Jeremy Sirota - who spent six years as CEO of Merlin, the organisation representing 30,000 independent labels, a core purpose of which is to protect the rights and revenues of indie labels and artists - has been announced as Chief Commercial Officer of Suno, the generative AI music company currently valued at $2.45 billion.
That valuation, it should be noted, was largely achieved by Suno training its generative AI model on tens of millions of copyright protected recordings scraped from the internet without permission - a dataset that almost certainly included the music of Merlin’s members.
As Suno itself acknowledged in court filings in August 2024 after it was sued by the Recording Industry Association Of America, “it is no secret that the tens of millions of recordings that Suno’s model was trained on presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the plaintiffs in this case”.
Under Sirota’s leadership, Merlin published an AI policy in December 2024 explicitly stating that any use of its members’ music for AI training without “specific and express” prior authorisation was forbidden, and that the ‘fair use’ defence employed by companies like Suno was “the exact opposite of fair, both morally and legally”.
In an interview with Stuart Dredge at Music Ally just months before his departure, Sirota declared that using music to train a model without permission “is copyright infringement and no one should be doing that. That’s just simple”. He also told the UK government that “independent music is not raw material for tech companies to exploit without consent”.
In Dredge’s Music Ally piece, Sirota also took aim at the billionaire tech-bro culture driving much of the AI boom, saying he did not “need another AI or tech overlord talking to us about how they want to live to 500 and fly us to Mars”.
His new boss might test that resolve. Mikey Shulman is a Harvard physics PhD and former head of machine learning at a financial analytics company, who describes himself as a “mediocre musician”.
He is also the CEO of a company backed by $375 million in venture capital who has said on the record that making music is “not really enjoyable”, that “the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music”, and that “increasingly taste is the only thing that matters in art and skill is going to matter a lot less”.
Not that Sirota is entirely immune to a little tech-bro bullshit himself. In a LinkedIn post sharing lessons from his time at Merlin - a post in which he also reveals that renaming “cross-functional teams” to “strategic pods” delivered “40% better results” - he advises that “to break the rules, you must first master them”.
Six years representing 30,000 independent labels and their copyright interests is certainly one way to master the rules. He also shares an anecdote about his ten-year-old daughter telling him “Dad, no more TED Talks today”, which he says taught him “the difference between having all the answers and creating space for others to ask better questions”.
Shulman has cheerfully described training AI models on copyright protected music as “stock standard” practice that “every AI company does”, and in a blog post responding to the RIAA lawsuit, compared Suno’s mass ingestion of copyrighted recordings to “a kid learning to write new rock songs by listening religiously to rock music”, insisting that “learning is not infringing. It never has been, and it is not now”.
Sirota has now taken a C-suite position at this company, which ingested “tens of millions” of recordings without that “specific and express” authorisation his own Merlin policy demanded.
While it does now have a licensing deal in place with Warner Music, Suno still faces active copyright infringement lawsuits from Universal Music and Sony Music. And unlike competitor Udio, it has not yet got a licensing agreement with Merlin. Even though there is no reason to believe it treated independent music any differently to the major label catalogues it admitted to ingesting - after all, a scraper doesn’t check your label’s headcount before hoovering up your catalogue.
In a statement announcing his new role, Sirota said he has “deep respect for music and the role it plays in our lives” and that he is “energised” by Suno’s vision of “building new layers of creativity and connectivity that didn’t exist before”. Presumably those new layers - and Suno’s multi-billion dollar valuation - were significantly easier to build when you skip the part where you ask permission.
Shulman describes Sirota as “a rare leader” whose ability to “build what doesn’t yet exist, finding opportunity where others see obstacles and bringing all sides with him” would “help craft a better future of music for all”. One thing that certainly didn’t exist before Suno started meddling was a generative AI music company built on the unlicensed work of the members Sirota previously represented. Opportunity where others see obstacles, indeed.
Sirota will “lead Suno’s commercial strategy, music industry relationships, platform partnerships and enterprise solutions” - leveraging the very relationships he built while representing the independents whose work his new employer hoovered up without consent.
The “platform partnerships” brief is particularly noteworthy at a time when Spotify is actively exploring the integration of AI-generated music into its catalogue, and Sirota’s decade of dealmaking with the major streaming platforms makes him an obvious pick to lead that charge.
The “enterprise solutions” element is equally telling - suggesting Suno may be preparing to pitch itself to brands as a replacement for traditional music libraries, which would represent a direct commercial threat to the very independent labels, artists and composers Sirota spent six years claiming to champion.
On LinkedIn, Sirota describes himself as being “in the learning phase” at Suno. In a staff memo at Merlin, he once urged his team to “continue to identify AI partners who want to be on the right side of history about copyright, consent and culture”.
With his new role at Suno, it appears Sirota has decided which side of history he wants to sit on when it comes to copyright, consent and culture. A fat paycheck and some presumably chunky equity options doubtless went some way to helping him make up his mind.
Whether Merlin’s members will feel quite so positively about his move is another matter entirely. And for Suno... well. If you can’t beat them, join them. And if you can’t join them, buy them.
