A big part of Suno’s strategy at the moment is asserting its potential as a tool for professional, human musicians who want to do much more than just push a button to pop out a slop track.
Its latest move is MILO-1080 – the name stands for ‘Model-Integrated Loop Orchestrator, since you ask. We learned about it during an interview with developer Kieron Donoghue about his SunoCharts site.
“The launch of Suno’s new MILO-1080 tool in the last few days is a really telling signal of where this is heading,” said Donoghue when we asked him about Suno’s overall strategy.
“MILO-1080 is a step sequencer. That’s not a tool for casual users who just want to type a prompt and get a song. That’s a tool for people who know what a step sequencer is, people with some music production experience,” he continued.
“Suno is clearly saying: we’re not just for beginners anymore. We want producers, beatmakers, and musicians in here too. And when you look at their trajectory, it makes sense.”
That trajectory has seen Suno start with simple text-to-music generation, before adding more editing features, acquiring browser-based DAW WavTool, and then launching its own Suno Studio DAW product last year. And now MILO-1080.
“Each step brings them closer to being a full creative platform for musicians at every level,” suggested Donoghue.
MILO-1080 is currently part of Suno’s ‘Labs’ area, described there as “a quirky, fun-first, mixed compositional, generative, procedural, sample friendly, MIDI enabled, 16 track step sequencer and synth designer” and tagged as a ‘preview’.
Users can generate sounds for it via prompts, search their libraries of tracks they’ve made with Suno to use as clips, or fiddle with its synth engine to create samples manually. “Quirky, fun-first” undersells it: this is a deceptively powerful tool. YouTube channel Music Tech Info has also picked up on its potential:
Don’t let it distract you so much that you ignore SunoCharts though: that’s interesting too. Donoghue – who previously founded ShareMyPlaylists and Humble Angel Records – built it as a demo of how an external analytics dashboard could work if Suno launches an API.
That means it uses dummy data, but it shows how trending artists, songs, genres and even prompts could be tracked on Suno. It comes from a similar feeling that sparked the launch of ShareMyPlaylists back in 2009.
“When Spotify launched in the UK in 2008, there were no editorial playlists on the platform at all. No Browse section, no curated collections. All you had was a search box and some genre tags,” Donoghue told us.
ShareMyPlaylists “filled a gap that Spotify hadn’t addressed yet, and I see the exact same gap with Suno right now. Suno has an incredible creation platform but the discovery and analytics layer is almost non-existent.”
“There’s a basic explore page and that’s it. There are no real tools to understand what’s happening on the platform, what genres are emerging, what prompts are working and who the top creators are. SunoCharts is designed to fill that gap.”
Donoghue said that he expects Suno to launch a public API at some point, as it scales and seeks to maintain its advantage over rivals. However, he acknowledged that the company’s ongoing legal battles may be a barrier for now.
“Third parties might use Suno’s data or capabilities in ways that create legal or brand risk, especially with the ongoing copyright litigation from the major labels. And once you open an API, you can’t easily close it without it leaving a really bad taste in the ecosystem.”
You can read the full interview here, with more of his thoughts on how Suno is developing and what it means for the industry and music-making.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source musically.com ’
