Imogen Hale
Imogen Hale reports on the business side of AI music — licensing terms, royalties, and copyright — reading the fine print so working creators don't get burned.
AI Music Generation Broke the Oldest Rule in Music Video Production
The edit was locked at 2:47. The track ran 3:12, and the only place it wanted to end was a long ringing decay that arrived eleven seconds after the last shot.
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What AI Music's Merger Wave Tells You About Macroeconomic Policy
Two minutes into rendering a 96 BPM bed for a client's trailer cut, the vendor dashboard reloaded with a new logo and a fresh terms-of-service banner. Same model, same latency, new owner.
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64 Percent: What a Blind Test Really Says About AI Music Generation in Games
Fourteen out of twenty-two. That's how many people correctly picked the human-composed loop when I dropped two eight-bar clips into a Discord full of game developers and audio people and asked which…
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The AI Music Generation Impact on Royalties, and What Actually Protects Your Payouts
A 92 BPM loop I built for a puzzle game in 2018 — detuned Rhodes, brushed kit, tape hiss I never bothered to clean up — is still in rotation somewhere.
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Can AI Music Detection Tools Keep Your Playlists Human? I Tested Them On My Own Library
The track was 74 BPM, minor key, the kind of warm neo-soul instrumental that ends up three songs deep in a focus playlist. I liked it for about forty seconds.
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Music Industry M&A Is Paying Catalog Prices for Assets That Go Home at Six
Providence Equity Partners is reported to be moving to full ownership of Casey Wasserman's agency — rebranded THE•TEAM in May — at a valuation of roughly $3.4 billion, per trade reporting picked up…
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AI Music Generation Licensing: The Rule Everyone Repeats, and Where It Quietly Breaks
The one-pager landed at eleven at night with a question mark in the subject line. A product manager I know at a small generative-audio company had five sentences of compliance copy her counsel had…
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Anthropic Copyright Litigation, Compared: Three Cases, Three Theories of Harm
Ask a large language model to write something in the manner of a well-known songwriter, and you get one of two results.
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The 26% Problem: AI Agents and Autonomy When Detection Barely Works
In July 2023, OpenAI quietly retired its own AI text detector. The classifier it had launched six months earlier correctly flagged about 26% of AI-written text as "likely AI-written," and it…
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