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.
Fake Artist Prevention: Why Your AI Music Generation Policy Should Ignore the Audio
A few months back I dropped twenty-four thirty-second clips into a Discord full of working mixing engineers and asked them to sort human from machine. Twelve came out of text-to-music models.
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AI Music Generation on Trial: The Lawsuits Are Setting a Price, Not a Ban
The lawsuits over AI music generation are not, in the main, an attempt to stop it. They are an attempt to price it. That sounds like cynicism. It is closer to a reading of the paperwork.
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Scrape, Caption, Train, Ship: How AI Music Generation Actually Gets Made
The render came back at 128 BPM, minor key, with exactly the sludgy 808 I had asked for. About eleven seconds in, buried in the tail of a reversed cymbal, there was a syllable.
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How to Price-Check a Streaming Price Rise: A Working Guide to Streaming Economics
The advice comes back around like a chorus. A service raises its monthly price, the timeline fills with cancellation threats, and someone from the industry side says the calming thing: a higher…
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What Copyright Law Actually Protects When Two Tracks Sound Alike
The email had two attachments: a 48kHz WAV of a lo-fi beat, and a PDF of a cease-and-desist. The producer who sent it was sure he'd been robbed.
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Fair Use Versus Mechanical Royalty Rates: When Does Reuse Owe You Nothing?
Nine-point-one cents. That was the statutory mechanical rate for a physical copy or a permanent download in the United States, frozen at that figure from 2006 until the Phonorecords III proceedings…
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Where AI Music Generation Gets Its Training Data — And Why Nobody Will Say
The first time I tried to trace where a popular text-to-music model got its training data, I got a marketing page, a terms-of-service link, and a paragraph that leaned on the word "proprietary" three…
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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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