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.
The Gallery Analogy Is Doing a Lot of Work in AI Copyright Regulation
Last month I ran a small test, mostly out of suspicion. I took a bassline I know cold — a detuned analog walk in F minor, the kind of line that sits under a thousand library cues — and I described it…
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AI Music Detection in Practice: What Holds Up When the Verdict Gets Challenged
A dispute lands on your desk on a Tuesday. A distributor flagged a track in your catalog as machine-generated, pulled it from three DSPs, and now the artist's lawyer wants to know what produced that…
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Prediction Markets Are Coming for Your Song Catalog — and SongPicks Is the First Real Test
I put twenty dollars on a song last month. Not on the artist, not on a stream-count milestone three years out — on a specific question with a specific deadline: would a particular pop single still sit…
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Artist Development When AI Music Generation Is Part of Your Stack: What Most People Do, What Works, What I Actually Do
A label-adjacent "artist development program" emailed me last spring. The subject line promised mentorship, funding, and "platform support." I clicked through three pages of aspirational copy and…
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AI Music Generation Has a Consent Problem It Was Born With
An artist opens a search box, types her own name into a public index of AI training data, and watches the results stack up. Not a track or two. Her catalog.
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The "Open Source" Trap in AI Training Data Licensing: Why a Free Research Dataset Can Still Cost You Millions
A research dataset shows up on a university mirror. A few thousand tracks, neatly tagged by genre, key, and BPM, every file marked Creative Commons, the whole package described in the README as "open…
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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.
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The Bot Math: Why 50% Engagement Drop-Off Is the Only Artist Promotion Number That Matters
You open SoundCloud on a Tuesday and the track you posted Sunday night has 4,000 plays. You did nothing. No DSP placement, no blog, no post that took off. Just 4,000 plays, sitting there.
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The Italy Music Market Runs on a Belief Most Executives Never Checked
Sit in enough release-strategy meetings about Italy and you will hear the same sentence, said with the confidence of settled fact: it is a melodic market, a legacy market, a place that loves its…
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