THE INDUSTRY
Copyright rulings, Content ID, label drama, and what the machine age actually means for anyone releasing music. The analysis, minus the panic.
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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Why SoundCloud Wants Your Live DJ Set: Inside the Streaming Land Grab
A producer I know went live last month from a spare bedroom in Leeds — two controllers, a ring light pointed at the ceiling because direct light washed her out, and a set of unreleased edits she'd…
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Why Music Rights Acquisitions Don't Close on the First Try
The advice you hear at every rights conference is some version of this: a good catalog sells itself. Capital is deep, music is a non-correlated asset, the institutions are lined up around the block…
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Prediction Markets Are Coming for Your Song Catalog — and SongPicks Is the First Real Test
I put twenty dollars on a song last month. Not on the artist, not on a stream-count milestone three years out — on a specific question with a specific deadline: would a particular pop single still sit…
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Where Is the Institutional Money in AI Music Generation Actually Going?
You have probably asked yourself some version of this in a Monday meeting: when a private-equity shop or a major label puts real money behind AI music generation, what are they actually buying — and…
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The Training Data Question: What AI Music Generation Owes the Artists It Learned From
Last month I typed a friend's stage name into the search box of a public dataset that several music models were trained on.
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AI Music Training and the YouTube Clause: How Your Catalog Becomes Someone Else's Dataset
There is a sentence in YouTube's terms of service that most artists scroll past on their way to hitting publish.
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AI Voice Generation Is Coming for Audio Ads — But "Set It and Forget It" Is the Wrong Read
First Snap, then Spotify. Within the same stretch of earnings-season optimism, two platforms that sell attention by the second started pitching the same idea to advertisers: describe your product…
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AI Music Generation Has a Consent Problem It Was Born With
An artist opens a search box, types her own name into a public index of AI training data, and watches the results stack up. Not a track or two. Her catalog.
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Meta Platform Development and the $46 Billion Question Behind the Prediction-Market Bet
There's a number that should sit at the top of any memo about a new Meta platform, and it isn't a user count.
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The Quiet Trap in AI Training Data Licensing: What a Dataset's Curation Owns That the Songs Don't
You can clear every single track in a dataset — every Creative Commons attribution, every share-alike clause, every artist credit logged and honored — and still lose a copyright case over that…
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What Did Clive Davis Actually Hear? The Question Behind a Half-Century of A&R
Here is a question anyone who has ever sat in a chair with the power to say yes or no to a song has asked themselves at two in the morning: what was Clive Davis actually hearing that the rest of the…
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