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.
Micro-Dramas and Your Catalog: Where the "Get In Early" Advice Holds and Where It Cracks
The advice making the rounds in every A&R group chat right now is tidy enough to fit on a Post-it: get your catalog into micro-dramas before the format saturates.
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Gender in Music: Why the Live Music Industry Keeps Underselling Its Most Reliable Audience
Here is a question you have probably asked yourself standing at the back of your own room at 9pm on a Friday: when six people show up together on one set of tickets, who actually decided they were…
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What Poland's $11M Bet on ElevenLabs Says About AI Voice Generation — And Who Builds the Next One
Last month I fed a 90-second Polish voiceover into a cloning pipeline to see whether I could ship an English dub of a short film without booking a session.
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What Spotify International Expansion Means for Your Royalties (and Your AI Tracks)
A producer I know shipped an instrumental hip-hop loop pack last year, nothing fancy, a detuned Rhodes over a broken 808 at 84 BPM. His top earning region wasn't Los Angeles or London.
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Voice Trademark Protection: What the New Filings Actually Buy an Artist
Last week I spent an afternoon trying to clone a voice you'd recognize in two syllables. I won't name the singer, but the source was four minutes of clean a cappella, 48kHz, no reverb tail to confuse…
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Where AI Music Generation Gets Its Sound: A Short History of a Borrowed Library
A figure-skating routine goes viral. The music underneath sounds like a song you half-remember — the hook lands where you expect, the vocal grain is familiar, the chord turn at the bridge is the one…
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When IP Licensing Stops Being a File and Starts Being a Set of Rules
The advice everyone gives you is clean and old: clear the rights, take delivery of the assets, keep the paperwork, and you are covered.
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Physical Music Packaging Is Doing More Work Than You Think — and the Evidence Is Thinner Than the Sermon
Last spring a friend who runs a 200-capacity post-punk label sent me a 40-second clip: a fan, somewhere in Leeds, peeling the shrink off a clear-with-black-splatter LP, tilting it under a desk lamp…
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When an Artist Disowns His Own AI Voice: A Field Guide to AI Music Generation Ethics
The most credible voice in the fight over unauthorized AI vocals isn't a label lawyer, a senator, or an ethics-panel keynote.
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