HAVING MY SAY - Hello, Suno!
The first time Suno AI generated a song for me, I laughed. Then, panicked. Then, got curious.
Not necessarily in that order. And entirely on live radio, which — as anyone in broadcast will tell you — is the best and worst place to have an existential crisis.
The Shelf Life of a Medium
Let's be honest about something the industry spent years dancing around.
Terrestrial radio in India had been facing challenges long before COVID. This wasn't a secret. It wasn't even a particularly controversial opinion. It was simply an uncomfortable truth that the people with the most to lose were the least incentivized to say out loud.
Audiences were fragmenting. Attention spans were contracting. Streaming was rewriting the rules of music consumption. Podcasts were stealing the intimacy that radio had always claimed as its own. And social media — that monstrous beast — was swallowing entire chunks of consumer attention before breakfast.
Radio networks knew it. The smart ones were already hedging for a while — diversifying into events, OTT, and digital, keeping one hand on the transmitter and one eye on the exit. The less agile ones were adding more stations, cutting more costs, and hoping that scale would somehow substitute for strategy.
It wouldn't. But we'll get to that.
Learning to Speak Every City's Language
Meanwhile, my Radio One story kept finding new avatars. The show went national — Bengaluru , Chennai and Delhi joining Mumbai on the roster — a sharp strategic move to keep the team lean and the footprint wide.
It also handed me something I hadn't anticipated: the added skills needed to become a multi-city host.
Every city, I quickly learned, is its own frequency. Delhi? Aggressive, unapologetic, and magnificently sure of itself. Chennai? Deeply rooted and always happy to reward authenticity. Bangalore? Reflective, cerebral, more likely to quote Dostoevsky than the Sensex. Mumbai — well, Mumbai is metrosexual in the truest sense. Fast-moving. Fiercely ambitious. Chronically sleep-deprived. Quietly fabulous about all of it.
And yet beneath every surface difference, every city was ultimately tuning in for the same things. Connection. Belonging. Purpose. The simple, non-negotiable need to feel something real after a long, hard day.We found our tribe everywhere we went.
Because the tribe, it turns out, was never really about geography.
When Scale Becomes a Substitute for Strategy
In 2019, Radio One was acquired by HT Media Ltd — absorbed into a portfolio play that would combine Fever FM, Radio Nasha, and Radio One across 22 stations in 15 cities.
On paper, it was a masterclass in media consolidation logic. Scale. Reach. Synergies. Operational efficiency. All the right words in all the right slides.
The problem with consolidation, however, is that it tends to optimize for the average. And Radio One was never built to be average. It was built to be specific — a premium, differentiated product in a market that had largely forgotten what differentiation even sounded like. That kind of positioning requires care, consistency, and a sales culture that understands nuance.
Nuance, as it turns out, is the first casualty of a trench war.
The network shut down on 15th June 2026. A quiet, poignant full stop for everyone who had invested years — and, frankly, a piece of themselves — into building something genuinely, stubbornly different.
I had already signed off air in March 2024. Fully at peace with the journey. Grateful for every extraordinary mile of it. Ready — more than ready — for whatever came next.
What came next arrived sooner than I expected, and it arrived in a text prompt.
Hello, Suno
It was March 2024. I was running a daily Generative AI segment on Drive With Erica — road-testing new AI platforms live on air, in real time, with an audience watching the experiment unfold. That particular day, the platform in question was Suno AI.
I typed in a handful of prompts. And then I sat back and listened .
A jazzy bossanova about the streets of Mumbai — husky female vocal, warm bass, nailed in seconds. A trap-rap about those same streets, a Punjabi rap version for good measure, and — the one that really did it — a fully produced 30-second theme tune for my own show, Drive With Erica.
Ideated. Arranged. Mixed. Mastered.
In the time it takes to order a coffee, or less even.
I want to be precise about what happened next, because I think it matters. What I experienced was wonder — but the unhinged, apocalyptic, someone-just-detonated-a-glitter-bomb-inside-my-brain variety. Magnificent and terrifying in equal measure.
For the better part of three decades, I had watched music get made. I understood the craft, the cost, the time, the sheer human capital involved in taking a song from concept to broadcast-ready. Songwriters. Musicians. Session players. Producers. Engineers. Studios booked by the hour. Revisions. More revisions. A budget. A timeline. A team.
That entire ecosystem — compressed into a text box and a few seconds of processing time.
At the time, Suno wasn't disclosing the dataset behind its model, though it assured anyone who asked that plagiarism and copyright concerns had been thoroughly addressed.
Yea, right.
These are conversations the industry — the legal profession, the creative community, the policy makers — is still trying to resolve. And the model has already moved several generations ahead of the debate.But in that moment, the specifics almost didn't matter. What mattered was the signal.
The world of music had changed. Irrevocably. Entirely. And the people who would navigate that change most successfully would not be the ones who panicked, nor the ones who dismissed it. They would be the ones who got curious — and stayed curious.
What Three Decades in Broadcast Taught Me About This Moment
I have watched this industry adapt around every significant shift it has ever faced — digital libraries, streaming, social media, podcasting. Often more painfully than necessary. Occasionally with genuine brilliance.
AI is not different in kind. It is different only in the speed and scale at which it is arriving.
The broadcasters, creators, and media businesses that will matter on the other side of this transition are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the widest distribution. They are the ones who understand — truly understand — how human beings listen, connect, and find meaning in a voice they trust.
That has been my business for thirty years. The tools have simply become considerably more interesting.
Existential threat? For some, undoubtedly yes.
For others — the curious ones, the ones paying attention — just the next chapter.
Waiting to be written.
Next up — the final instalment: leaving radio, going back to school at IIT-M, surviving SQL, falling head-first into machine learning, and the founding of Loca Voca Media — where three decades of analog instinct finally meet AI ambition.
This is Part 5 of "Having My Say" — six essays from the analog-to-AI frontier of Indian broadcasting. If you'd like to talk about what audio can do for your brand — podcasts, sonic identity, or voice AI — Loca Voca Media is always listening.
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