Rio Castellanos
Rio Castellanos tests AI music generators against real client briefs — stems, mixes, and export quality — drawing on years behind the desk in working studios.
What AI-Generated Music Statistics Actually Tell Us — and What They Hide
The number that traveled this year wasn't a total, it was a share: on one large streaming service, more than half the tracks uploaded on an average day were generated by software.
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TikTok Adoption by Legacy Acts: The Metrics That Justify the Late Arrival
A band I follow posted its first video last month. The account was four days old, had a blue check, and opened with a clip of the drummer waving at a ring light like he'd been handed someone else's…
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Indonesia's Copyright Reform Is the Most Interesting Thing Happening in AI Music Law — and Almost Nobody Can Enforce It Yet
The most important AI-music copyright fight of the year is not in Brussels, and it is not in a US federal courtroom.
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AI Music Adoption Is Real — But "Using AI" Means Eight Different Jobs
Last Tuesday I ran a stupid little experiment on the clock, mostly to settle an argument with myself.
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AI Music Generation Copyright Law: What Germany's Section 16 and 19a Do That U.S. Fair Use Can't
You have probably asked yourself some version of this question in a conference room with the general counsel and two outside firms billing by the six-minute increment: if an AI music company is on the…
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What Happens When an AI Music Generation Startup Gets Acquired: The Mechanism Behind the Consolidation
The founder posts one last message in the company Slack — "grateful for every one of you, more soon" — and then the channel goes read-only.
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South Korea Music Regulation: Would Pre-Release Screening Actually Reach Your Catalog?
A distributor I know — mid-size, moves K-pop B-sides and a lot of indie electronic into Asian DSPs — sent me a two-line message last month.
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AI Music Detection Won't Tell You Who Gets Paid
Deezer said it out loud before most of its competitors did: on some days, roughly a third of the tracks arriving at its ingestion pipeline are fully machine-generated.
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AI Music Labeling: How the Metadata Tags, Platform Rules, and Detection Actually Compare
You render a track in your AI tool of choice — an 80 BPM downtempo thing, warm Rhodes-ish keys you played in yourself, a bassline the model generated, your own vocal chop on top.
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