In June 1999, a nineteen-year-old at Northeastern University built a piece of software in his dorm room. His name was Shawn Fanning. He called it Napster, after his childhood nickname for his hair. He wasn’t trying to destroy anything. His roommate complained about how hard it was to find music online. Fanning fixed the problem.
Within eighteen months, seventy million people were using it. Students were running their connections overnight, pulling the entire recorded history of popular music onto their hard drives. Every Beatles album. Every obscure B-side out of print for a decade. Not because they were thieves, particularly. Because they could.
The RIAA sued in December 1999. Metallica sued in April 2000, after tracing a leaked demo of “I Disappear” to Napster. It was being played on thirty radio stations before the band had finished recording it. Lars Ulrich hand-delivered a list of 335,435 individual users who had shared Metallica’s music. Printed out in full. Several dozen boxes of paper, wheeled up to Napster’s offices. The data was on the internet. He printed it.
Napster didn’t get banned from most universities for legal reasons. It got banned for infrastructure reasons. Indiana University: 61% of all external bandwidth consumed. Vanderbilt: 45% of outbound traffic. UC Santa Cruz estimated its residential network bill jumping from $65,000 to $97,000 in a single year from file-sharing load alone.
Before Napster, no single application had ever taken more than around 15% of university bandwidth. Within a year of its launch, university IT departments were billing students individually for excessive usage. The legal battle was the headline. The server room was the real crisis.
That July, Ulrich testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Just like a carpenter who crafts a table gets to decide if he wants to keep it, sell it or give it away,” he said. “Shouldn’t we have the same options?”
The answer, it turned out, was: not forever.
Three months after the Senate testimony, Shawn Fanning was invited to present an award at the MTV VMAs at Radio City Music Hall. Lars Ulrich was in the audience. Fanning walked out wearing a Metallica t-shirt, to the opening bars of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” When the host asked where he got the shirt, Fanning said, with the studied casualness of someone who had been rehearsing this moment: “A friend of mine shared it with me. I’m thinking of getting my own.”
The crowd cheered. A camera found Ulrich in his seat. He was pretending to be asleep.
That one exchange tells you everything about what was really happening. The crowd wasn’t making a judgment about copyright law. They were making a judgment about who was on the right side of history.
While Ulrich was being booed at the VMAs, Napster paid $1.8 million to sponsor a free nationwide summer tour headlined by Limp Bizkit. Fred Durst, the frontman, was also an A&R executive at Interscope, one of the labels suing Napster. He was vocally pro-Napster anyway. The shows were free. The band performed ground-level with only a metal cage between them and the crowd.
One side of the culture war had lawyers and Senate testimony. The other had free concerts. The PR outcome was not close.
While Ulrich was testifying before Congress, a group called Camp Chaos was making viral Flash animations mocking him. “Napster Bad” depicted Hetfield and Ulrich as knuckle-dragging cavemen screaming about money. It was shared millions of times via email chains and fan sites, YouTube was still five years away. A later one, “Metalligreed,” was commissioned by Mötley Crüe, who accused Metallica of only suing Napster to generate publicity for their summer tour, while plugging their own summer tour in the same cartoon.
I won’t insert them here due to the sensitive language but you can find them on Youtube if you search for CampChaos – Napster Bad!
The workaround for the ban Napster implemented on 335,435 Metallica fans? Change your username. That was it. Users were back within hours.
In August 2000, one month after Ulrich’s Senate testimony and weeks before the VMAs, research firm Jupiter Communications published a study that the labels buried immediately: Napster users were actually more likely to buy music than the average consumer. Heavy downloaders were heavy spenders. The labels weren’t fighting piracy. They were fighting a distribution model they hadn’t built.
The most spectacular evidence came from Radiohead. Kid A, their 2000 album, leaked on Napster three weeks before release. No singles. Almost no radio play. Radiohead had never charted in the US top 20. By release day, millions had already downloaded it free. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, beating Nelly and Green Day. Capitol’s own VP of marketing later admitted: “When it went up, did it create more excitement, more enthusiasm? Absolutely.” The labels buried that finding too.
The music industry fought for four more years without building anything. They put digital locks on CDs. They sued a twelve-year-old girl. They turned down every licensing proposal that came through the door. US recorded music revenues, which had stood at $14.6 billion in 1999, fell by more than half over the following fifteen years. And then Steve Jobs walked into their offices, told them a song was going to cost ninety-nine cents, and they took the deal.
They won the legal battle. They lost the decade. What saved them wasn’t winning. It was Spotify.
There is a footnote worth adding here. Sean Parker, who co-founded Napster with Fanning, spent years after the shutdown looking for a legal way to finish what he’d started. In 2009 a friend showed him a Swedish startup called Spotify. Parker invested $15 million, joined the board, and personally negotiated Spotify’s licensing deals with Warner and Universal, the same labels that had sued him a decade earlier. He called Napster his “Napster University.” He graduated and went back to the same classroom to fix the homework.
The chart tells the real story. Napster was shut down in July 2001. Revenue kept falling for another thirteen years. The legal victory was real. It changed nothing about what people wanted. iTunes slowed the decline. Spotify ended it. The thing that saved the industry wasn’t a lawsuit. It was a Swedish startup that did something not too different from what Napster had done, made music frictionlessly accessible, and gave the labels a cut
Twenty-Five Years Later
In 2022, four engineers left Kensho, a financial AI company acquired by S&P Global, to start an audio company. The connection between derivatives modelling and music generation isn’t obvious until you understand what Kensho actually did: it processed enormous volumes of financial documents and earnings calls to find patterns too subtle for human analysts. The same instinct pointed at music produces something different in scale but identical in method.
One of the founders, Mikey Shulman, had a PhD in physics from Harvard. He was the first machine learning hire at Kensho. He describes himself on his personal website as “an avid mediocre musician.” He played bass in small clubs in New York during high school and college. He left a comfortable career building AI for financial markets because he loved music too much not to.
What Shulman and his co-founders built was a tool that converts a sentence of text into a finished song. Not a rough approximation. A song, with vocals, with structure, with the internal logic of whatever genre you asked for. They launched publicly in December 2023. Within a year: $200 million in annual revenue.
In March 2025, thousands of musicians including Thom Yorke and ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus signed an open letter calling on Suno to stop training on copyrighted music. The following day, Timbaland posted a video on Suno’s website endorsing the product.
That’s the split in the creative community, in two sentences.
The Lawsuit That Was Always Going to End in a Deal
The labels had already understood what was happening. The RIAA filed its lawsuit in June 2024, on behalf of Sony, Universal, and Warner. The allegations came with receipts. The lawyers had fed Suno targeted prompts. A prompt built around the characteristics of B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” produced something that sounded like B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone.” A prompt about Chuck Berry produced an output the RIAA said “replicates the highly distinctive rhythm of the original’s chorus” of “Johnny B. Goode.” Statutory damages: up to $150,000 per infringed work.
Suno said it was fair use. Its lawyers argued the model had learned from music the way any musician does. “Those genres and styles are not something that anyone owns.” Same argument Napster’s defenders made. Updated for neural networks.
But here’s the thing Napster didn’t do. Suno raised money.
In May 2024, weeks before the RIAA filed its complaint, Suno closed a $125 million Series B led by Lightspeed. Antonio Rodriguez at Matrix Partners said something that deserves to be read twice:
“If we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think that they needed to make this product without the constraints.”
Antonio Rodriguez, Matrix Partners — one of Suno’s Series B investors, speaking before the lawsuit was filedRead that clearly. The lawsuit wasn’t a threat to the business. It was priced into the business. This isn’t recklessness. It’s a calculated assumption: that legal resolution takes longer than it takes to achieve the scale that makes you impossible to kill. That the labels, in the end, will do what they always do. They’ll join.
By November 2025, Suno had one hundred million users. The Series C closed at $2.45 billion — a near-fivefold increase in eighteen months — with NVIDIA’s venture arm in the round. NVIDIA. The company whose chips train the AI models that are the subject of the lawsuit. The ecosystem had already decided how this was going to end.
The Man Who Had Done This Before
Robert Kyncl grew up in Liberec, Czechoslovakia, under a government that controlled information tightly. He moved to the United States after communism fell, got an MBA, and joined Netflix when it had half a million DVD subscribers by mail. He helped steer it into streaming. Then he spent twelve years as YouTube’s Chief Business Officer.
At YouTube, he navigated something that rhymes precisely with what Suno presented. YouTube was flooded with copyrighted content. The labels and studios sued. YouTube built Content ID — a fingerprinting system that identified copyrighted material in uploaded videos and routed revenue to rights holders instead of taking it down. The labels hated it. Then they loved it. Kyncl built that system. He watched it become a multibillion-dollar revenue stream for the very people who had tried to kill it.
“The genie is not going back in. You have to embrace technology, because it’s not like you can put technology in a bottle.”Robert Kyncl, Warner Music Group CEO — Code Conference, September 2023. Two years before signing the Suno deal.
He wasn’t describing a future he feared. He was describing a transition he had already navigated once, from the other side of the table. The difference this time: he was the label.
On November 25, 2025, Warner and Suno announced their settlement. Lawsuit resolved. Licensing deal signed. New models, trained on Warner’s catalog with permission, launching in 2026. Full opt-in control for Warner’s artists over how their voices and compositions appear in AI-generated music. Kyncl called it “a victory for the creative community that benefits everyone.”
Tucked into the announcement, in two short paragraphs near the end, was the detail most people skipped past. As part of the deal, Suno had acquired Songkick.
The Asset Nobody Wanted
Songkick is a concert discovery platform. Warner bought it in 2017. In the years since, Warner couldn’t grow it. In 2024, when it was selling off media assets, it tried to find a buyer for Songkick. No takers. Bandsintown, its main competitor, had locked up partnerships with Spotify, YouTube, Apple, Shazam, and Google, and grown to four billion monthly interactions. Songkick’s most recent Companies House accounts showed annual revenue of £4.5 million. Pre-tax profit: effectively zero.
Warner couldn’t give it away. So it gave it to Suno.
Songkick founded. Grows into the leading concert discovery platform globally.
Warner Music Group acquires Songkick’s app and brand. Live Nation had already taken the ticketing business.
Songkick peaks at 15 million monthly users. Bandsintown begins pulling ahead on integrations and partnerships.
WMG tries to sell Songkick during broader asset disposal. Finds no buyer. Revenue: £4.5M. Profit: ~zero.
Suno acquires Songkick as part of WMG lawsuit settlement. Price undisclosed. Press release uses the phrase “deepen the artist-fan connection.”
The press release called it an opportunity to “deepen the artist-fan connection.” What that means, exactly, was left unspecified.
But here’s what actually changed hands: Songkick sits on years of fan behavioural data tied to Spotify listening habits. It knows which fans are tracking which artists for live events. It has direct artist relationships built through touring that exist entirely outside the label system. And with UMG and Sony still unsettled, those direct relationships are leverage in the next negotiation.
The Songkick acquisition wasn’t about Songkick. It was the sweetener that made the math work. Warner got licensing revenue and a framework for AI music it could influence. Suno got legitimacy: the right to operate inside the ecosystem rather than against it. And Songkick, the asset nobody wanted, became the seal on an agreement that neither party could publicly describe as anything other than a win.
The Pattern
The music industry has been running the same losing sequence since 1999. Sue. Fight. Win the legal battle. Lose the cultural one. Build nothing. Then license. Watch the licensing revenue become the new model and quietly wonder why margins never recover.
Kyncl knows this. He lived it from two different desks. The question isn’t whether the Suno deal is smart. It is. The question is whether it’s a new beginning or the final chapter of a very expensive lesson the industry keeps paying for and never quite finishes learning.
Shulman has said he would “hate for there to be an AI music world and a non-AI music world.” That’s the line worth sitting with. Because what he’s describing isn’t a disruption. It’s an absorption. A single ecosystem where AI-generated music and human-made music coexist in the same feed, the same playlist, the same fan’s phone, eventually indistinguishable from each other.
Fanning wore the Metallica shirt. Ulrich pretended to be asleep. The crowd picked a side.
Twenty-five years later, the same thing is happening. The players have better lawyers and the stakes are larger. But the logic is identical. The only question that remains is the one the next few years will answer not in a courtroom, but in what a hundred million people decide they want music to be.
I will continue this at a later day with some informed possibilities and wild speculation on what Songkick could possibly bring to Suno.
Further Reading
- Napster. Wikipedia.
- Shawn Fanning. Wikipedia.
- Sean Parker. Wikipedia.
- Metallica v. Napster, Inc. Wikipedia.
- Kid A. Wikipedia.
- Suno (platform). Wikipedia.
- Robert Kyncl. Wikipedia.
- Bradford Morgan White. “The Story of Napster.” Abort Retry Fail, June 2024.
- “The Real Reason Colleges Banned Napster.” EdTech Magazine, December 2012.
- “For Better or Worse, Napster Changed the Music Industry Forever — and Made Radiohead Global Superstars.” AV Club, August 2020.
- “Metallica Sues Napster, 20 Years Later.” Stereogum, April 2020.
- “NAPSTER NABS ‘KID A’.” NME, September 12, 2000.
- Courtney Love. “Courtney Love Does the Math.” Salon, June 14, 2000.
- Sean Parker. “Spotify Will Finish the Job Napster Started.” VentureBeat, October 2010.
- “Q&A: Sean Parker on Napster, Spotify, and His Federal Tax Law Triumph.” Fortune, May 2018.
- Downloaded. Dir. Alex Winter. VH1 Rock Docs, 2013.
- RIAA. U.S. Sales Database. Recording Industry Association of America.
- RIAA. 2024 Year-End Music Industry Revenue Report. Recording Industry Association of America.
- “AI Music Generator Suno Raises $125M, Valuing Company at $500M.” Music Business Worldwide, May 21, 2024.
- “Legally Embattled AI Music Startup Suno Raises at $2.45B Valuation on $200M Revenue.” TechCrunch, November 19, 2025.
- Suno Revenue and Funding Analysis. Sacra, 2025.
- Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno. Interview. The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), January 2025.
- “S&P Global to Acquire Kensho.” S&P Global Press Release, March 6, 2018.
- “Record Labels Sue AI Music Generators Suno and Udio.” Rolling Stone, June 2024.
- “Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl Says AI to Impact the Music Industry Within the Next Year.” TechCrunch, September 27, 2023.
- “AI Music Company Suno Acquires Songkick from WMG.” IQ Magazine, November 2025.
- “On Suno, Songkick and a Reddit Revolt.” Music Business Worldwide, November 2025.
- “Suno Picks Up Songkick as Part of AI Licensing Deal with Warner Music.” Complete Music Update, November 2025.
- “Timbaland Launches AI Music Company Stage Zero with First AI Artist TaTa.” Music Business Worldwide, June 2025.
- “Timbaland Apologises to Producer Amid AI Record Label Controversy.” Stereogum, June 2025.
- “AI Artist Xania Monet Climbs the Charts and Signs a Multimillion-Dollar Record Deal.” Billboard, September 2025.
- “One of Suno’s Latest Investors Will Be of Particular Interest to the Music Industry.” Music Business Worldwide, November 2025.
