The highly anticipated AI music generation platform Suno is struggling in a copyright lawsuit, and a "heartfelt" comment from its lead investor may have handed the opposing side the evidence they had been hoping for. C.C. Gong, a partner at Suno's core investor Menlo Ventures, recently deleted a tweet that directly contradicted Suno's current legal defense strategy.

In previous copyright litigation, Suno's defense mainly relied on the "fair use" argument, with one key point being that AI-generated music is merely a "tool," and does not directly compete with copyrighted original works or cause user loss. However, C.C. Gong wrote on February 26: "I have shifted most of my listening time to Suno because I am tired of Spotify's repetitive recommendations."

This tweet quickly drew attention from copyright holders. Ed Newton-Rex, founder of the non-profit organization Fairly Trained, said: "Any rational observer can see that AI models trained on copyrighted music harm the market value of original works. But it's still shocking to see the lead investor of Suno openly admit this."

Currently, Suno is under attack from multiple sides. Although it reached a settlement with Warner Music (WMG) in November last year, the German music rights organization GEMA won an initial trial in a regional court, accusing it of not paying copyright fees. Analysts believe that the lead investor's statement that "Suno has already replaced Spotify as the preferred choice for listening to music" greatly strengthened the copyright holders' argument regarding the "market substitution effect."

Additionally, Suno's CEO Mikey Shulman once made controversial remarks such as "most people don't enjoy the process of making music." This logic that simplifies "creative culture" into "content consumption" is now causing widespread disgust in the music industry and among neuroscientists. Although Suno's annual revenue has exceeded $300 million and it has 2 million paid users, this legal and moral battle over the value of human creativity is only just beginning to heat up.