"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see"
— Edgar Degas
When I first learned about apps that claimed they could make finished songs from scratch, I was eager to try them. Being an artist and music producer myself, my motivation was to see where they would fall short. With all the hype around AI, a part of me needed to re-affirm to myself that my musical abilities are unique and that "AI has nothing on me".
I believed that music created by AI was the cliché EDM build with a speeding up kick drum, a drop with a wall of synths and chipmunk vocals untastefully panned to each side of the stereo spectrum, auto-tune so aggressive that you can't even make out the lyrics. In fact, this is exactly what early Suno tracks sounded like when I first tried Suno in 2024.
But only about a year later, AI models had become exponentially more sophisticated. By the end of 2025, Suno had finished ingesting the entire catalog of music available on the internet, and I became aware that my previous assumptions no longer held weight. The landscape had drastically changed and I knew something was off when I started hearing AI-generated tracks that I couldn't distinguish from human-made music.
So I gave myself a challenge: could I use AI to write a song about something deeply human? Something that required real emotional weight? I chose one of the hardest topics I could think of.
Before I say any more, I'll let you hear the song:
Listen to the Song
Lyrics
Almost-Name
Lyrics: Claude · Music & Vocals: Suno
Verse 1I painted the corner by the window white again
Covered up the pale yellow we'd chosen in the spring
Now the afternoon light hits the wall a different way
Like nothing ever lived here in between
Verse 2Your father keeps his sadness in the garage these days
Organizing nails by size, rewiring broken lamps
I fold the tiny clothes back in their tissue paper graves
And wonder if he's thinking what I can't say out loud
ChorusYou were here, you were here
In the space between my heartbeat and my breath
You were real, you were real
Even if the world won't hold a place for you
I will, I will
Verse 3September came the way it always does, indifferent
The maples on our street turned gold without asking why
I watched the neighbors bring their baby home in autumn light
And felt you like an echo in my empty hands
BridgeThey say that time will soften this
That grief becomes a gentler kind of missing
But I don't want to stop remembering
The future that we held for seven weeks
The name we never got to speak
ChorusYou were here, you were here
In the hope I carried like a secret song
You were real, you were real
And the love doesn't vanish just because you're gone
It stays, it stays, it stays
OutroSo I'll keep the corner white and simple
Leave the window open to the sound of rain
And some days I'll forget to feel the weight
And some days I will speak your almost-name
To the quiet morning, to the empty room
To the small forever I still carry inside me
Does it feel real?
For context, I have never experienced a miscarriage. I am also a man. This is not my story. I didn't expect to find myself feeling a swelling lump in my throat when I listened back.
The thing is, AI has gotten good. Really good. Good enough that the line between "created by a human" and "created by AI" is becoming impossible to distinguish. And honestly? I think that's okay. Because as a listener, what matters is the emotional truth in the work, not how it was made.
But here's where things get tricky for AI music creators.
You can make something beautiful. You can make something that moves people. You can generate ten songs in an hour that sound professionally produced. But if you're only posting them in the Suno subreddit or Discord servers, you're essentially shouting into a room where everyone else is also shouting. Other Suno users aren't there to discover new music. They're there to share their own creations, get quick feedback, and move on to the next generation.
Your song gets buried in minutes. Maybe you get a few comments from people who spent ten seconds listening. Maybe you don't. Either way, your music disappears into the feed, and the people who would actually connect with it never hear it.
I realized this after posting a few tracks myself. The engagement felt hollow. It wasn't that the music was bad. It was that I was trying to find an audience in a place where nobody was actually looking for music to listen to. They were looking for validation for their own work.
So where do you actually find listeners?
The obvious answer seems like Spotify, right? That's where the money is. That's where the streams count. And you're right, a lot of Suno creators are flooding Spotify right now, chasing those fractions of a cent per stream.
But here's what nobody talks about: Spotify's algorithm doesn't care about you.
Unless you already have a following, unless you're getting added to playlists, unless you're paying for promotion, your tracks just sit there. Spotify has over 100 million tracks. Hundreds of thousands of new songs get uploaded every single day. Your song becomes track number 47,329,182 in a database that nobody will ever scroll through.
And even if someone does stumble onto your track, there's no community there. No comments. No reposts. No conversation. Just a silent play count that might tick up by three if you're lucky. Spotify listeners aren't there to discover unknown artists. They're there to listen to playlists and algorithmic recommendations that favor established artists.
While creating music has never been easier, getting anyone to hear it has never been more challenging.
SoundCloud is different
SoundCloud still has what Spotify killed: a discovery culture. People actually browse. They listen to new artists. They leave comments, repost tracks they like, and follow creators based on the music itself, not because an algorithm told them to. The platform was built for independent artists, and that DNA is still there.
But here's the problem: even on SoundCloud, you can't just upload and hope for the best. You need a strategy. You need to get your music in front of people who actually care about your genre. People who will listen, repost, follow, and come back for more.
That's where Artist Management comes in.
Artist Management solves this problem in a pretty straightforward way. It exposes your music to real listeners on SoundCloud who are actually into your genre. Not bots. Not fake engagement. Just people who are actively looking for new music like yours and might actually care about what you made.
It's the difference between uploading into silence and actually getting your tracks in front of people who chose to be there because they want to discover something new.
If you're spending hours generating songs with AI, you owe it to yourself to get them heard by people who will appreciate them. The tools to create have become democratized. Now it's time to democratize discovery too.
Because whether you made it with AI or a guitar doesn't matter. What matters is whether anyone gets to hear it.
I've been using Artist Management to get my tracks in front of real listeners, and the difference is night and day. If you're serious about building an audience, give it a shot.
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