He Called The AI Music Boss Arrogant. Here's Why · Sigurdur Arnason, Overtune

What we talked about.

Sunny Ray talks with Sigurdur Arnason, founder of Overtune, a music creation platform built for vocalists and creators who want to arrange beats without mastering tools like Pro Tools or Ableton. A former teenage pop star and jazz pianist from Iceland, Sigurdur describes Overtune less as an AI music generator and more as a Canva or CapCut for music, focused on empowering people who have melodies in their heads but no production skills. He recounts founding the company in 2020 with two co-founders, hitting number one in Iceland within a day of launch, and raising two million dollars from investors inside music and gaming. The conversation turns to his public clash with Suno CEO Mikey Shulman, whose claim that no one likes making music Sigurdur called arrogant. He also details Overtune's current pipeline strategy, building a virtual music studio inside Roblox that hit three million users in ninety days, then feeding creators toward SoundCloud. Throughout, Sigurdur argues creators are angry not at AI itself but at technology accelerating trends already reshaping music and attention.

Overtune's founder explains why he called Suno's CEO arrogant, and why music tools should feel like Canva, not a black box.

The questions, and the answers.

What is Overtune and what problem are you solving?

It's not really an AI music platform, it's a music platform. Think of it like CatCut or Canva for music. We're building it mainly for music creators and vocalists, particularly ones who want to sync over beats. It's for people who can play something but can't arrange it, closing the gap that used to require Pro Tools, Logic, or Ableton skills.

What were you doing before Overtune, and what made you think an app could do a better job?

I wasn't making anything, I was in branding and marketing for energy companies. But I'm an ex-musician, actually a teenage pop star in the Nordics, and more of a singer-songwriter. I always had to work with producers using tools like Pro Tools, Logic, or Ableton, and those are really hard to use.

How did you and your two co-founders split up building the company?

I think every company should have a combination of a hipster, a hacker, and a hustler. Sometimes that's three people, sometimes two, sometimes one person does it all. The hipster covers marketing, graphic design, and soft skills, often that person also does sales, and the hacker is the technology side.

You called the idea that most people dislike making music infuriating, wrong, and arrogant. Can you say more?

That was aimed at Mikey Shulman, the CEO of Suno. I have nothing against the technology, I think it's interesting. But when you generalize over a whole cohort of people and say no one likes making music, it's like me saying I'm an atheist so there's no God, so you can't be Buddhist or Christian. That's a rushed, arrogant statement.

What's the most expensive thing you believed about creators that turned out to be wrong?

That you have to use social media marketing and pay for it to get users. That's a very expensive thing to do, and you shouldn't really do it unless you're a big corporation, and maybe not even then.

Six years in, who are you building for now, and how has that changed?

We look at this company more like a pipeline than a standalone platform. We built a virtual music studio for Roblox and in the past ninety days got three million users. We're also integrating into SoundCloud on the other end, so it's creator to artist, converting Roblox users into Overtune users and then into SoundCloud.

What did that first week as the number one app in Iceland teach you, and what did you have to unlearn?

Honestly, nothing at first, it just derailed us because it looked like a nice number. Maybe it taught me it's hard to scale something as a platform versus a tool. People think founders need a lot of money or to be super smart. I'm not smart, we don't have much money, but we have a high pain threshold, and that's the real key in this space.

What do AI music companies get wrong about creators?

I think everything, because they treat music like disposable sound and not the language of emotions. That's why people are upset about something so dear to them. Creators hate it, that's what these companies get wrong, but the technology itself is interesting and it opens up a conversation worth having.