// Writer · 7 signals

Hannah Mercer

Ai Music A dimly lit home recording studio at night, shot on a full-frame camera with…
Ai Music · 5 min

AI Music Labeling Sounds Simple. The Detection Under It Isn't.

A distributor I know got a takedown-adjacent question from a platform last quarter: prove this catalog of 400 tracks is human-made. Not "confirm you hold the rights" — that they could do.

Read signal →
Policy A professional documentary photograph of a dimly lit industry conference room, a speaker in…
Policy · 11 min

Ticket Pricing Transparency Won't Kill the Box Office Job — But the Story Everyone Tells About It Might

There is a line you hear at every ticketing panel, delivered with the confidence of a weather report: regulate the resale market and you will destroy jobs.

Read signal →
Ai Music A dimly lit modern home music studio at night, shot on a full-frame camera…
Ai Music · 6 min

AI Music Policy Is Being Written Around One Number, and You Should Know What It Doesn't Measure

A distributor made headlines when it said something like a third of the tracks arriving through its pipe each day were AI-generated.

Read signal →
Ai Music A dimly lit professional recording studio at 11pm, shot on a 35mm lens with…
Ai Music · 6 min

When SZA Said No: AI Music Generation and the Fight Over Training Data

Last month I fed eight bars of my own singing — a scratch vocal from a film cue I scored in 2016 — into a voice-cloning tool to see what would happen.

Read signal →
Touring A sweeping wide-angle photograph taken from the upper deck of a packed open-air stadium…
Touring · 4 min

Concert Tour Revenue Isn't Collapsing — It's Splitting in Two

You have heard the obituary by now. Mid-tier acts pulling tours mid-routing, club promoters underwater, a venue circuit that can't make rent between the 800-cap room and the 4,000-cap theater.

Read signal →
Local Inference Close-up macro photograph of a Pioneer DDJ-FLX4 DJ controller on a dark studio desk…
Local Inference · 12 min

Can You Run AI Music Generation Locally for a Live DJ Set? Magenta, Stable Audio, and an FLX4 on the Desk

You turn the filter knob on the FLX4, and there's a beat — not a musical one, a dead one — before the audio answers. Three hundred milliseconds, maybe four hundred. In a studio that's nothing.

Read signal →
Ai Video A dimly lit home studio at 2 a.m., shot from a low three-quarter angle…
Ai Video · 5 min

Can AI Music Video Generators Actually Carry Your Single? A Working Answer for Broke Indies

It's 2 a.m. and I'm rendering a 38-second vertical clip for a friend's single that drops in nine hours.

Read signal →