Nova Reyes
Nova Reyes edits The Signal and reviews AI music tools after a decade scoring indie games and short films; still owns four broken synthesizers.
AI Coding Agents Write Faster Than You Can Read. So Why Are You Still the Bottleneck?
A pull request landed in my queue last Tuesday at 9:14 a.m. The agent had written it in about ninety seconds: a refactor of a payment-retry path, four files touched, 230 lines changed, a commit…
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Music Publishing's Regional Land Grab Isn't About Buying Catalogs Anymore
When a mid-size publisher announces it is "entering" the Latin or African or Southeast Asian market, the instinct among people watching the cap table is to ask how big the catalog was and what…
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The Suno AI Music Generation Settlement Is the License Template, Not the Lawsuit
The lawsuit was never the story. The settlement is. For two years the music industry treated AI audio companies as defendants — entities to be sued into either compliance or extinction.
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Why Music Rights Acquisitions Don't Close on the First Try
The advice you hear at every rights conference is some version of this: a good catalog sells itself. Capital is deep, music is a non-correlated asset, the institutions are lined up around the block…
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Algorithm Customization Is Quietly Killing the Discovery Plan Your Artist Was Counting On
Here is a claim worth stating before I soften it with caveats: the single biggest threat to your artist's next release is not a competitor, a label, or a bad mix.
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AI Music Training and the YouTube Clause: How Your Catalog Becomes Someone Else's Dataset
There is a sentence in YouTube's terms of service that most artists scroll past on their way to hitting publish.
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What Did Clive Davis Actually Hear? The Question Behind a Half-Century of A&R
Here is a question anyone who has ever sat in a chair with the power to say yes or no to a song has asked themselves at two in the morning: what was Clive Davis actually hearing that the rest of the…
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When an Artist's Catalog Becomes AI Music Training Datasets, Who Said Yes?
Last fall a Grammy-winning singer posted that hundreds of her songs — including tracks she had never released — appeared to have been swept into a generative music model without anyone calling her…
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The Anatomy of Music Licensing Disputes: How a Defendant Turns "Pay Up" Into "Prove It"
The advice rights-holders run on is simple enough to fit on a notecard: assemble a catalog, document the unlicensed use, attach a damages figure large enough to command attention, and the platform…
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