Caroline Hester
Paid Social Marketing for Music Has a Disclosure Problem, and Labels Own the Risk
A campaign brief crosses your desk on a Tuesday. Twelve creators, mid-tier followings, each posting a fifteen-second Reel with your artist's new single under a lip-sync or a get-ready-with-me.
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AI Music Labeling Won't Tell You What You Think It Tells You
A label that says "AI-generated" on a track doesn't tell a listener whether a machine made the music.
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What AI Regulation Actually Asks For: A Songwriter's Ledger, One Motion at a Time
I spent a Tuesday afternoon doing something unglamorous: reading a royalty statement out loud to nobody, line by line, trying to find the number that matters.
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One Song Should Ship as Twelve Videos: AI Music Video Generators and the New Math of Release
Your song is finished. That was the easy part. I know that sounds backwards. You spent three weeks on the mix, chased the low end through four revisions, finally got the vocal to sit.
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AI Music Generation and Master Rights: What You Actually Own When the Model Sings a Gamelan
Last month I fed a generator a four-bar phrase built around an interlocking kulintang-style pattern — bronze gongs, a lilting call-and-response I'd transcribed years ago from a field recording.
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Spotify Direct Uploads and the Quiet Math of Cross-Platform Release
A release strategist I trade notes with sent me a screenshot last spring: a track that had been sitting flat at a few hundred monthly listeners, then a vertical line the day she posted a thirty-second…
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