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.
The 20 Percent Number: What One Detection Study Actually Says About AI Music Generation Enforcement
Every few months a number circulates through the AI music generation compliance conversation, and it is almost always a detection-accuracy figure: a platform or a research group reports that its…
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AI Voice Cloning Isn't a Copyright Problem — And That's Exactly Why It's So Hard to Stop
The last time I cast a voice actor for a game, the booth work took three hours and the paperwork took longer.
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The Watermark Question: What Detection Can and Can't Prove About AI Music Generation
Zero. That is the number of independent, published audits I have been able to put in front of someone who asked me a reasonable question: does a commercial audio watermark actually survive a real…
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How to Measure Tour Uplift in Streaming Analytics (Without Trusting the Recap Deck)
A promoter's recap deck lands in your inbox the Monday after the final night: ticket count in seven figures, a livestream viewership record, and one line set in 40-point type saying streams doubled in…
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AI Voice Cloning and Unauthorized Covers: What NIL Rights Can and Can't Do for Nepali Musicians
I spent an afternoon cloning myself. Forty-one seconds of dry vocal from a 2019 game trailer — me counting in over a click, no reverb, nothing under it — was enough for a consumer voice model to hand…
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AI Songwriting Ethics: The Training Data Question Nobody Puts on the Label
The email came in at 11:40 on a Thursday, three days before delivery: Please confirm no generative AI was used in the delivered assets. One line, no definitions.
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Free EQ Plugins That Do Dynamics: ZL Audio, TDR Nova, and LSP Plugins Compared
The vocal sat fine until bar 33, when the pad came in. Suddenly there was a 220 Hz shelf of mud that hadn't existed thirty seconds earlier — two sources, one frequency region, one of them arriving…
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Microtuning and MPE Inside Unified Audio AI Models: Where the Pitch Layer Breaks
The brief was four bars of ambient bed for a temple level, and it said one thing clearly: not Western tuning.
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IFPI AI Music Regulations: Will Your AI-Assisted Track Still Count as a Record?
The dropdown appeared on my distributor's upload page between the ISRC field and the explicit-content toggle: Was AI used in the creation of this recording? Yes. No.
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