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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, 10/27/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Over the weekend, there was some debate over.
Speaker 1:Is anybody paying for AI music? What's who's paying for this thing? Music app Suno nearly quadruples annual recurring revenue to a $150,000,000. Can someone explain where this revenue comes from? Who is paying?
Speaker 1:What's actually going on? What's driving the revenue? Because there's a whole bunch of different buckets of value that you can be extracting if you're Suno the company. The worst possible scenario is that a 100% of your revenue comes from someone who's just scraping your API basically and trying to distill your model. If we went back to what happened with DeepSeek, DeepSeek was paying for GPT-four tokens.
Speaker 1:That's right. But GPT-four obviously was generating money from all over the place and had people paying for knowledge retrieval and a whole bunch of different use cases, coding tokens, all sorts of stuff. And if you add up the number of reviews on the iOS and Android app store, it's over a million.
Speaker 2:Wow. People are realizing that they can go to their favorite artists. Yes. Like a rapper, let's say, say make this future song, make the jazz version of this future song.
Speaker 1:Saw DMX, X Gon Give It To You, but in nineteen sixties jazz, it's almost just style transfer. It's really just filtering. It it is I mean, that's the beauty of the Studio Ghibli is that you don't have to come to it with something that's completely a blank canvas.
Speaker 2:Good thing about that is that I don't I don't think the jazz community is up in arms.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think they might be.
Speaker 2:Maybe? Maybe. It's every time. It's brand new every night. It's very, very exciting.
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 1:think there'll definitely be a lawsuit.
Speaker 2:Well well, so of course, like individual artists Yeah. Might try to figure out, okay, are they training on my music? Yeah. And then in that case, did they buy the music? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because we now have precedent that shows if you purchase the songs Yep. Can you train on them? Yep. In general, I think this this kind of use case is probably like good for the underlying artists. Yep.
Speaker 2:It's just like marketing. It's fan engagement. Mhmm. They're just doing kind of like broad style transfer from a category of music onto this new artist.
Speaker 1:Will this become a network?
Speaker 2:It's just so undeniably magical to be able to generate a song. There is a massive amount of people that will just pay for that magic experience today. I don't believe that these songs are for listening to yet. I feel like they're for entertainment, but not passive listening.
Speaker 1:Kind of like GarageBand esque. Yep. You used to need to go and buy every instrument. And then all of a sudden it was like, you could pull a piano off of a menu bar and just say, I want a piano right now.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And what does that do? Well, that lowers the that lowers the bar the barrier to entry.
Speaker 2:My question becomes, you know, if I I've I've seen these, like, reels go viral on Instagram going back to this, like, future as jazz music Yep. Or coding crazy by future as in jazz Yes. As somebody who grew up listening to future
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I love future. But I have no desire to, like, go find
Speaker 1:songs and it.
Speaker 2:And put it and listen to it on the drive home.
Speaker 3:The the quality bar for music is actually like quite high to get people to actually start listening. Totally.
Speaker 2:Could you actually play the bongo drums while you talk?
Speaker 1:Pretty sick.
Speaker 3:Okay. So I think this is like two or
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is it a competitor to Spotify long term? Is it a competitor to Fruity Loops long term or Ableton long term? Or is it a competitor Fortnite long term?
Speaker 2:OpenAI is working on an AI music product. Yes. I would expect that OpenAI eats the category of music as meme. Music. OpenAI never never met a ward and wasn't interested in fighting.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free.
Speaker 2:Gonna f you mean 1982 Soul Funk.
Speaker 1:1982?
Speaker 2:An AI cover. Okay. Let's play this.
Speaker 1:I think we won't get this demonetized because of this.
Speaker 2:That's a beauty.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is okay. Everyone's jamming. If
Speaker 2:you just make it so that if if I generate a song that's like an AI Gunna song that we just listen to, if every person like, if you can figure out a revenue split that basically takes care of the people that created that the track that inspired it Yep. In that case, it's extremely obvious because it's an an existing Gunna song that's converted Yep. Into into a new song.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:If you're just paying out effectively the same amount to the producer and the writers and all that stuff, that feels like an easy solution. Yep. Now the problem is if you're just generating entirely net new music, which is just like the prompt would be like, make me a funk song. Yep. Then you're still eating into the potential earnings of, like, real artists on the platform.
Speaker 2:Yep. And I don't know how you solve that. I mean, it it's potentially a bull case for Spotify because they take can take out they get why did Spotify, like, lean so heavily into podcasts? One, because people wanted to listen to podcasts. And two, because they didn't have the same dynamic where they're paying out at such a large amount of their revenue to artists on the platform.
Speaker 2:So they could go out and pay to acquire, you know, Joe Rogan or whatever, it was originally for like a year or two Because you were acquiring users that would presumably listen to podcasts. Yep. And you're not paying out the record label and the artists and all the underlying.
Speaker 1:That is a good point. But yeah, monetization has to be wildly different between.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If I'm an artist, I'm, if, if, if, if I'm gonna and somebody's generating AI, gonna, I'm cool with that. If
Speaker 1:You're getting paid.
Speaker 2:If I'm getting paid like that's a normal song.
Speaker 1:Why tech bros are getting facelifts now? Whoever this dude is, is getting Doctor. Ben Tale. He's a 60 year old who runs a solar and tech business. He had an advanced deep plane facelift and neck lift.
Speaker 2:This looks like a good ad for facelifts, if you ask me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can't hire anyone over 30. Men in tech are increasingly spending thousands of dollars on procedures such as mini facelifts, neck lifts, and eyelid lifts to beat the signs of aging. The latest addition to the tech bro look is a brand new face. Tyler, maybe you should go ten years younger.
Speaker 1:Maybe you should try and look like a five year old. The White House has posted that the console wars are over. They shared an image of Donald Trump donning master chief's battle armor with the plasma sword. I'm really not that sharp on Halo terminology.
Speaker 3:You know, we're announcing the console wars are over. The Halo Halo is is coming to PlayStation.
Speaker 1:That's exciting. Halo's coming to PlayStation. The two companies have just diverged so thoroughly in strategy. Microsoft owns Xbox, but is very much like console agnostic. And Sony is very much like all in on PS five as like the core strategy.
Speaker 2:I wish I I I miss when q four meant that there was an then all I was thinking about was a new COD. That was a simpler time.
Speaker 1:Here's why AI is in a bubble today. He's distilled data points and ideas from previous columns and coverage. If you prefer facts and evidence based reality over vibes and conflated narratives, enjoy. Big tech valuations are reasonable. Leverage is low.
Speaker 1:We're at the beginning of multiple AI super product cycles in the year ahead. We are in the early innings of a technology computing shift to AI, the largest in decades. Think 1994 versus 1999.
Speaker 2:My personal timeline was that, like, the further you went in the nineties, the crazier it got. Mhmm. Like, it was, like, heating up, and there was plenty of people that made insane amounts of money, like prior to the bubble. Right?
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:And a lot of them probably wish they held a bit longer, but
Speaker 1:No, no. I think a lot of them were happy that they got out when they did. I've talked to some folks who are like, they founded a company in 1994. They sold it in 1998. It does not exist anymore.
Speaker 1:It didn't exist in 2002. But they wound up with like $100,000,000 liquid.
Speaker 2:That's enough to retire?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Need the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product road maps.
Speaker 1:You can start building. See
Speaker 2:if If you're trying to figure out if we're in a bubble or not, I recommend going outside, picking a daisy
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And just picking the leaf, the picking the petals off. That does
Speaker 1:feel like where we are right now.
Speaker 2:It's a bubble. It's not
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:A bubble. It's not. It's and then whatever you end up landing on, that's what's gonna happen.
Speaker 1:The owner of Oreo has trained their own video model for television advertising. They invested $40,000,000 and they say it cuts production costs by 30 to 50%. I don't know how that's possible.
Speaker 2:There's a huge amount of budget goes to coming up with good ideas. Sure. And then the, like, editing and then making infinite variations of it, which I'm sure AI will will can already do well in in some cases. You pay people to come up with great ideas and then execute. The idea is, like, the actually the highest margin part.
Speaker 2:Apparently, the Oreo's parent company Mom's only spent a 100,000,000 on digital print and national TV advertising in the last year.
Speaker 1:Wait. So they spent a 100,000,000 on advertising And then this and 40,000,000 on top.
Speaker 2:It's hard not to see this being, like, a huge waste of money that somebody somebody high up said, like, I'm gonna be the AI guy at Mondelez.
Speaker 1:If you want to make money in the AI boom, go and get $40,000,000 for a project like this. It's genius. Like, you just made
Speaker 2:moment. So So the friend.com billboard strategy Yeah. Is potentially a new strategy. It's just like buy so much advertising that people can't stop talking about it. We don't we're not just using generative AI.
Speaker 2:We are generative AI. We are the future of food. It's the year 2025. You wake up, and a progressive white billionaire with a black face NFT profile picture is saying GM to you, saying wag me, friend.
Speaker 1:This is a crazy choice. Why did he pick this one?
Speaker 2:This is like the how do you do, fellow kids meme.
Speaker 1:It's it's such a crazy choice on a million different levels. Even the smoking, even the NFT.
Speaker 2:I think the crypto community loved it, to be honest. Really? I think they're I think they're pretty fired up. If you're one of the 10,000 people that own CryptoPunk? A punk.
Speaker 2:This is a punk. How are the punks doing?
Speaker 1:Are they still are they still hanging out, hanging around?
Speaker 2:A lot of people have been focused on this this chart overlaying stock market performance over job openings
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And how it basically diverges.
Speaker 1:At the introduction of Chad GPT. Like Basically. That's where people,
Speaker 2:like, go. Also the introduction of high rates. Yes. This is particularly trippy chart crime. The break point was exactly when the COVID stimmy bubble pop and the Fed hiked interest rates to the moon.
Speaker 2:CEOs are desperate for every possible AI narrative. And if they need to do layoffs because they got bloated during COVID
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They will say that we're getting efficiency out of AI, and that's a much better reason than, like, we over hired. Timothy Mellon, a banking heir, is said to be the anonymous donor who gave 130,000,000 to the US government to help pay troops during the shutdown, worth 14,000,000,000 personally guaranteed payroll for the armed services. And the only and most recent photo of him is from 1981. The train in the background
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, with the with the the hair, the stare, he just he one shotted photography. You know, at this point, I've lost all motivation to post on X. The new algorithm is so demoralizing. I have 30,000 followers, and I'm getting 500 views in an hour. I'm done with this place.
Speaker 2:Well done, Elon Musk. And everyone, and their mother was dunking on him and saying, you just got paid $10,000, a week ago to post a picture of Steve Jobs' daughter.
Speaker 1:Thank you to everyone who supports the show. Thank you
Speaker 2:Love you.
Speaker 1:To everyone in the chat. Thank you to everyone who's listening to the show. We will see you tomorrow live with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft.
Speaker 2:Cannot wait. Cannot wait.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:See you then. Goodbye. Cheers, folks.