Why Suno Won't Produce the Next Charlie Parker

Or, the difference between creating content and creative culture

Third Hemisphere art by noted human Matteo Farinella

Welcome to The Third Hemisphere, where I try to make sense of how AI is reshaping work, thinking, and creativity, often by watching my own assumptions get upended.

It’s been a few weeks—I’ve been traveling and trapped on an onerous university committee that mercifully ended this week. In the meantime, a piece I adapted from my Third Hemisphere essay on AI and scientific thinking was published in Persuasion and will be reprinted in The Biologist, the magazine of the Royal Society of Biology. I’m happy scientists are increasingly having hard conversations about AI’s complicated role in our profession. Today’s piece is different: I’m a musician, and a tweet about AI-generated music set off a reaction I couldn’t quite explain. This essay is me trying to figure out why.

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A tweet crossed one of my feeds yesterday that really got a rise out of me, even more than the usual social media pablum:

This tweet is real, but has since been deleted, presumably because it undermines Suno’s fair use argument in court. Oops!

C.C. Gong isn’t just a random user of x dot com, she is a lead investor in Suno. When I read this, I felt something I don’t usually feel about AI, which was uncomplicated disgust. I questioned the reaction because I’m a musician and music-making is a big source of meaning in my life. I’m not, in general, an anti-AI person, and while uncomplicated feelings about AI sometimes reflect actual moral clarity, they often just mean I’m not thinking hard enough. Maybe I’m just being a music snob?

So I tried to think about it from Gong’s side. Is AI expanding “the surface area of human creativity”? Because that’s the kind of reasoning you hear all the time from Silicon Valley. Here’s Suno’s CEO in a recent press release: “Our mission at Suno is to democratize music creation and unlock the musical creativity within everyone.”

It’s an appealing pitch, with some truth to it. Browse the Suno subreddit and you’ll find a poet who uses the platform to set his PTSD recovery writing to music, a support worker who wants to help adults with disabilities turn their lyrics into songs, producers uploading old beats to hear them reimagined, users conjuring up soundtracks for home-made videos.¹ If Suno is giving people access to a form of creative expression they couldn’t reach before, what kind of snob objects to that? Isn’t this democratization?

But something about the pitch still nagged at me, and it starts with Gong’s own description of what Suno does for her: “When I’m in a specific mood, I don’t search for a song, I create it.” The word “create” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. And I don’t think she’s wrong, exactly. Suno probably does make people better creators in the way that word has come to be used—content creators, people who make things and put them into the world. Two million people are paying for Suno, and if even though most are probably just using it to manufacture party playlists, if even a fraction of users are feeling a spark of creativity they didn’t feel before, that’s real and I don’t want to dismiss it.

But I’d bet that when many people hear “democratize creativity,” they’re hearing a bigger promise—not just that more individuals will produce more content, but that creative culture will flourish. More people making music, and the music getting richer and stranger and better. Empowering individual content creators and a flourishing creative culture sound like they should go together, and in a better world maybe they would. But I keep worrying they won’t, because the conditions that produce the second thing are different from the conditions that produce the first, and in this world they may actually be at odds.

Where are all the baby Mozarts?

So what does a flourishing creative culture actually require? It could be tempting to conclude that new musical instruments and technologies spur cultural creativity. And to some extent that’s definitely true—the electric guitar, the synthesizer, the sampler, even the transition from harpsichord to pianoforte all opened up genuinely new musical territories. But a look at some of the most prolific and world-changing musical settings suggests other factors may be more important.

Take Vienna in the late 18th century. Vienna then was a city of roughly 200,000, about the size of present-day Akron, Ohio. But Vienna was organized around music in a way Akron is not. The Habsburg court had maintained the largest musical retinue in Europe—three successive emperors, from Leopold I through Charles VI, were themselves serious composers—and though the court’s musical establishment had contracted by the late 18th century, the culture of patronage it established still saturated the city. The aristocracy competed to sponsor private orchestras. Antonio Salieri, the imperial Kapellmeister, taught Beethoven, Schubert, and Czerny. Haydn and Mozart were chamber music partners. Beethoven studied with Haydn, who had spent decades in service to the Esterházy family, a noble house whose musical establishment rivaled those of major European capitals. Music societies, public concerts, and a growing publishing industry meant that composers could study and push against each other’s work in something close to real time. There is no version of giving everyone in Akron a Suno subscription that produces anything like the musical richness of Vienna, because Akron is not a city that has organized itself around the conditions for musical development at every level.

Or take Kansas City in the 1930s. Here there is no court, no conservatories, no aristocratic patronage. What it had, under the Pendergast machine’s wide-open policy on vice, was a nightclub district that never closed. As Mary Lou Williams remembered, “We didn’t have any closing hours in these spots. We could play all morning and half through the day if we wished to, and in fact we often did.” Count Basie’s orchestra was the anchor, but dozens of working bands filled the clubs along 18th and Vine. Musicians sat in with each other nightly. Charlie Parker learned advanced harmony from guitarist Efferge Ware, memorized Lester Young’s solos from phonograph records, and got publicly humiliated at a jam session at the Reno Club when drummer Jo Jones dropped a cymbal at his feet to cut him off. Parker spent the following years “woodshedding”—a jazz term for obsessive, solitary practice—between band gigs in the Ozarks and odd jobs in New York, where, playing the tune “Cherokee” in a practice session, he found he could use the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and, as one writer put it, “fell through a music warp.” The bebop revolution that followed—Parker, Gillespie, Monk, Kenny Clarke, and others pushing each other in after-hours clubs like Monroe’s Uptown House and Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem—was what happened when musicians who'd each done years of deep work in scenes like Kansas City found each other in the right room.

Clockwise from left: Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk at Open Door on West 3rd street in 1953 (source)

Vienna and Kansas City look nothing alike, but they’re both pictures of what the second kind of creativity—the cultural kind, the kind that changes what music can be—may actually require. Not access to a specific tool, but enabling conditions: mentors, a community of practitioners who can push each other, a tradition deep enough to apprentice yourself to, and enough time and space to do the actual work of getting good.

You can find versions of this story all over music. Ragtime coalesced in the saloons and cutting contests of St. Louis and Sedalia, where Scott Joplin, Tom Turpin, and a circle of pianists pushed each other to refine a mash-up of march and plantation dance music. Laurel Canyon in the late '60s was a hillside neighborhood where Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Byrds, and a dozen others lived in each other’s houses, wandered into each other’s sessions, and formed and dissolved bands in each other’s living rooms. Punk didn’t emerge because someone invented a cheap guitar; cheap guitars had existed for decades. It emerged because a specific community in a specific set of clubs developed a shared aesthetic vocabulary and a shared conviction that the existing one was bankrupt. In many if not most scenes of profound musical creativity, I’d argue, the cultural conditions were just or more important than any particular new instrument.

Erik Hoel, the neuroscientist and writer, made a version of this argument about scientific genius. The most depressing fact about humanity, he wrote, is that “during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age.” Hoel’s answer is the decline of what he calls “aristocratic tutoring”—the practice of pairing young people with dedicated, intellectually serious adult mentors for sustained one-on-one instruction. You can quibble with the importance of tutoring, but Hoel’s observation stands that genius is not just about access to information but probably heavily dependent on the conditions of education. I don’t know if music works exactly the same way—musical creativity might be a different beast from scientific genius—but I suspect something similar is at play: Musical creativity is probably less about access to musical technology (whether that’s the latest viola da gamba or Suno) and more about the conditions that allow creativity to flourish.

Consumption as the new creation

This is the part that worries me because the conditions for music-making have arguably never been worse. Sure, tools for creation and distribution are widespread and affordable. But decades of cuts have made music education a luxury good in public schools. The economics of being a young musician are brutal. Independent and small-capacity venues are closing. And the streaming ecosystem that Suno’s output enters is already structured in ways that actively undermine the conditions that develop musicians like Charlie Parker.

Liz Pelly, in her book Mood Machine, traces how Spotify reshaped not just the economics of music but the idea of what music is for—nudging listeners toward passive consumption, optimizing for mood regulation over active engagement. Music became content: something to fill silence, soundtrack a commute, help you sleep. And when the platform needed cheaper content to fill those playlists, it got it. Through its Perfect Fit Content program, exposed by Pelly in a Harper’s feature, the company partnered with production houses to create cheap stock music under fake artist names (”ghost artists”) and had its own playlist editors seed this music into popular playlists like “Cocktail Jazz” and “Ambient Chill,” displacing real musicians like Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins. The internal logic, as a former employee told Pelly, was simple: “If the metrics went up, then let’s just keep replacing more and more, because if the user doesn’t notice, then it’s fine.” Musicians had been sold the idea that streaming was a meritocracy, that the best would rise because listeners voted by listening. But the voting was rigged. The platform decided what people heard, then pointed to the stream counts as proof of what people wanted.

This is the system AI-generated music is now entering, and it is not entering as a democratic force. In 2025, AI-powered acts began hitting the Billboard charts: Breaking Rust debuted at No. 9 on the emerging artists chart and reached No. 1 on Country Digital Song Sales; a track called “I Run” by HAVEN., whose vocals were created by running a human recording through Suno to produce an AI-transformed voice that closely resembled singer Jorja Smith, racked up 13 million Spotify streams before being removed from the platform after takedown notices from Smith’s distributor and the RIAA; an AI persona named Xania Monet landed a multi-million-dollar record deal. Deezer has reported that nearly a third of new tracks uploaded daily to its platform are now AI-generated.

This ecosystem is where the two kinds of creativity start to compete. Gong says she “creates” a song when she’s in a specific mood. She might be right that something new is happening—that the line between making music and consuming it is blurring. But I think it’s blurring in a way that trivializes creation. What she calls creation looks to me like a new mode of consumption: the prompt as the ultimate playlist. Pelly writes that the idea of pop music, mood-enhancing background sounds, and independent art-making all living on the same platform under the same economic arrangements “is a recipe for everything being flattened out into one ceaseless chill-out stream.” Suno doesn’t just continue that flattening. It completes it.

From an article titled “Suno Is Fun But Professional Musicians Shouldn’t Lose Any Sleep.” I beg to differ.

I realize how elitist this can all sound, and I want to be honest about where I stand. I genuinely believe people should be empowered to create whatever they want, with accessible tools. That’s a real value and I hold it. But I also believe that creative culture—the kind that produced sonatas or ragtime or bebop or punk, that comes out of scenes and deep work and years of apprenticeship—is something worth protecting, and it requires conditions that no tool can substitute for. I don’t think it’s elitist to acknowledge that most people are not going to make music that moves other people in deep or lasting ways. There isn’t an inner Charlie Parker or Mozart inside all of us. The people who do that kind of work will always be somewhat rare, and that’s OK. But cultures can choose to value and support the conditions that maximize the number of people who get there, or they can put up obstacles.

In a better world, individual creation and creative culture would reinforce each other—more people making music would mean more people immersed in music, which would mean richer scenes, which would produce more extraordinary musicians. But that’s not the world Suno is entering. The democratization pitch works because it’s a bit of rhetorical legerdemain, treating individual content creation and creative culture as synonyms, as if what Gong does with a prompt and what Parker did in New York City are just different points on the same spectrum. I don’t think they are. And in the ecosystem that actually exists, I think a very real concern is that one is going to eat the other. And that, in the end, is why I feel disgust.

1. This is under the increasingly shaky assumption that these Reddit users aren’t Suno-affiliated bots.