The recently-launched SunoCharts website carries the tagline ‘the analytics layer for AI music’. The twist is that none of the trending tracks or artists included in those analytics are real.
That’s not us making a snarky jab at those creators. They’re literally not real, as the site’s creator Kieron Donoghue explains to Music Ally.
“SunoCharts is a site built on dummy data that shows what could be possible if Suno released an API. It does not use any live data, it’s purely a demo,” he says.
Donoghue has form when it comes to building interesting things sparked by new music services. In 2009 he launched ShareMyPlaylists, a site for Spotify users to, yes, share their playlists with other people.
“When Spotify launched in the UK in 2008, there were no editorial playlists on the platform at all. No Browse section, no curated collections. All you had was a search box and some genre tags,” he says.
ShareMyPlaylists “filled a gap that Spotify hadn’t addressed yet, and I see the exact same gap with Suno right now. Suno has an incredible creation platform but the discovery and analytics layer is almost non-existent.”
“There’s a basic explore page and that’s it. There are no real tools to understand what’s happening on the platform, what genres are emerging, what prompts are working and who the top creators are,” continues Donoghue.
“SunoCharts is designed to fill that gap. Just like ShareMyPlaylists gave Spotify users something Spotify didn’t offer yet, SunoCharts gives Suno’s community an analytics and discovery layer the platform hasn’t built.”
The challenge, right now, is that Suno doesn’t have a public API to provide real data for SunoCharts to analyse – hence the dummy data that Donoghue is using to show off the concept.
Will Suno launch an API? “I think it’s a question of when, not if. Every major music platform has followed the same path,” he says.
“Spotify didn’t have a public API at first either. When they opened it up, it created an entire ecosystem of tools, apps, and businesses around their platform. I built one of them. That ecosystem made Spotify stickier and more valuable over time.”
Suno has been used by more than 100 million people, and Donoghue thinks it has reached the scale where enabling developers to build on top of it could only increase its strength.
Analytics tools, prompt libraries, DAW integrations, creator tools. There’s a whole layer of value that Suno doesn’t need to build themselves if they let others do it,” he says.
“There’s also an AI music race happening right now. Suno, Udio, and others are all competing for creators and users. Releasing an API is a smart way to get the developer community building cool tools and apps on your platform, which drives more users to you. That’s a real competitive advantage when you’re in a land grab.”
He admits there may be reasons why Suno will hold back, including the major-label lawsuits that it has not yet managed to settle.
“Third parties might use Suno’s data or capabilities in ways that create legal or brand risk, especially with the ongoing copyright litigation from the major labels,” says Donoghue. “And once you open an API, you can’t easily close it without it leaving a really bad taste in the ecosystem.”
Suno continues to divide opinions within the music industry, but Donoghue has been following its evolution closely, and has a lot to say about how that might continue.
“I think the launch of Suno’s new MILO-1080 tool in the last few days is a really telling signal of where this is heading,” he says.
You may have missed that launch. Music Ally did too. MILO-1080 is part of the experimental Suno Labs side of the company, but it’s publicly accessible here.
“MILO-1080 is a step sequencer. That’s not a tool for casual users who just want to type a prompt and get a song. That’s a tool for people who know what a step sequencer is, people with some music production experience,” says Donoghue.
“Suno is clearly saying: we’re not just for beginners anymore. We want producers, beatmakers, and musicians in here too. And when you look at their trajectory, it makes sense.”
“They started with simple text-to-music generation. Then they launched Suno Studio, which is essentially a browser-based DAW with AI built in. They acquired WavTool. Now they’re releasing production tools like MILO-1080. Each step brings them closer to being a full creative platform for musicians at every level.”
Donoghue compares this to the path that Spotify took, starting as a listening platform before building tools for artists.
“Suno is doing the same thing but from the creation side. They’re building an ecosystem, not just a platform,” he says. His new project has given him ample excuse to dive in to that ecosystem to understand what’s happening on there, too.
“When I was building SunoCharts and looking at the trending data, what jumped out was how weird and specific the genres are getting,” he says.
“You’ve got people creating ‘glitch witch electro house’ and ‘ragtime-techno fusion.’ These are genres that are being invented in real-time by people experimenting with prompts and styles that would be almost impossible to produce traditionally.”
Donoghue offers some historical parallels to back this up, pointing out that historically, new genres often emerged when musicians and producers found new ways to use existing tools.
“Dub reggae came from studio engineers experimenting with delay and reverb. Drum and bass came from producers chopping up breakbeats. Now anyone can say ‘what happens if I combine Japanese city pop with math rock and glitchy electronics?’ and hear the result in 60 seconds,” he says.
“The speed of experimentation is completely different. Whether the artists who emerge from this will be taken seriously by the traditional industry is a different question. But the creativity is real.”
“And with 100 million people experimenting on the platform, the odds of something genuinely new breaking through are pretty high.”
Donoghue cites mainstream crossovers like Breaking Rust and The Velvet Sundown as the first signs of this potential dynamic. Although if you ask Music Ally, both could more-than benefit from a touch of glitch witch ragtime math-rock.
Breakout Suno acts are currently a hot topic within the music industry, with major labels – Universal Music Group in particular – pushing hard to turn the AI-music platforms into ‘walled gardens’ that sit apart from the established music-streaming services.
Again, Donoghue looks to the past when making his predictions for how this argument will play out in the future, suggesting that “we’ve been here before – multiple times”.
“UMG’s position makes total sense from their perspective. If AI-generated music stays contained in its own ecosystem, it doesn’t compete with their catalogue on Spotify, Apple Music, or anywhere else. It protects their market share,” he says.
“But history tells us walled gardens don’t survive when consumers want something different.”
The move from protected formats to DRM-free downloads in the early digital-music era is the example he points to. Even Apple ultimately moved to a DRM-free model, before streaming swept that market (nearly) away.
“Consumers wanted freedom to use their music how they wanted. The market rewarded the open approach every single time. I think the same thing will happen here,” suggests Donoghue.
“You can’t tell 100 million people ‘this music you made is only allowed to exist in this one place.’ People will want to share their creations on Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, everywhere. And platforms will eventually accommodate that because the demand is there,” he adds.
“Suno already offers commercial rights on paid plans. The walls are already coming down.”
Rival Udio has agreed to build those walls as part of its licensing deals with UMG and other majors, but at the time of writing – and especially at the time its chief music officer Paul Sinclair was writing his ‘open studios’ LinkedIn riposte in February – Suno is pushing back.
SunoCharts could be a fascinating resource either way: tracking an ecosystem that sits completely apart from the established music-streaming economy, or constantly pinpointing the needles in its haystack that are primed to find mainstream audiences.
All it needs is the non-dummy data. All eyes on Suno now: it may not want to build any walls around its garden, but is it more open to building an API for external developers?
Source link