THE SIGNAL
Guides, tutorials, and brutally honest reviews on AI music generation, royalty-free sound, and the future of production. Tune in.
Music Industry M&A Is Paying Catalog Prices for Assets That Go Home at Six
Providence Equity Partners is reported to be moving to full ownership of Casey Wasserman's agency — rebranded THE•TEAM in May — at a valuation of roughly $3.4 billion, per trade reporting picked up…
The Noisy 2.6 Synth Update: Is the Expression in the Engine, or in the Effects?
The patch was a bowed metal thing — filtered noise pushed into a resonator sitting somewhere near D, no oscillator in the traditional sense anywhere in the signal path — and for about ten minutes I…
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Data Breach and Cybersecurity in AI Music: What the Suno Leak Actually Exposed
The most valuable thing stolen from an AI music company is not your credit card number. It's the repository.
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AI Music Generation Licensing: The Rule Everyone Repeats, and Where It Quietly Breaks
The one-pager landed at eleven at night with a question mark in the subject line. A product manager I know at a small generative-audio company had five sentences of compliance copy her counsel had…
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AI Music Licensing Ethics: The Clauses That Actually Protect Artists
The clause sat on page nine of a production-library agreement, between the delivery specs and the credit language: the licensee could use delivered stems "for the development, training and improvement…
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AI Music Generation Economics: Where the "It Doesn't Pay" Consensus Breaks Down
The advice has been the same in every label strategy deck for a couple of years now: AI music is a volume problem, not a revenue problem.
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Ninety Seconds: How AI Music Generation Actually Reaches Your Royalty Statement
Ninety seconds. That was the render time. I fed a prompt into an AI music generation tool on a Tuesday afternoon — 92 BPM, brushed kit, a detuned Juno pad underneath, melancholy but not sad — and…
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Anthropic Copyright Litigation, Compared: Three Cases, Three Theories of Harm
Ask a large language model to write something in the manner of a well-known songwriter, and you get one of two results.
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AI Voice Cloning Scams: A Sound Designer's Guide to the Call You Shouldn't Trust
The first time a cloned voice fooled me, I was sitting at my own mixing desk. A friend sent me eight seconds of a synthetic version of me as a joke — scraped from a podcast I'd done — saying a…
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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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The 26% Problem: AI Agents and Autonomy When Detection Barely Works
In July 2023, OpenAI quietly retired its own AI text detector. The classifier it had launched six months earlier correctly flagged about 26% of AI-written text as "likely AI-written," and it…
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AI-Generated Music Bans Aren't About Taste — They're About the Math
Last Tuesday I set a kitchen timer for sixty minutes and tried to bury my own hard drive. One text prompt after another, minor variations, no listening back beyond a few seconds to confirm the render…
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