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 Album Launch Campaign Is a Story Music Marketing Keeps Telling Itself
Sometime last year a legacy rock act rolled out an album with a bracket. Not a tour bracket — a World Cup-style knockout tournament, band members captaining fictional teams, fans voting through a…
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AI Music Generation Has a Consent Problem, and Black Artists Are Paying the Bill
The problem with AI music generation is not that the music sounds bad. Plenty of it sounds fine. The problem is the ledger — the list of names whose work went into the machine, who never got asked…
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Where to Distribute AI Music: The Streaming Platform AI Music Policy That Actually Affects Your Payout
You upload a track through your distributor on a Tuesday. Wednesday it's "in review." Friday you get an email: the release is held pending "clarification of the tools used in production." You didn't…
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Trade Dress Infringement, Six Years, and $17.9M: What OMG Girlz vs L.O.L. Surprise! Teaches Anyone Licensing an Artist's Brand
The arithmetic tells the whole story before the law does. A jury in September 2024 put the number at $71.5 million. A judge knocked it to $1 on a technicality of damages calculation.
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Whose Name Goes on the Track? AI Music Policy and the Composer Identity Problem
There is a field in every distributor's upload form marked Composer. Sometimes it is required, sometimes it is not, and for a fully AI-generated instrumental it is the field where an honest person…
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The $10 Million Question: What AI Music Generation Artist Programs Actually Fund
A round number lands in your inbox with the word "fund" next to it — say ten million dollars, earmarked for independent artists by a company built on AI music generation. The press language is warm.
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AI-Generated Music Policy Is Now a Royalty-Pool Problem: What Distributors and Labels Actually Have to Do
A track lands in a distributor's ingestion queue at 2 a.m. — a moody downtempo instrumental, 82 BPM, F minor, delivered as a 48kHz WAV with stems.
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What GPS Trackers on a Tour Van Tell Us About K-Pop Industry Ethics
Last month a client sent me a phone recording of a fan chant from a stadium show and asked whether I could clean it up into a crowd bed for a promo edit. Standard request.
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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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