"Suno Stole All the Music" — Let's Talk About That

After publishing my response to Adam Neely's video about the generative AI controversy at Berklee College of Music, the comment section lit up with some genuinely thoughtful reactions — and a few I felt deserved a proper reply. So in this follow-up, I'm sitting down to address the points you raised directly: the "they stole all the music" argument, whether every college should really be teaching tools like Suno, the difference between generating audio and making music, and what music education should actually prioritize if it wants to prepare students for the next ten to twenty years.

Drawing on more than three decades of working with disruptive technologies in education, I try to bring some much-needed nuance to a debate that too often collapses into a cage fight. We get into cognitive offloading versus "cognitive uploading," why these tools get boring so quickly, what branding has to do with any of this, and why I think the Napster era tells us more about where things are heading than most people realize. Whether you agree with Adam or with me, my hope is that you come away seeing the bigger picture a little more clearly.