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.
It's Friday so it must be Stems! This week we wade back into the AI brouhaha with some notes on a big Suno feature in Billboard. Plus: You requested the ability to share individual stories, and the Stems IT team has answered! Every piece now has a share button at the bottom.
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There’s an Unasked Question in the Billboard Suno Cover Story
The music trade claimed that the AI company is building a model that is “only trained” on licensed music. But has anybody at Suno actually said that?
Do you trust the future of music with this guy? Suno’s Mikey Shulman
The Billboard cover story on Suno this week has some interesting moments from inside the ever-expanding AI music company: CEO Mikey Shulman talks about regretting some of his more combative statements to the press — notably saying that music-making without Suno isn't as fun as Fortnite. It also gives a glimpse into Suno's Grammy week activity and other efforts to court major artists and industry people, including a VIP list of unnamed top artists who get previews of new features.
One line in the middle of the piece raised eyebrows at Stems HQ, though. It illustrates some of the difficulties in writing and talking about AI music and keeping track of the fine print. Referring to Suno's deal last November with Warner Music Group, reporter Kristin Robinson writes:
As part of the deal, Suno agreed to retire its current model and launch a new one, sometime this year, that is only trained on licensed copyrights in which the owners opt-in to be part of its data set.
This would be a significant turning of the page if it were true. Robinson repeats the claim in the intro to her Grammy week podcast interview with Shulman.
The problem is, neither WMG and Suno have actually said that Suno’s next model will be based on 100% licensed music. Here's what they announced back in November:
In 2026, Suno will make several changes to the platform, including launching new, more advanced and licensed models. When the new models launch in 2026, the current models will be deprecated.
If you read closely, the only thing Suno is saying is that future models will be more “licensed" than their existing model — which is a genuinely low bar, given that their existing model wasn't trained on any licensed music at all. And while the old models getting “deprecated” sounds a bit impressive, it’s actually fairly meaningless in this context — it just means that the existing model will be replaced by a new version.
The question is, what if the new version is actually a lot like the old one under the hood? “More licensed" could mean licensing a bunch of Ed Sheeran songs and building some premium remix features on top of them, while the underlying model — trained on tens of millions of tracks ripped from YouTube and other sources — remains essentially unchanged.
Even if Suno scrupulously removes all unlicensed WMG content from its underlying model (which it hasn't explicitly committed to) that could leave tens of millions of unlicensed songs as the foundation of its service. Warner controls roughly 15–20% of the global recorded-music market. But YouTube skews heavily toward independent artists. That means WMG recordings likely represent somewhere between 5% and 15% of what Suno trained on. Let’s call it 10% — or, in visual terms:.
If you want to understand what Suno actually thinks it's building, read the blog post they published for nervous Suno customers after the WMG announcement. The goal, as they framed it, was "preserving the magic" of the existing product while layering new features on top. Which doesn’t sound like a company that is rebuilding its core business from scratch.
Kiki Cavazos’s True West
New single “Hawthorne & Heartache” might take you out
“Hawthorne & Heartache” is gorgeous country folk that might break your heart in two with a splitting maul, the one a Kiki Cavazos character has sticking out of the woodpile in their front yard in the middle of some barren Mountain-Time plain. Cavazos writes like she has done some living and maybe fought off some bad habits; you can hear shades of Townes Van Zandt, Blaze Foley, Gillian Welch and even a little Adrienne Lenker (which makes sense – Cavazos opened for Big Thief last year). The plainspoken lyrics don’t mess around – “Wrote you a letter and believed like a child / you’d feel every word and be back by my side” – but it’s her rich, Western voice that does the real work. Her upcoming album, Goodbye Blues, produced by Sam Doores of the Deslondes, is sounding like a big leap forward; it’s out at the end of April on Jalopy Records.
The World’s Finest Music-Themed Mini Crossword Keeps Raising the Stakes
The exclusive puzzle in the offer below first ran in Stems’ 1994 Power Players special issue
Don’t miss the special crossword offer below, here for one more week!
To learn more about Stems, visit the About page. To learn more about my consulting practice, visit here.
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: /in/nbrackett
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