With the 98th Oscars coming up on Sunday March 15, we’re looking back at past Oscar ceremonies, and specifically, who presented the Oscar for best original song each year.

The late, great song and dance man Gene Kelly did the honors four times, more than anyone else in Oscar history. That’s fitting: Kelly starred in Singin’ in the Rain, which topped the American Film Institute’s 2006 list of AFI’s Greatest Movie Musicals. Kelly presented best original song in 1951, in 1975 (in tandem with Shirley MacLaine), in 1980 (with Olivia Newton-John, with whom he starred in the soon-to-be-released, ill-fated musical Xanadu) and in 1986 (with his Singin’ in the Rain costars Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor).

Six people are tied as runner-up, having presented best original song three times: They are Burt Bacharach, Angie Dickinson, Gregory Hines, Jennifer Lopez, Queen Latifah and John Travolta. J.Lo presented three times within four years (1999-2002), a record for most presenter assignments in the shortest time. (Not coincidentally, J.Lo landed three of her four No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 in those years.)

Bacharach and Dickinson, Hollywood’s golden couple of the era, teamed to present the award in 1971 and 1976. Bacharach teamed with Ann-Margret to present the award in 1974. Dickinson teamed with Luciano Pavarotti to present it in 1981.

Six people who won Oscars for best original song also served as presenters in the category (obviously not in the same year they won). They are Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Barbra Streisand, Bacharach, and the team of Common and John Legend. The latter team presented in 2016, the year after their win for “Glory” from Selma. Prince, who presented in 2005, never won for best original song, but he did win for his song score to Purple Rain.

The reunion of the Singin’ in the Rain cast wasn’t the only cast reunion that Oscar show producers arranged in connection with this category. In 2013, 10 years after Chicago became the first musical in more than three decades to win best picture, that film’s stars, Renee Zellweger, Richard Gere, Queen Latifah and Catharine Zeta-Jones, presented best original song.

In 1988, seven years after they teamed in the box-office hit Arthur, Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli co-presented the award (which had gone, in 1982, to “Arthur’s Theme”). In 1993, a decade after their collaboration on the Broadway cast album Lena Horne: A Lady and Her Music, Quincy Jones and Lena Horne co-presented the award. In 1996, a few years after they co-starred in the Tina Turner biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It, Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne co-presented the award.

In some cases, Oscar producers had people co-present to plug an upcoming movie in which they were to co-star. Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda co-presented in 2018, months before the release of Mary Poppins Returns. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande co-presented in 2024, months ahead of their teaming in Wicked.

In 2015, Idina Menzel and John Travolta teamed to present the award – one year after Travolta inexplicably mangled Menzel’s name on the Oscar stage while attempting to introduce her performance of “Let It Go” from Frozen. (He called her Adele Dazeem.) In this presentation teaming, Menzel jokingly introduced him as Glom Gazingo – and they gracefully put it to rest.

Some presenter pairings held symbolic meaning. In 1989, singer/dancer/actor Gregory Hines co-presented with Sammy Davis Jr., the top song and dance man of a previous generation. Davis died of complications from throat cancer in May 1990.

In 1944, Dinah Shore became the first woman to present in this category. In 1984, the biracial Jennifer Beals, star of the previous year’s smash Flashdance, became the first person of color to present in this category. The youngest presenter was Miley Cyrus, who was just 17 in 2010 when she co-presented with Amanda Seyfried.

Bacharach and Dickinson weren’t the only married couple to present in the category. Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows presented in 1961, followed by Sonny & Cher in 1973. One parent and child separately presented in this category: In 1997, Goldie Hawn co-presented with her The First Wives Club co-stars Bette Midler and Diane Keaton. In 2023, Hawn’s daughter, Kate Hudson, co-presented with Janelle Monáe. Hudson is a best actress nominee at the 2026 ceremony.

Pavarotti was the second classical star to present in the category. The first was conductor Leopold Stokowski in 1937.

Here is the presenter of the Oscar for best original song from the first year it was presented, 1935, to the present. The years shown are the year of the ceremony. We’ll add the name of the presenter of best original song at the 2026 ceremony once it is known. Brief identifications are shown in the early years to help our younger readers. After that, you’re on your own.

1935: Irvin S. Cobb (author)

1936: Frank Capra (director)

1937: Leopold Stokowski (conductor)

1938: Irving Berlin (songwriter)

1939: Jerome Kern (songwriter)

1940: Gene Buck (president of ASCAP)

1941: B.G. DeSylva (songwriter, film producer, co-founder of Capitol Records)

1942: B.G DeSylva

1943: Irving Berlin

1944: Dinah Shore (singer)

1945: Bob Hope (comedian)

1947: Van Johnson (actor)

1948: Dinah Shore

1949: Kathryn Grayson (actress)

1950: Cole Porter (songwriter)

1951: Gene Kelly (actor)

1952: Donald O’Connor (actor)

1953: Walt Disney (film producer and entertainment mogul)

1954: Arthur Freed (lyricist and film producer)

1955: Bing Crosby (singer)

1956: Maurice Chevalier (singer)

1957: Carroll Baker (actress)

1958: Maurice Chevalier

1959: Sophia Loren & Dean Martin

1960: Doris Day

1961: Steve Allen & Jayne Meadows

1962: Debbie Reynolds

1963: Frank Sinatra

1964: Shirley Jones

1965: Fred Astaire

1966: Natalie Wood

1967: Dean Martin

1968: Barbra Streisand

1969: Frank Sinatra

1970: Candice Bergen

1971: Burt Bacharach & Angie Dickinson

1972: Joel Grey

1973: Sonny & Cher

1974: Burt Bacharach & Ann-Margret

1975: Gene Kelly & Shirley MacLaine

1976: Burt Bacharach & Angie Dickinson

1977: Neil Diamond

1978: Fred Astaire

1979: Ruby Keeler & Kris Kristofferson

1980: Gene Kelly & Olivia Newton-John

1981: Angie Dickinson & Luciano Pavarotti

1982: Bette Midler

1983: Olivia Newton-John

1984: Jennifer Beals, Matthew Broderick

1985: Gregory Hines

1986: Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor & Debbie Reynolds

1987: Bernadette Peters

1988: Liza Minnelli & Dudley Moore

1989: Sammy Davis Jr. & Gregory Hines

1990: Paula Abdul & Dudley Moore

1991: Gregory Hines & Ann-Margret

1992: Shirley MacLaine & Liza Minnelli

1993: Lena Horne & Quincy Jones

1994: Whitney Houston

1995: Sylvester Stallone

1996: Angela Bassett & Laurence Fishburne

1997: Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton & Bette Midler

1998: Madonna

1999: Jennifer Lopez

2000: Cher

2001: Jennifer Lopez

2002: Jennifer Lopez

2003: Barbra Streisand

2004: Jack Black & Will Ferrell

2005: Prince

2006: Queen Latifah

2007: John Travolta & Queen Latifah

2008: John Travolta

2009: Zac Efron & Alicia Keys

2010: Miley Cyrus & Amanda Seyfried

2011: Jennifer Hudson

2012: Will Ferrell & Zach Galifianakis

2013: Richard Gere, Queen Latifah, Renée Zellweger & Catherine Zeta-Jones

2014: Jessica Beal & Jamie Foxx

2015: Idina Menzel & John Travolta

2016: Common & John Legend

2017: Scarlett Johansson

2018: Emily Blunt & Lin-Manuel Miranda

2019: Gal Gadot, Brie Larson & Sigourney Weaver

2021: Zendaya

2022: Jake Gyllenhaal & Zoë Kravitz

2023: Kate Hudson & Janelle Monáe

2024: Cynthia Erivo & Ariana Grande

2025: Mick Jagger

Some music executives start their day hoping to sign the next great pop star, land a No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 or sell out a stadium tour. But Paul Sinclair has a different aspiration: “Every day I wake up and I’m like, ‘Don’t ruin music,’” he says with a laugh.

Sinclair has spent decades working in the industry, primarily for Warner Music Group and Atlantic Records, at the intersection of recorded music and tech. After exiting his post as Atlantic GM/executive vp in 2025, he found himself consulting for a new artificial intelligence music startup, Suno, which had quickly become the most controversial company in music since Spotify’s launch 15 years ago. It’s arguably even more controversial than that.

Many have compared Suno, and the rise of generative AI music in general, to Napster’s launch at the turn of the century, which upended album sales and led to the darkest financial decade in recorded-music history. Suno could disrupt music consumption, like Napster and Spotify once did. But it’s also doing something different: disrupting the sacred act of creation itself.

One of Suno CEO/co-founder Mikey Shulman’s interviews for this story has been released as an episode of On the Record, Billboard‘s music business podcast. It is available now on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Sinclair became Suno’s chief music officer last July and sees his skeptical eye as a selling point. “Truly, every single day I’m conflicted,” he says. “This s–t is complicated … I want to make sure there’s whole future generations of the beauty of art and music and the ability to build careers around it.” He mentions his daughter, who aspires to enter the music business in the not-so-distant future: “I really want her to be able to do that.”

Research from French streaming service Deezer suggests that 97% of people cannot differentiate between AI and human-generated music, and of the now-60,000 fully AI-generated tracks delivered to the service daily, a Deezer representative says the “vast majority” are flagged as being created with Suno specifically. According to an unpublished company pitch deck Billboard obtained in November, Suno generates 7 million songs a day, which equates to an entire Spotify catalog’s worth of music every two weeks — and the songs are sounding uncannily similar to those made the old-fashioned way. With that deck, Suno recently raised $250 million in Series C funding, a figure nearly unheard of in music tech that further cemented it as the clear front-runner in AI music.

Naturally, many musicians see Suno and other generative AI music companies as an existential threat — and for some of them, it could be. Some uses for the technology, beyond silly novelty songs or co-writing, could include creating vocals, producing demos and replacing stock or production music, all tasks that have previously required paying working-class musicians. In 2024, for a Billboard story about how AI could threaten the production music business, I spoke to Henry Phipps, an aspiring film composer and production music-maker who had also briefly worked in AI.

“Very few people aspire to be production library composers long term,” he explained, but “it is a way into [the music business] to survive, eat and pay rent and work toward projects that are more creatively fulfilling.” He said then that he believed AI music could augment, but not entirely replace, the compositions of blockbuster film scorers — but it might “cut off the bottom rungs of the ladder” for young upstarts like him.

The following year, Phipps started working at Suno. Now, he is one of dozens of musically inclined employees the AI company has hired, and he acts as a product manager and liaison with the growing class of professional musicians who use the platform. Phipps has become a favorite among those pros, in part because he’s also a musician and because he monitors the company’s VIP program, a private group of thousands of top music-makers who get early access to new products and offer the company feedback. Employees at Suno tell me this exclusive group includes some of the biggest talents in the world — but add that they can’t tell me exactly who.

Over the course of a month, I met with executives at Suno several times to better understand the company — and to decide for myself whether it is deserving of the boogeyman reputation it’s taken on to some in the music business. As part of this reporting, I was invited to join the generative AI music company at one of their songwriting camps during Grammy week. As with the VIP program, I wasn’t allowed to say who was there or where it was. In an email laying out the ground rules, the company’s publicist suggested I “just refer to it as a studio in Hollywood.”

I found a few producers at the camp who were willing to share their names, though, including Timbaland, Gino the Ghost and Om’Mas Keith — the lattermost of whom spearheaded the camp with Suno. Keith is a Grammy-winning record producer who has worked with Frank Ocean, Erykah Badu and Jay-Z, and he welcomed me into the studio to see what he had been working on with his colleagues. “This is a music creation camp. I wanted to bring over every great musician I know for this,” he said, gesturing to the dozen or so musicians in the crowded room, where everyone was chattering excitedly. As a few Suno employees schmoozed with engineers at the massive mixing board, Keith pointed out what each musician at the session excels at: One was a sought-after session drummer, another a platinum-selling record producer, another a top violinist.

“This is all about human involvement; even the prompting is democratic. We do it together,” Keith said. I joked about whether I could get a courtesy credit for being in the room. “No, you didn’t contribute to the prompt. It starts there. You got to be careful who you prompt around,” Keith replied in a serious tone. “These are some of the best musicians in the world.”

While I sat on the studio’s couch with Keith, I witnessed a song come to life. In 30 minutes, what he said started with a prompt and some lyrics became a master recording just as good, if not better, than the scores of pitch songs I’ve heard in my years as a music publishing reporter. But interestingly, by the end, what I hear is approximately 90% human-recorded. The only Suno piece left was the vocals, which I was told would also eventually be rerecorded too.

As several other professional musicians who use Suno tell me, this camp’s approach to AI is a common one: prompting the model dozens of times with original lyrics to reach a song idea that sparks their interest. Then, Keith and his co-writers re-­create the Suno song stem by stem, adding in their own flourishes and subtracting bits that they don’t like. This is partly due to, Keith whispered to me, the fact that while Suno-created music may sound good, it still isn’t perfect, studio-quality audio. It’s also because these music pros simply enjoy molding the platform’s initial output into their own. Optimistically, this approach makes Suno a writing companion that encourages and accelerates human creativity. Cynically, it’s a way to use AI-generated ideas without disclosing the use of an AI model. Sitting there, I wondered how many songs released in the last few years were made this exact way without anyone knowing.

Around this time, Mikey Shulman, the 39-year-old co-founder and CEO of Suno, walked into the room from outside, where he’d been shaking hands with a mix of record-label executives, Suno employees and venture capitalists who, like me, had all come to watch the camp. With his white T-shirt, unbuttoned oxford, athleisure pants and nondescript sneakers, Shulman looks like your typical tech founder. Arms crossed over his chest, he listened to the song, bobbed his head and surveyed the room contentedly. Nearly everyone turned to say hello to him with a big smile. I couldn’t help but wonder how he felt at that moment: Like a god, surveying his own creation? Like Dr. Frankenstein beholding his monster? Or was this just like the buzz that comes from writing a great song?

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The dawn of music’s AI age didn’t arrive with a big bang — it stumbled into being, by accident, at a kitchen table in Cambridge, Mass. “It wasn’t exactly, you know, the proverbial three guys in a garage thing,” Shulman jokes.

In January 2022, Shulman and his co-founders, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho and Keenan Freyberg, had just left their jobs at Kensho, an AI business tool company acquired by S&P Global in 2018, and were pursuing a new startup together that would help navigate and analyze music libraries and catalogs using AI. “We didn’t even think it was possible to generate music like [we can now],” Shulman explained.

Still, excited by the developments in AI image rendering, the foursome — all hobbyist musicians as well as Ivy League-educated technologists — started staying up late to experiment with generative AI after finishing their other work. One day, the group legend goes, they created some “vaguely passable sounds.” “The first things that came out you would be very generous to call music,” Shulman admits. The pet project quickly grew into an obsession for the group, leading them to abandon their original company idea and start what is now known as Suno (Hindi for “listen”) instead. “Why are we not doing the thing that we can’t put down?” Shulman recalls thinking.

Suno was not the first company to generate music with AI, but it was likely the first to generate singing voices alongside instrumentals with a traditional verse-chorus structure — or simply put, a full song. “Nobody else could make songs, and there’s something really special about a song. A song is a story, it’s not background music,” Shulman says. The team first launched the product on the messaging platform Discord in July 2023 — the same way that popular AI image model Midjourney was first launched — which allowed them to disseminate the model quicker and to Discord’s built-in audience.

Immediately, Suno found a fan base. The product wasn’t anywhere near perfect, but it had promise. “I remember at the beginning we didn’t even have control over the genre, so the models would basically infer the genre from the lyrics,” Shulman says. “We found people hacking their lyrics, adding in words like ‘yo, yo, yo’ at the beginning because they demanded that it came out as rap.”

As Suno developed, the co-founders took on different roles at the company. “Mikey’s the face; Martin’s the soul, overseeing engineering and brand; and Georg is the mad scientist, the machine learning genius, the man behind the curtain,” Sinclair tells me. The final founder, Freyberg, was the company’s COO, but left months before Sinclair arrived in July 2025. “He wanted to do different things,” Sinclair explains with a shrug.

Suno also picked up early evangelists, like Timbaland, who preached that the company was a “new frontier” for music and joined as an ambassador for the company in 2024. Rolling Stone added to the hype that year, calling it “ChatGPT for music.” But around the same time, music business executives around the world began to worry about how Suno’s model got so good so fast. Like ChatGPT, Suno was training on copyrighted material — their companies’ songs — without consent or compensation. Suno was not yet talking about its training data, but one investor told Rolling Stone, “Honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it.” It felt suspicious.

In Denmark, Koda, the local collection society for songwriters, composers and music publishers, launched an investigation. “To me, it was obvious what they were doing,” Koda CEO Gorm Arildsen says. “That music had to come from somewhere, and we expected some of it to be ours.” He instructed his full-time tech scout to try prompting Suno for Danish works in Koda’s catalog. Suno has protections so that users cannot prompt songs to sound like specific artists, but Arildsen says “to be honest, it was not that difficult to prompt one of our songs,” which include hits by Aqua, MØ and contemporary Danish phenom Christopher; in the United Kingdom, Ed Newton-Rex, a musician and founder of nonprofit Fairly Trained who formerly worked as Stability AI’s vp of audio, was performing his own tests, which he’d ultimately publish to fanfare in Music Business Worldwide; in Germany, local collection society GEMA, which represents songs recorded by Lou Bega, Milli Vanilli and Alphaville, was doing the same.

“We tried to quantify this impact, and then came to a stunning number,” GEMA CEO Tobias Holzmüller tells me. “Up to 950 million euros [about $1.1 billion] in Germany and France could be endangered in 2028 alone due to generative AI if we let it all happen without taking action.” Its study also found that 27% of music creators’ revenue will be at risk for the same reason by 2028. Holzmüller and Arildsen say they reached out to Suno to talk but neither received a reply. Eventually, both CEOs say, this prompted them to launch separate lawsuits against Suno. GEMA’s was filed in January 2025 and Koda’s in November 2025. Arildsen called the move “the largest theft in music history.”

But Suno’s biggest challenge so far has come from North America, where the major-label groups — Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music and Warner Music Group (WMG) — which also found ways to trick Suno into regenerating songs that sounded very much like those in their catalogs, specifically James Brown, Chuck Berry and Michael Bublé. In a rare sign of camaraderie, the rivals teamed to launch a blockbuster $500 million copyright infringement lawsuit against Suno, as well as a near-identical suit against Udio, another significant AI music model on the market, in June 2024. The labels said that using their sound recordings to train Suno’s model was infringement “at an almost unimaginable scale” and that Suno’s resulting songs could “saturate the market with machine-­generated content that will directly compete with” what the labels call “genuine sound recordings.”

Suno held the position taken by other AI companies before them: that it’s “fair use” to train on copyrighted works. Shulman responded to the filing by saying “[the majors have] reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook,” likely a reference to the majors’ past treatment of Napster and file-­sharing, which many now view as a failure. Back then, Shulman spoke more like a provocative, move-fast-and-break-things tech founder. (One quote from a podcast interview during this period follows Shulman to this day: “I don’t think the majority of people enjoy the majority of time it takes to make music.” He now says of that quote: “I really wish I had chosen different words.”)

These days, Shulman is much more subdued. “I do have a lot of respect for music,” he says. “The major labels are very important, but what we did is legal and so that’s what we did.” While he maintains his position about fair use, Suno did agree to a licensing deal and settlement with WMG in November, ending just WMG’s portion of the major labels’ lawsuit. As part of the deal, Suno agreed to retire its current model and launch a new one, sometime this year, that is only trained on licensed copyrights in which the owners opt-in to be part of its data set. Suno also agreed to limit the number of AI songs a user can download in a given month.

It’s a sign that, despite several high-profile law­suits that remain in its path, the stigma around Suno in the music business establishment could be fading. “I don’t think of what we did as a settlement,” Shulman says. “I think about this much more like a partnership … It is much more long term.”

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“I’m looking for the Kanye of AI music designers,” says Neil Jacobson, his eyes wide with excitement.

“Obviously, I hope he doesn’t hate Jewish people… but what I mean is he’s going to be brilliant and he won’t apologize,” the music executive continues. “He’ll be like, ‘Yeah, I created this new world, this whole new way of listening to music.’ ” He pictures a day when his AI-driven talents pioneer virtual reality-native entertainment while his human artists continue to dominate in more traditional spaces.

Jacobson, founder and CEO of management, label and publishing company Hallwood Media, is one of Suno’s most outspoken evangelists and is the first music executive to publicly invest in it, through his fund Hallwood Ventures. In September, Jacobson made headlines for signing what he calls “AI music designers” — or the people who use generative AI to make music — to Hallwood, a first in the business, and he even scouted his new AI signee, imoliver, from Suno’s streaming service.

Since then, Jacobson has doubled down on AI-powered talent, signing Telisha “Nikki” Jones, who created AI gospel persona Xania Monet, to what Billboard previously reported was a multimillion-dollar deal. He understands that his bullish AI views will likely lose him some clients (“I have major issues with some of my artists who are really upset about my involvement in AI music, some of which I believe will leave me over [it] — it’s heartbreaking”), but he feels that the negative discourse over AI in music will eventually subside. More specifically, he calls this “artistic fascism” — a colorful way of saying that detractors are policing what art is and how art is made.

Now, Monet’s manager, Romel Murphy, is joining in with a company of his own called dai + drm (pronounced “daydream”), a label joint venture through Create Music Group that will sign AI-powered talent, including Solomon Ray. Timbaland has also been building his own AI entertainment company, Stage Zero, which generates artists from scratch, including his first project, Tata, who was created with the help of Suno and other AI tools.

These so-called “AI artists” or “AI music designers” — everyone in the space seems to have a different name for them — some but not all of whom use Suno, have made an impact on the Spotify, Billboard and TikTok charts, and the broader discourse. The Velvet Sundown, for example, which is touted in Suno’s investor pitch deck with the title “Suno songs go viral off platform,” ignited a debate around the future of music last summer after becoming an early viral example of a seemingly nonexistent band posting AI music on streaming services.

Despite the commotion it caused, which was started by a concerned poster on Reddit, none of The Velvet Sundown’s Suno-generated songs — faithful descendants of classic rock à la Creedence Clearwater Revival and Buffalo Springfield — have more than 5 million plays on Spotify. Monet, who was also created using Suno, climbed to the top of Billboard’s Hot Gospel Songs chart, yet is far from cracking the Hot 100. Ray, a clean-cut AI persona constructed by MAGA rapper Christopher “Topher” Jermain Townsend, hit the top of the Gospel Digital Song Sales chart with the song “Find Your Rest,” but given downloads are an increasingly unpopular form of music consumption, the stat remains a niche measure of success. These milestones last year proved that a breakthrough from an AI-generated act is clearly possible — but to date, it is still yet to truly come.

Some Suno supporters are not concerned with the inevitable rise of AI-driven competition. Timbaland says that people who use Suno to make songs in seconds don’t threaten producers like himself who have “done the over 10,000 hours” of mastery in his craft. Keith agrees. “As a lot of ‘AI slop’ enters the ecosystem, those with true artistry will be differentiated.”

Gino the Ghost, a writer-producer for Sabrina Carpenter, The Chainsmokers and Saweetie who was also at the songwriting camp, adds that he uses Suno “like a more intuitive Splice,” referring to the popular sample and sound library, and that he’s “not worried” about its implications for his career. “This isn’t me being naive,” he assures me. “It will never be good enough to get to that top, top, top level of writing and producing on its own.” Still, he is concerned about the undeniable rise of quick-made slop: “I’m torn as someone who’s a big proponent of songwriter rights and us being paid fairly. I’m worried the royalty pool on Spotify is going to be diluted.”

There’s also a growing concern that the fan base for AI songs isn’t even real. According to research from Deezer, up to 85% of streams on fully AI-­generated songs on its site are flagged as artificial or fraudulent. In late February, several artist rights groups, including the Music Artists Coalition, sounded the alarm on this issue in an open letter titled “Say No to Suno,” raising concerns that “Suno has, in effect, become a fraud-fodder factory on an industrial scale.”

Speaking to those at Suno or those who use it, I’m often met with a mix of total enthusiasm, a little fear and some dark humor. Keith jokes about how one day we’ll all be “in a pod with fluid and hooked up to devices,” and Jacobson sees a vision of the future like the popular dystopian novel Ready Player One.

But regardless of AI music’s current popularity and the discourse around it, the number of AI-­powered songs on streaming services is growing fast and sparking fears about increased competition for human-made songs, which take much longer to create. To stop the flood, UMG has now taken a hard-line stance when negotiating with AI companies, saying that AI partners must instate a “walled garden” to make it impossible for users to download AI music and take it elsewhere on the internet. When Billboard asked if that was why UMG had not yet settled with Suno, UMG chief digital officer/executive vp Michael Nash said, “If I were to treat your question as a rhetorical one, then yes. It’s kind of a hat-hanger in this discussion.”

Shulman says that this “somewhat black-and-white view of things lack[s] nuance. [It can] also really prevent a lot of innovation.” As for whether Suno would ever become a closed environment, Shulman says, “Completely? I just think that’s way smaller than it needs to be.”

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The same day that I talk to Jacobson to get his take on the future of AI music, I also call Shulman to ask about his first-ever Grammy week, the famously exhausting run of nonstop parties and networking in the music business ahead of the actual awards ceremony.

“Last week was kind of an eye-opening moment,” he says with a wide grin. “I really felt a change in how excited and curious and optimistic people were in a way I hadn’t felt before. I think there was a lot more acceptance, and a lot more public acceptance of it, which is a really new thing.” He had been invited to WMG’s Grammy party, among other events, for the first time — which felt like evidence that the establishment was ready to talk.

Suno’s stated vision of the future looks a little different from what it has inspired from its biggest fans. Suno is already working to create a “verticalized” service, as noted in the company pitch deck, incorporating a TikTok-like social media feed (Hooks, announced in December), a streaming service and a number of different music tools, to target, as Shulman puts it, anyone from “Grammy winners to grandmas.”

Is it really possible to get everyone to make music? Shulman thinks so. “Our usage is showing that a hell of a lot of people, way more than anybody expected, want this,” he says. The hope is to expand music-making as something more like a pastime, competing for the same hours as one spends scrolling on TikTok, playing video games or watching a movie. “I think we’ve reached peak scrolling,” Shulman explains. “People want to do something else.”

It’s a bold vision of the future, and if Shulman is right, Suno projects itself to reach $1 billion in revenue by 2028. “When we talk about ‘verticalizing’ inside the company, it’s not like we want to smush TikTok and Spotify together,” Shulman tells me. “Those two things already exist, and that is not going to reap a lot of benefits … I’m thinking, ‘How do I make discovery way better than it is now?’ Because we are able to do something no one else can do. [The point of Hooks] is to get you off of the feed, playing with content and remixing it. That’s the kind of discovery that doesn’t exist right now.”

And, he continues, Suno doesn’t have a “fixed pie mentality,” like he thinks much of the music industry does, where “if one thing wins, another has to lose.” As Shulman explains, “We want to grow the pie and make the music industry even bigger.” This thinking is, in part, what attracted Mike Mignano, partner at venture capital firm Lightspeed Ventures, to the platform. He says his team “definitely views [Suno’s] technology as a market expander” for music, even saying he sees Suno becoming “the most important company in music” one day.

Armed with its impressive Series C funding, licensing momentum and the growth of its music off-platform — not to mention Suno’s recent recruitment of longtime Merlin CEO Jeremy Sirota as its new chief commercial officer — Suno’s total takeover of the music business can feel inevitable. But the most common question remains: Does everyone really want to make music?

Suno also faces the challenge that, due to differing views on “walled gardens,” UMG, the world’s biggest music company, may not reach a settlement with Suno before its deadline to retire its current model and to launch the new, fully licensed version later this year. Given musical copyrights are often split between a number of different songwriters and artists across multiple labels and publishers — and all rights holders must opt-in to the use for it to work — it’s possible that Suno’s agreement with WMG has put the platform in a tough position with a limited catalog of training data. When pressed about how many songs he needs to train the new model to produce quality results, Shulman is noncommittal: “It’s really hard to say — more is always better. It’s really hard to give definitive answers here. Whenever you change anything, some things get better and some things worse.”

There’s also, of course, the various lawsuits still active against Suno from GEMA, Koda and the remaining majors — as well as a couple of class action lawsuits from independent songwriters. And while the path to becoming the de facto AI music model has seemed increasingly clear for Suno (especially after its competitor Udio pivoted its offerings in November), now Google — a goliath in general AI development with nearly unlimited resources to burn — seems increasingly interested in entering the AI music race, acquiring ProducerAI and launching its latest version of its own AI music model, Lyria, as part of Gemini in February.

Plus, Suno’s users are primarily 25- to 34-year-old men. Young people, Shulman admits, have “general apprehension around AI everywhere” — a troubling trend, given that teens have historically been the music industry’s greatest cultural drivers and consumers.

“I get so many questions from people in music … and the questions are always like, ‘Is AI going to end the world?’ ” Shulman says. “I happen to think it’s not going to, but certainly Suno is not going to turn everybody into paper clips! That’s not the domain we play, so I say, ‘Why don’t you try it? Most people like it when they try it.’ ”

This story appears in the March 7, 2026, issue of Billboard.

Michael Jackson superfans will get a chance to see the upcoming biopic Michael a few days early. The film’s studio, Lionsgate, announced on Tuesday (March 10) that the movie chronicling the late King of Pop’s rise from his hardscrabble Gary, Ind. roots to global superstardom will hit a limited number of screens for early-access viewings in premium formats on April 22, two days ahead of its wide release that Friday. Tickets for the one-night-only screenings are on sale now here.

The film directed by Antoine Fuqua (Stans, Bullet Train) stars Jackson’s real-life nephew, Jaafar Jackson, who pulls off a spot on homage to his uncle in the trailer of the movie, from Jackson’s signature electrifying dance moves to his laser-focused determination to produce pop music for the ages.

Among the other stars featured in the film are Colman Domingo (Wicked: For Good, Eurphoria) as imperious family patriarch Joe Jackson , as well as Kendrick Sampson as producer Quincy Jones, Miles Teller as the singer’s powerhouse lawyer/manager John Branca, Nia Long as mother Katherine Jackson, Larenz Tate as Motown founder Berry Gordy, Juliano Valdi as a young MJ, Laura Harrier as Jackson 5 dresser Suzanne de Passe, Kat Graham as Diana Ross, Jessica Sula as sister La Toya Jackson, Liv Symone as Gladys Knight and Kevin Shinick as Dick Clark.

“For Michael Jackson’s fans, Michael is the cinematic event they’ve been waiting for — the movie captures both the soul and the spectacle of the boy who became the King of Pop,” said Lionsgate Motion Picture Group president of worldwide distribution Kevin Grayson in a statement. “These early access screenings, in IMAX and premium large formats, will immerse audiences in the electrifying performances and bring the power of Michael Jackson’s iconic music to life. It’s the perfect way to be the first to see the movie.”

A description of the $155 million movie promises that Michael is “the cinematic portrayal of the life and legacy of one of the most influential artists the world has ever known. The film tells the story of Michael Jackson’s life beyond the music, tracing his journey from the discovery of his extraordinary talent as the lead of the Jackson Five, to the visionary artist whose creative ambition fueled a relentless pursuit to become the biggest entertainer in the world. Highlighting both his life offstage and some of the most iconic performances from his early solo career, the film gives audiences a front-row seat to Michael Jackson as never before. This is where his story begins.”

Lionsgate released a new trailer for Michael on Tuesday, featuring more images of Jackson in his most iconic moments, from crooning “Who’s Loving You” as a child for Motown’s Gordy to secure his family band’s record deal with the legendary label, to his breakout solo career and massive worldwide tours.

Check out the latest Michael trailer below.

Miley Cyrus could buy herself flowers, but her recent appearance on Sesame Street proves that receiving them from a friend is just as great — especially edible flowers.

The “Wrecking Ball” singer is making her return on the beloved children’s program Monday (March 9). Donning a shimmery two-piece fringe outfit, Cyrus joined Elmo and friends for fun times on an episode of the new Volume 2 episodes of the newly reimagined Sesame Street on Netflix and PBS Kids. The same day, the series released “Just Imagine,” a fun song sung by Cyrus and Elmo about how we can be whatever want to be, as long as we have imagination.

On Wednesday, Sesame Street shared another adorable clip of Cyrus on its social media channels. In it, Cyrus is joined by Cookie Monster. In a very sweet exchange, everyone’s favorite dessert-loving monster gives Miley her flowers.

“Me know that you can buy yourself flowers, right?” Cookie Monster says to Cyrus. “Well, on Sesame Street, me want to give you me favorite type of flower — a cookie flower!”

In true Cookie Monster fashion, the “flower” is actually a cookie designed to look like a flower. Together, the two new friends enjoy their sweet treats before agreeing that they were “delicious.”

Cyrus is, of course, no stranger to family TV. This year marks the 20th anniversary of Hannah Montana, the Disney Channel show on which the pop star got her start. To celebrate the momentous occasion, Cyrus and Disney have partnered up for the forthcoming Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special. The special brings Cyrus back into the world of Hannah Montana, where she’ll take a look back at the iconic character, revisit some of the series’ most iconic moments and share memories with fans. The first trailer for the forthcoming special was released on Tuesday, with Cyrus wishing the world a “Happy Hannah-versary.“

The Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special will air on Disney+ on March 24. All episodes of Sesame Street, including Cyrus’, are available now on Netflix and PBS Kids.

PRS for Music has initiated legal proceedings against Valve Corporation, the operator of the games distribution service Steam. 

According to a statement shared with Billboard U.K., the collection society is alleging that works represented by its members have been made available on the platform without the appropriate license.

PRS alleges that Valve has never obtained a license covering the musical works on behalf of songwriters, composers and music publishers since Steam launched in 2003. The organization added that it had spent “many years” attempting to negotiate a licensing agreement with the company before issuing legal proceedings in the U.K. on March 4.

Steam is primarily a marketplace where users buy, download and play games, though the platform also sells other digital content, including video game soundtracks. PRS for Music says titles available on the service that feature music written by its members include major franchises such as EA Sports FC, Forza Horizon and Grand Theft Auto.

Developers and publishers in the gaming industry generally secure synchronisation licences allowing music to be embedded within a game. But under U.K. copyright rules, those agreements typically cover only the initial use of the music within the title itself.

When the game is later distributed via download platforms, a separate ‘communication to the public’ right may apply. In the U.K. that right is administered by PRS, meaning platform operators like Valve must obtain their own licence.

In a statement, Dan Gopal, chief commercial officer at PRS for Music, said: “Our members create music that enhances experiences and PRS exists to protect the value of their work with integrity, transparency and fairness. Legal proceedings are not a step we take lightly, but when a business’s actions undermine those principles, we have a duty to act.

“Great video games rely on great soundtracks, and the songwriters and creators behind them deserve to have their contribution recognised and fairly valued.”

PRS for Music said the case will proceed unless Valve Corporation enters into negotiations and agrees to a licence covering both historic and future uses of music written by its members on Steam. Billboard U.K. has approached a representative from Steam for comment.

The case arrives as PRS for Music prepares for a leadership transition. The organisation confirmed last week that its CEO, Andrea Czapary Martin, will step down at the end of 2026 after seven years in the role.