When Suno lost its copyright case in Germany against GEMA, the company responded with a line that sounds noble on the surface: “We built Suno around a core belief: to empower everyone to experience the joy of making music.” That statement might be easier to take seriously if Suno’s own CEO hadn’t repeatedly suggested that people don’t enjoy making music in the first place.
That tension is not a small PR inconsistency. It goes to the heart of how Suno talks about music, musicians, and the creative process: as though music-making is a burden to be automated away, while the company’s public-facing rhetoric wraps itself in the language of empowerment, access, and joy.
The contradiction
Suno’s post-ruling framing is emotionally polished. “Empower everyone” and “the joy of making music” are the kinds of phrases that suggest inclusion, creativity, and artistic liberation. But Suno’s CEO, Mikey Shulman repeatedly undercut that message when he says things like “the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music” and that making music is often “not really enjoyable.”
Those two positions cannot comfortably coexist. If making music is genuinely a source of joy and self-expression, then why repeatedly describe it as an unpleasant process most people supposedly endure? And if the process is supposedly so dispiriting, why market a product in the language of creative fulfilment rather than convenience or automation?
What the case exposed
The German ruling matters is important as it categorically brought the underlying issue into view: Suno was found by the Munich Regional Court to have infringed GEMA-represented works (GEMA is a performing rights organisation in Germany, like the PRS in the UK, or BMI and ASCAP in the US), with the court ordering it to stop unauthorised reproduction of protected songs and to disclose revenues tied to the infringement. The judgment is not yet final, but the message is already clear: music rights do not vanish simply because a company wraps infringement in the vocabulary of innovation.
That makes Suno’s “empowerment” rhetoric especially awkward. A company cannot credibly claim it exists to celebrate music-making while simultaneously relying on disputed use of other people’s musical works to power its product. If the joy of making music is the mission, then consent, attribution, and compensation need to be part of that mission. Otherwise you’re simply punishing a large number of people who already make music, in favour of a new group of people who don’t make music (and Suno hopes will do so by using their tool).
The hypocrisy
The deeper hypocrisy is that Suno’s language positions human musicianship as inefficient, even unnecessary, while treating the output of human musicians as raw material. That is not empowerment in any meaningful artistic sense. It is extraction dressed up as democratisation.
And for anyone in music production or composition, the insult lands twice: first in the suggestion that real music-making is mostly joyless toil (which it really isn’t!), and then in the implication that the work of musicians can be harvested without proper permission so that someone else can sell “creativity” as a subscription feature.
Why this matters to musicians
This is why the backlash to Suno has been so intense. Musicians are not rejecting technology because they hate change; they are objecting to a worldview that talks about music as an inconvenience, then builds a business on the unlicensed labour of the very people it claims to be helping.
If Suno wants to argue that AI can assist creativity, it should start by respecting the creative community instead of narrating it out of existence. “Empower everyone to experience the joy of making music” is a powerful line. But only if the company is willing to treat actual music-makers as more than a data source.
