// Editor, The Signal · 37 signals

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.

Music Marketing A close-up over-the-shoulder photograph of a focused indie label manager seated at a tidy…
Music Marketing · 10 min

Music Advertising Trends 2024: Meta vs TikTok for Indie Label Ad Spend

Last month a small electronic label sent me a screenshot before they spent a euro. One line item: €10,000, all of it queued for Meta, because that's where the last three releases had gone and nobody…

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Ai Music A close-up photorealistic photograph of a professional sound designer's studio desk, featuring a sleek…
Ai Music · 5 min

Stable Audio Review: A Sound Designer's Tool Wearing a Songwriter's Marketing

There is a moment that tells you what a tool is really for. With Stable Audio it came when I asked for a "moody synthwave track, full arrangement, three minutes" and got back something that started…

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Distribution A solo independent musician seated alone in a softly lit home recording studio, head…
Distribution · 6 min

Spotify Direct Uploads Won't Make You a Video Platform — They'll Feed Your Audio

Here is the counterintuitive part, stated plainly: when you upload a music video to Spotify, the video is not the product. Your audio stream is.

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Streaming A dimly lit movie theater seen from behind the back row, the wide silver…
Streaming · 9 min

When Music Biopic Box Office Records Move Catalog Value: What a Theatrical Release Really Buys

A music biopic can clear nine figures at the global box office and still hand most of its lasting value to a company whose name never appears on the poster.

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Licensing A dimly lit professional recording studio shot from a low angle, an aging male…
Licensing · 5 min

AI Music Re-Recording Could Hand Catalogue Power Back to Artists — Or Just Move the Money Around

Boy George, by most accounts, should hate this. He is the frontman of an act whose biggest songs are decades old, the kind of artist you would expect to treat a machine singing his catalogue as theft…

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Music Industry A dramatic close-up photograph of a darkened computer screen displaying a glowing fabricated bank…
Music Industry · 5 min

The Napster Fraud Case and the $3 Billion That Wasn't There

A number ran through every headline about Napster's reinvention: $3 billion. That was the figure attached to the investor backing Infinite Reality, the company that bought the Napster brand in 2025…

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Streaming A close-up macro photograph of a smartphone screen displaying a generic music streaming interface…
Streaming · 10 min

AI Music Detection on Spotify: Can You Actually Tell What You're Streaming?

A track surfaced in my Discover Weekly last month that I couldn't place. Mid-tempo, lo-fi, a warm Rhodes chord loop, brushed drums, the kind of thing that sits politely under a study playlist.

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Ip Licensing A dramatic studio portrait of an empty vintage theater stage set against a deep…
Ip Licensing · 5 min

Infinite Reality and the New IP Licensing Question: When You License a Character's Behavior, Not Just Its Face

A brand I know cleared a beloved animated character for a holiday campaign. Likeness: approved. The catalog of pre-written lines: approved, lawyered, locked.

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Ai Video A professional video editor sitting alone in a dimly lit post-production suite late at…
Ai Video · 6 min

Unified Voice and Lip-Sync in AI Video Generation: Can One Platform Replace Your Five-Tool Stack?

A 14-language product launch, one talking-head avatar, and an 80-millisecond lip-sync drift that nobody caught until the German cut hit final QA.

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