her again. From there, the book is all drive and improvisation, with anxiety never far below the surface: Graham makes thousands hosting crap games as a waiter at Catskills resorts; wins a Bronze Star and Purple Heart in Korea; almost gets court-martialed for refusing to go on a suicide mission; manages a mime troupe; discovers hippies and, finally, concert promotion. Then we are off to the races with a parade of behind-the-scenes stories – and Graham’s unvarnished opinions – about the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Grace Slick & the Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix and many more. He would die in a helicopter crash in 1991.
If you want to read Bill Graham Presents you’ll likely have to buy a used hard copy; it hasn’t been reprinted since 2004, and there is no Kindle or audiobook edition. Per co-author Greenfield (who I know slightly), a biopic that was in the works in the late 2010s was scuttled; reading between the lines, it sounds like Graham’s sons Alex and David were not interested.
Let’s hope we see a little more activity coming out of Graham’s estate to keep these stories alive. As Pete Townshend writes in the foreword to the 2004 edition, “Bill was one of the great mavericks who redefined what freedom really meant in the U.S.A. … This is a book that helps to define rock.”
Boy Howdy! It’s the World’s Finest Music-Themed Mini Crossword Puzzle
Flashback: Stems, June 1976
We dug deep into the Stems back-issue archives to find the perfect clues this week.
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Email: [email protected]
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