loading . . . SUNO Is Fun But Professional Musicians Shouldn't Lose Any Sleep If you search YouTube or Reddit, you’ll find videos and threads with titles like “Suno Made Me A Hit Song.” Really? That’s quite a claim for something knocked out by typing a few words into a text box.
Curiosity got the better of me, so I gave it a try. After a couple of hours, my conclusion was more straightforward: Suno is fun in the way a meme generator is fun. You press a button, and it spits something out. You’re amazed at how cool the music sounds, you laugh, and then you move on.
The tracks I got back ticked the boxes: verse, chorus, middle eight, the lot. They were polished enough to pass as something you might hear on hold music or a supermarket playlist. But listening properly was like biting into a glossy apple and finding it tastes of nothing. Everything was drenched in cliché. The lyrics were fridge magnet poetry dressed up as messy, real-life experiences; the chord progressions so predictable that I could sing the next line before it arrived, the choruses rousing in the way “Sweet Caroline” does after three pints. Would I put my name to it? Not a chance.
Additionally, when I asked it to create songs from several different genres, they all seemed to have a modern country feel to the vocals, even after instructing it to make them British.
When I told my wife, she laughed and said they use Suno at work to create songs for colleagues who are leaving to have babies or celebrating birthdays. And of course they do. It’s perfect for that. A bit of personalised novelty, mildly embarrassing, instantly forgettable. Suno isn’t the new Lennon and McCartney. It’s the “Happy Birthday” banner from Tesco, only with a backing track.
Naturally, I wondered if I could coax it into producing something with more character. I asked for a 70s folk song about empathy. What I got sounded less like Joni Mitchell and more like one of the endless beige tracks on American country radio. It had all the insight of a Hallmark card and none of the charm. Then, because I couldn’t resist, I asked for a Queen song based on the English flag. The result wasn’t Queen. It wasn’t even a tribute act. It was every rock cliché rolled into one: predictable power chords, predictable chorus, and a few half-hearted “yeahs” for good measure. Brian May can sleep soundly. These little experiments confirmed it: Suno can create songs that sound like songs, but the moment you ask for originality and real human experience, it fails.
The Craft AI Can’t Fake
And this is the heart of it. Professional songwriters know that a song isn’t just chords and rhymes. If it were, we’d all have been millionaires years ago. A good song comes from lived experience, from turning something personal into something universal.
AI doesn’t live. It doesn’t get dumped. It doesn’t sit up all night writing lyrics on a beer mat. It doesn’t know what it’s like to play a song to someone who matters. It just regurgitates patterns, which is why it sounds like everything and nothing at the same time.
The closest comparison is Microsoft clip art. In the 90s, people stuffed PowerPoint slides with cheerful cartoons of men shaking hands or light bulbs hovering over heads. Clip art was everywhere, but no designer worried about being replaced by it. Suno is clip art for music. It falls into the same category as those apps that turn your selfie into a Picasso painting. Amusing for five minutes, but nobody is hanging it in a gallery.
Where Suno Actually Fits
Some people are already screaming that AI is coming for musicians’ jobs. And yes, the technology will improve. The songs will become slicker, the clichés slightly less obvious, the joins harder to spot. But that still doesn’t account for what music is actually for.
A song isn’t judged by how neatly the chords line up, the use of sounds that fit into a chart listing, or the mastering sound of nearly every song out there. It’s judged by whether it says something, whether it connects. That’s the bit machines can’t do, because they don’t have anything to draw on. No heartbreak, no joy, no grief, no late-night scribbles that feel like they matter to someone in particular. Suno will get better at simulation, but it will still be simulation. Suno doesn’t bleed.
Which is why its natural home is in the gaps nobody cares about: the office farewell party, the shop that wants background noise without paying PRS, the birthday video that needs a throwaway jingle. That’s its league. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But let’s not confuse it with real songwriting.
Some who own a shop or a restaurant might use Suno to avoid paying royalties. It would pump out royalty-free wallpaper music, and customers wouldn’t care, because background music is meant to be ignorable anyway. It reminds me of every spa massage I’ve ever had. They play “relaxing” music, and I lie there thinking: I could write this in an hour, tops! That’s Suno’s natural habitat: sonic vanilla. Fine for wallpaper and elevators, hopeless when you need flavour and substance.
History, Limits And The Future
We’ve been here before. The synthesiser was meant to kill orchestras. Drum machines were meant to make drummers obsolete. Samplers were meant to end originality once and for all. And yet here we are, with orchestras, drummers and more originality than most people can cope with. Each technology found its place, became another tool, and often pushed music forward.
AI might eventually do the same. Perhaps it will help you brainstorm ideas or spark a chord progression when you’re stuck. However, it won’t replace songwriting or songwriters.
AI is clever in the way a crossword-solving computer is clever: good at patterns, hopeless at meaning. It can predict what “should” come next, but it doesn’t know why. It doesn’t understand why a lyric about a coffee cup left on the table can make someone cry. It doesn’t know why a key change at the right moment makes a crowd scream. It doesn’t get goosebumps. Until it can, it’s not competition.
Furthermore, because it relies on LLM and datasets, it can never be first. In the same way, a synth or snare sound suddenly appears on every track, or a genre is suddenly the next big thing, that’s because someone got their first. AI can’t ever get there first.
So professional songwriters can relax. Suno is genuinely brilliant; it has its place, and that place is birthday songs, novelty ditties, spa playlists and someone wanting to try out ideas. It’s fun, but it’s not art. It’s the meme generator of music. Sleep well. Your craft is safe. http://dlvr.it/TNG3WG
