AI music is booming, and the player piano saw it coming
April 17, 2026
5 min read
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AI music is booming, and the player piano saw it coming
As AI songs get harder to tell apart from human-made music, an older technology offers a revealing preview of the fight over artistry, labor and pay
By Steven Melendez edited by Eric Sullivan
Inside an early 20th-century player piano. By translating punched holes on paper rolls into automated performances, the instrument acted as an analog predecessor to the digital code powering modern AI.
Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Recent research suggests listeners often struggle to distinguish music made by artificial intelligence from human-made songs—a sign that the technology has moved past novelty and into serious business.
In late February Suno, an AI music company based in Cambridge, Mass., announced it had reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue and two million paying subscribers, even as artists and record labels have continued to challenge how the technology was built and what it might replace.
Suno generates songs from written prompts, and it increasingly allows users to shape the results with lyrics, uploaded audio and voice samples. Paying subscribers get more control. Since last September Suno Studio, the company’s premium offering, has allowed users to manually edit its generated tracks. In March the company rolled out Voices, which lets subscribers generate songs using AI versions of their own voices.
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Suno says more than 100 million people have accessed at least its free version. In a November 2025 post on the company’s blog, its CEO Mikey Shulman wrote that many were doing so “for the first time in their lives.” Existing musicians, from students to professionals, also use Suno to test ideas quickly, hear melodies in different styles and generate musical fragments for use in larger works.
“Our tools are designed to expand what people can create—to amplify the instinct, taste and feeling that only a person brings to music,” the company said in a statement.
For some musicians, the attraction is flexibility. Los Angeles musician and producer Yannick “Thurz” Koffi and collaborators recently used Suno to generate snippets in the styles of different eras and then used that material in place of the samples of existing songs often used in hip-hop. “We’re able to just use different elements from these generations and then throw them into our new compositions,” he says, “and make a bed for artists to jump in and create new ideas.”
That promise comes with a legal fight at the center of the industry. Artists and record labels say Suno was trained on copyrighted recordings without permission or compensation. In court, the company acknowledged that building its system required showing the model “tens of millions of recordings” but argued that such training is protected as fair use.
Similar legal challenges abound. Warner Music Group settled with Suno last November. Rival company Udio reached deals with Warner and Universal Music Group. But Suno remains in conflict with Universal and Sony, and Google’s Lyria 3 is now facing its own lawsuit from indie musicians. Ron Gubitz, executive director of the Music Artists Coalition, which counts Don Henley and Meghan Trainor among its board members, says musicians want to know how their work is being used, to be able to withhold consent and to be fairly paid. “We’re not anti-AI,” he says. “We just want to make sure that this is done fairly.”
Critics also worry that AI-generated songs will compete with human-made music for listeners’ finite attention—and the limited pot of royalties paid to artists by music streaming services. Suno’s own marketing material for its Suno Studio feature promotes the ability to generate instrument tracks that match an existing composition’s style, key and tempo, eliminating “the need to hire session musicians for missing parts.”
More than a century ago the rise of the player piano prompted strikingly similar debates about automation, artistry and fair compensation. Of all the technologies that have reshaped music, it is the closest historical parallel to AI: it used punched holes on rolled sheets of paper to reproduce music in the home without a pianist at the keys. In early models the operator pedaled a treadle that pushed air through the perforations, triggering the notes.
Like today’s text-to-song systems, the player piano promised polished musical output for people with little or no training. “People think of digital as this new th