Loading summary
Grainger Advertiser
When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grange Grainger for the ones who get it done.
If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
Jaden
Today we're talking about Suno AI. They are a huge AI music generation company. Jaden is a huge fan, a huge user of SUNO AI. They recently reached 300 million in annual recurring revenue, which is a pretty insane number. So today we're going to talk about this company and how you can actually make money with their software. So, Jane Wayne, tell them about our school community first.
Jamie
Okay, so every single week Jamie and I record a bonus piece of content that we go and we post on the school community. And this week Jamie recorded an entire tutorial on how he got a local business to rank on the first page of Google from it was on the third before by redoing their site with Lovable and his process and him being able to do that and how he's spinning this into an entire business with where he'll approach small businesses and redo their websites and get them to rank high and rank inside of Google Gemini, Google's snippet at the top and inside of ChatGPT inside of Google's search snippet at the top, the AI search snippet. So he got it to rank on all three of those places. It is super fascinating as a case study if you want to check it out, join the school community. We drop videos like that every single week. It's $19 a month. You get incredible value as far as growing and scaling your business and how to start businesses, how to, you know, do it all with AI. So go check it out. The link is in the description to the AI Hustle school community. Okay, this is also a story that I am so thrilled about the Suno one. And by the way, I just, I think it's so funny every time I hear, like, anyone talking about AI music generation, like professionals or like, like in, in, like in podcasts where they're talking about, like, the future of AI, blah, blah. No one ever mentioned Suno for some reason. Everyone talks, talks about Udo or, or like there's like some other startups and Suno, I swear, is like the number one. They have a daw, which is like a digital audio work workplace, which is Suno Studio. That's, like, incredible. It does all this amazing stuff. Like, you basically can like, highlight different stems and be like, just generate the guitar for this song. Just generate the drums at this part of the song. Anyways, Suno's amazing. I don't know why no one ever talks about them. Evidently, users love them because they have just reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue, which is, I mean, it's a little bit below $30 million in monthly recurring revenue. But they have 2 million paid subscribers, and I've been a paid subscriber for a million years of theirs. It's. Yeah, it's just so good, you know, like. And like, no one gets close to it. It's so good. Sometimes I pay for different services, even things from Google. Like, sometimes the Google VO model isn't, like, perfect at making videos, or sometimes Nano Banana. I'm just never been thrilled with Nano Banana, even their latest update, if I'm being honest, for image generation. So, like, there's all these different models for different things. Sometimes they're hit or miss. Suno is just a hit, and it's been a hit for a long time with music, so I'll stop shilling them and saying how incredible they are. Jamie, tell us what you think is interesting about this story. I should really get a sponsorship from Suno, but honestly. So, Jamie, tell me what's interesting about the story, and then I want to show everybody a case study of how much money I'm currently making from an album I made on Suno.
Jaden
Yeah, so SUNO has been in the news for some in the past for some negative, you know, press, because there was lawsuits against them about, like, where they're training their data from. They had a Warner Music Group lawsuit that they ended up settling. But realistically, Suno is, you know, not doing things much differently than other AI music generators. Except this one, I think, is geared more towards musicians. And you can correct me if I'm wrong, Jaden, but like you had mentioned, they have. It's not just like, okay, generate me this song for this, like a little jingle for my advertisement. It's like, no, you can do fully produced music. You can generate, you know, just individual tracks for your music. You know, if you. If you're a good singer and you have a really beautiful song you've written, but you don't have, you know, a violin player to play along and accompany you, you can actually have Suno just generate that to put on top of your song. So it's. I think it's really a unique. They have a unique value proposition specifically for musicians and small artists. And so I don't think. I think what's. What's cool about Suno is they don't seem to be just, you know, ripping off music. Essentially, they're. They're creating a tool that's actually useful for humans. And I really like them. But what are your thoughts, Jaden?
Jamie
Okay, so I have actually been making music posting on Spotify for years, since I was in college. I'm gonna actually share one case in particular of an album I posted on Spotify that was AI generated. I made this with Suno. In the last week, I've had 18,000 streams on this one album. And I'll give you guys the full spoiler alert. So if you go over on our school community, I have like a whole segment on. On how I. I do this. I talk a lot about AI music and this whole like, thing. But I'll give you the spoiler. In the last week, I had 18,000 streams on this one album. And the spoiler is the exact category and type of music it is relaxing music to play to your cat. So if your cat is stressed out, here's it's basically just relaxing piano music. But I label it a whole bunch of different ways. Whether that's like baby sleep music or spa music or study music. Like you do a whole bunch of things. Anyways, relaxing music for your cat is just really popular with people these days. 18,000 in the last week on this one particular album, 88,000 in the last month. And in the last year it's done 861,000 streams on Apple and Spotify. And also that's not even a full year because if you look at I'm sharing my screen, so if you click the YouTube video, you can see the charts and everything that I'm sharing. But the first month that I posted it was about 30,000 streams, then 68,000 and then 123,000 was the third month I posted it. And yeah, so I mean Basically, we haven't even done a full year. We still got three or four months to complete the full cycle of a year. So we'll figure out. I think I'll get over a million streams on this one album in a year. And it is AI generated relaxing piano music. And to be fair, it does sound good. I did a whole bunch of clever things which you could go see over my school community. I use source files and a whole bunch of interesting stuff. I have a friend that's a great musician that has helped make original, relaxing piano music that I license and use. And I've worked with Suno to do some cool stuff. So anyways, uh, all this to say you can actually, I mean, a million streams a year on this one album. And I have lots of albums, lots of artists, lots of stuff I'm doing with this, you can actually make money and, and successfully. Suno sounds great and, and can do a good job. So, yeah.
Jaden
What is, what is like a million streams? What does that translate to as far as income? Just for the people listening?
Jamie
Yeah. If you go join the Skool community, I have screenshots almost every month where I show how much money I'm making from this. So. So go check it out. I don't want to publicly say how much money, but I have three different, like, genres of artists that are all making lots of money.
Jaden
Go check it out. School community.
Jamie
Check it out. Go check it out. So I think overall this is an incredible tool. It is working good. You're right. They've had a bunch of drama in the past. And this particular story, like Suno just announced that they raised $250 million in funding three months ago. So from. And at the time, they. They had a $2.45 billion valuation for the company and they said they had revenue that was about $200 million. Annual revenue was $200 million. And three months later, after doing that round of funding, we're now at $300 million. So obviously this company is growing very quickly. I mean, that is a pretty insane growth rate to go from 200 to 300 million annual recurring revenue in three months. But they did have this $250 million to kind of help boost them forward. Now I do think part of that money that they've raised is going to have to be for settling lawsuits and other things like that. So it is a very. It's a very highly contentious industry and it's not like it, you know, they just waltz in and it's. It's a walk in the park, like they're basically battling to keep their business up. And you wonder why there's not tons and tons of competitors in this space. It's because it's pretty hard to do what they're doing. And if I'm being honest, the way they're doing it is probably to scrape all the music in the world, probably from a pirating site. And this is completely unobstantiated speculation. For entertainment purposes only. Don't sue me, Suno. But if we look at what Anthropic did, there is a theory that Suno could have just went to like a pirating website, downloaded every song in the world, trained their model like their model kicks butt on anybody else. How do they do that? I don't know. So the theory is probably they did that, they're going to get all the lawsuits, they'll get a slap on the wrist, they'll say, sorry, maybe they'll pay the artists, maybe they'll go and have to actually purchase the music. But by that point, their company has grown enough, it's been able to raise $250 million. They can pay the fines and they can also go and purchase all the music where they maybe couldn't have at the beginning. And now they're just the number one company because they were the first and fastest. And for anyone that thinks, oh my gosh, that's horrible, blah, blah, blah, that's literally what Anthropic did. They went and actually they got, they had to pay over a billion dollars in fines, but they pirated every single book in the world off of a pirate website before eventually going and physically approaching a physical copy of every book and paying back all the writers and stuff. And like that's how they had the best tone and the best, like, you know, creative writing capabilities on Claude for over a year they were kicking chat gps but. And no one could figure out why. Okay, well, we figured out why they had a much bigger data set that, you know, they, they were pretty sneaky on how they got. So in the world, I don't know how they do it. They have commercial licensing you get when you create music here, so you're not going to get sued, you're not liable for anything. They, they take full liability. They're dealing with all the lawsuits from Warren Music. Personally, I don't really care what they do as long as I can make amazing music and it's a great creative tool and in it is. And the last thing I'll say on this all is like, I have friends that are professional. I'm sure lots of people are very angry about my like opinion on that. And I'm sorry, that's just my opinion on it. I could be wrong, but I just am happy with a shiny object tool that I can use. Okay, so I have a friend that is a music producer. He makes ad music for Apple, Pepsi, Coca Cola, Chase bank, like a lot of these companies. He works at a big, at a big company that does this and he used to do everything from scratch. I mean he's a wizard. You watch him on, you watch him on like some of these, like Logic, for example. And his fingers are just like moving and clicking and dragging and like it's insane to watch him work. Recently I've been talking to him a lot about Suno and he's, he's said he's 10x, how fast he can do everything, he'll come up with concepts and he gets Suno to just like create the vocals for it. He doesn't have to go out and hire like a singer to do it. He doesn't have to go hire a cello player. So anyways he's able to do way more. His stuff sounds amazing. So professionals are really getting into this. It's not just like novices like myself. There's professionals who do this as their career and they're becoming quite successful Suno as well. So no shocker, they hit $300 million in annual recurring revenue.
Jaden
Yeah, I mean, it's cool. I love these small, smaller, I would say AI companies who have a specific purpose they're creating their product for, you know, and I think there's still lots of room for startups like this out there. You know, everyone thinks talks about like the AI bubble and there's these big, you got anthropic, you have OpenAI, you have Gemini. But you know, if you can create a tool that is useful to a specific subset of people, there's still a lot of money out there, a lot of opportunity and I think this company is a great example of that. So it'll be cool to see where they go as a company and also what other spinoffs come from it. So thanks for listening guys and we'll see you next time.
Grainger Advertiser
If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
Did you know you can save up to 70% on the best brands just by shopping at from rebel.com we're talking about strollers, car seats, high chairs, espresso machines, cookware. Everything you need for way less. Here's how it works. Every single day, rebbl drops thousands of new products on the site for up to 70% off. It is a constant stream of endless deals from top brands like UPPAbaby, Nuna, Baby Bjorn, Breville, Nespresso, KitchenAid, Le Creuset and more. But you have to act fast because every deal is one of a kind. So if you see something you love, make sure you add to cart fast. So stop paying full price when you don't have to. Whether it's baby gear, kitchen upgrades or a treasure for your home you didn't know you needed, Rebel has it for way less. Up to 70% less. Shop from rebel.com and save big.
Date: March 11, 2026
Hosts: Jaeden Schafer & Jamie McCauley
This episode dives into the rapid rise of Suno AI, an AI-powered music generation company that has just hit an astonishing $300 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Jaeden and Jamie break down what makes Suno AI so successful, discuss its impact on musicians and the broader AI industry, and share firsthand entrepreneurial insights into monetizing AI-generated music. The conversation covers Suno’s unique tools for musicians, the controversy around its data sourcing, use cases for side-hustlers, and real revenue numbers from AI-generated albums.
"They have a DAW—Suno Studio—that’s incredible. You basically can highlight different stems and be like, just generate the guitar for this song, just generate the drums at this part."
—Jaeden (02:12)
"What's cool about Suno is they don't seem to be just, you know, ripping off music...They're creating a tool that's actually useful for humans."
—Jamie (04:50)
"That is a pretty insane growth rate to go from 200 to 300 million annual recurring revenue in three months."
—Jamie (08:39)
"In the last year it's done 861,000 streams on Apple and Spotify...I think I'll get over a million streams on this one album in a year. And it is AI generated relaxing piano music."
—Jamie (06:44)
"Personally, I don't really care what they do as long as I can make amazing music and it's a great creative tool...Their model kicks butt on anybody else. How do they do that? I don't know."
—Jamie (09:55)
"I've been talking to him a lot about Suno and he's said he's 10x'd how fast he can do everything...He doesn't have to go out and hire like a singer to do it. He doesn't have to go hire a cello player."
—Jamie (11:16)
"I love these smaller, I would say AI companies who have a specific purpose they're creating their product for...if you can create a tool that is useful to a specific subset of people, there's still a lot of money out there, a lot of opportunity and I think this company is a great example of that."
—Jaeden (12:15)
The episode paints a vivid picture of Suno AI as an under-the-radar juggernaut in AI music generation, with a rapidly growing user base and tremendous revenue. The hosts’ enthusiasm is contagious and practical; Jamie’s real-world streaming project exemplifies how entrepreneurs can tap AI for passive income. Despite ongoing legal drama in the industry, Suno’s user licensing and appeal to both amateurs and professionals underscore AI’s disruptive potential in creative industries. The episode closes with a hopeful nod to niche, purpose-driven AI startups on the rise, using Suno as the prime example.