THE INDUSTRY
Copyright rulings, Content ID, label drama, and what the machine age actually means for anyone releasing music. The analysis, minus the panic.
Can You Trademark a Voice? The Idea Is Older and Thinner Than You Think
Somewhere in a filing queue at the trademark office, an artist is trying to register the sound of their own throat.
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Venue Ownership Is the Quiet Engine of Music Industry M&A
There is a persistent belief among people who model live-entertainment companies for a living: that the venue itself is the boring part. The brand has the pricing power.
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AI Music Detection Is a Forensic Craft Now — Here's How the Pros Actually Do It
A country single crossed an A&R friend's desk last winter with a backstory that checked out on paper: a regional act, a clutch of streams, a label-ready master at 48kHz. The voice had grit.
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AI and Music Rights Won't Be Settled in Court — They'll Be Settled in Infrastructure
The fight over AI and music rights will not be settled by a landmark verdict. It will be settled by whoever builds the registries, the metadata, and the payment rails that decide who gets paid when a…
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TIDAL's AI Music Generation Policy vs. The Streaming Status Quo: Whose Royalties Actually Survive
A producer I work with sent me her quarterly streaming statement last spring with one line circled in red: the per-stream rate on a catalog of forty tracks had slipped again, and she couldn't tell…
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The Cost Comparison Tech Giants Don't Want in the AI Copyright Regulation Debate
A friend who runs a small commercial studio sent me two numbers last month. The first was an invoice: $4,200 for a three-day session to cut a 90-second cue for a regional ad.
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Music Publishing's Regional Land Grab Isn't About Buying Catalogs Anymore
When a mid-size publisher announces it is "entering" the Latin or African or Southeast Asian market, the instinct among people watching the cap table is to ask how big the catalog was and what…
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The "Buy Catalogs, Win the Market" Rule of Music Publishing — Where It Breaks Down
The advice you hear at every conference panel and in every investor deck goes like this: if you want to grow in an emerging market, buy the catalog.
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The Gallery Analogy Is Doing a Lot of Work in AI Copyright Regulation
Last month I ran a small test, mostly out of suspicion. I took a bassline I know cold — a detuned analog walk in F minor, the kind of line that sits under a thousand library cues — and I described it…
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Net Proceeds: What Charity Music Festivals Actually Move
A benefit festival sells a ticket for, say, $150. By the time the cause sees money, the line on the press release reads "net proceeds." Somewhere between that $150 and the check that lands at a…
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The Suno AI Music Generation Settlement Is the License Template, Not the Lawsuit
The lawsuit was never the story. The settlement is. For two years the music industry treated AI audio companies as defendants — entities to be sued into either compliance or extinction.
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AI Music Detection in Practice: What Holds Up When the Verdict Gets Challenged
A dispute lands on your desk on a Tuesday. A distributor flagged a track in your catalog as machine-generated, pulled it from three DSPs, and now the artist's lawyer wants to know what produced that…
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