Somewhere in the mid-1970s, my band Gangbusters and I recorded a handful of songs I'd written — music and lyrics both, my voice on the tape, my hands on the instruments. We never released them commercially. Never sent them to a label. We made a few cassette copies for the guys in the band and moved on with our lives. Decades later, I finally got around to putting them up on my own website, right alongside the rest of the history I've been building here — the Museum of Rock & Roll pages we've been putting together, my own recordings, fifty years of a life spent making music in one form or another.
This summer I started using an AI tool called Suno to breathe new life into some of that old material — modernize the production, sharpen the arrangements, keep my voice and my words exactly as I wrote them. It worked beautifully on several songs. Then I tried two more, "Tonight I Want You" and "Can You Feel It?", and got a message telling me the audio "matches material that is currently available on the internet."
I went back and checked. These four songs, from the exact same website, written and performed by the exact same person, had already gone through Suno without a hitch:
"Hold Me Now" — sailed through, no issue
"Do Dat Stuff" — sailed through, no issue
"With You" — sailed through, no issue
"One and One" — sailed through, no issue
And these two, from the same domain I've owned and hosted for more than twenty years, got flagged and blocked:
"Tonight I Want You" — blocked
"Can You Feel It?" — blocked
I wrote to their support team. Twice I got the same canned explanation, word for word, about how their system detects material "already on YouTube or Spotify." Neither song has ever been on either. Eventually I sent them a longer, more detailed message — proof of domain ownership, an explanation of how copyright actually works (it's automatic, the moment you create something; you don't need to register it to own it), and a direct question: what can I do to use my own music?
Their reply confirmed the WHOIS record. They agreed I own the domain. And they told me, plainly, that it didn't matter — the detection system doesn't check who owns anything, it just flags whatever it finds reachable on the public internet, and nobody on their support team has the ability to manually clear a flag for a specific upload. Not "won't." Can't.
I'd actually written a piece defending Suno a while back, against people calling the whole idea of AI music "slop." I still believe in the tool itself. What I don't believe in anymore is a company that builds a system capable of this kind of contradiction — four songs through, two blocked, no explanation for the difference — and never builds a single human being into the process who's allowed to say "that one's wrong, let's fix it."
I've since moved my project over to a different platform, and it worked on the first try, no questions asked. The songs will get their modern facelift one way or another. Fifty years is a long time to wait to hear them the way I always imagined they could sound, and I'm not going to let one company's broken escalation process be the reason I stop trying.