THE INDUSTRY
Copyright rulings, Content ID, label drama, and what the machine age actually means for anyone releasing music. The analysis, minus the panic.
The Licensing Question Nobody at the Label Wants to Answer About AI Music Generation
A sync deal I watched fall apart last year didn't die over money or taste. The placement was approved, the spot was cut, the music supervisor loved the track.
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When an Artist's Catalog Becomes AI Music Training Datasets, Who Said Yes?
Last fall a Grammy-winning singer posted that hundreds of her songs — including tracks she had never released — appeared to have been swept into a generative music model without anyone calling her…
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Reading Spotify Expansion Like a Map: What Office Openings Tell You That Press Releases Don't
A platform announces a new office in a country it was, not so long ago, publicly at odds with. There were takedown demands, a regulator's letter, a few months when the catalog felt politically…
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When SZA Said No: AI Music Generation and the Fight Over Training Data
Last month I fed eight bars of my own singing — a scratch vocal from a film cue I scored in 2016 — into a voice-cloning tool to see what would happen.
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AI Music Detection Tools Promise to Clean Up Your Playlists. Here's What They Can Actually Tell You.
A detector once told me a track on my running playlist was machine-generated. I'd seen the band play it in a basement in Oakland two years earlier — three people, one of whom broke a string.
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AI Music Training and the Consent Problem: What Your Catalog Is Actually Worth
A vocalist I know got a screenshot from a fan last spring. It was a forum thread listing the records an AI model had reportedly been trained on, and her name was on it — a specific number of songs…
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The Anatomy of Music Licensing Disputes: How a Defendant Turns "Pay Up" Into "Prove It"
The advice rights-holders run on is simple enough to fit on a notecard: assemble a catalog, document the unlicensed use, attach a damages figure large enough to command attention, and the platform…
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The Privacy Policy Wall Between You and the Sample: What Consent Actually Does Before You Hear a Note
You followed a link to an industry report — something about international music markets in 2026 — and the report did not load. A privacy policy banner loaded instead.
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The Bot Math: Why 50% Engagement Drop-Off Is the Only Artist Promotion Number That Matters
You open SoundCloud on a Tuesday and the track you posted Sunday night has 4,000 plays. You did nothing. No DSP placement, no blog, no post that took off. Just 4,000 plays, sitting there.
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Music Advertising Trends 2024: Meta vs TikTok for Indie Label Ad Spend
Last month a small electronic label sent me a screenshot before they spent a euro. One line item: €10,000, all of it queued for Meta, because that's where the last three releases had gone and nobody…
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The Italy Music Market Runs on a Belief Most Executives Never Checked
Sit in enough release-strategy meetings about Italy and you will hear the same sentence, said with the confidence of settled fact: it is a melodic market, a legacy market, a place that loves its…
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Artist Burnout Is a Scheduling Problem Before It's a Mental Health One
There's a version of the campaign calendar that looks like competence. Twelve months, color-coded, every release window stacked against the next, content shoots slotted in the white space, a press…
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