THE INDUSTRY
Copyright rulings, Content ID, label drama, and what the machine age actually means for anyone releasing music. The analysis, minus the panic.
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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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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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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Fair Use Versus Mechanical Royalty Rates: When Does Reuse Owe You Nothing?
Nine-point-one cents. That was the statutory mechanical rate for a physical copy or a permanent download in the United States, frozen at that figure from 2006 until the Phonorecords III proceedings…
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What AI Deepfake Detection Can and Can't Do About Scraping
A friend who scores mobile games sent me a link last spring: a thirty-second clip on a video app, a stranger's name in the corner, built around a vocal hook that was unmistakably hers — the same…
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Where AI Music Generation Gets Its Training Data — And Why Nobody Will Say
The first time I tried to trace where a popular text-to-music model got its training data, I got a marketing page, a terms-of-service link, and a paragraph that leaned on the word "proprietary" three…
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The AI-Generated Music Statistics Everyone Quotes — and the Thin Source Underneath
There is a number that has quietly become the load-bearing wall of every AI-and-music panel this year: the claim that a majority of tracks uploaded to a major streaming service each day are now…
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AI Music Labelling: Which Standard Do You Actually Build Compliance Around?
Here is the question I keep hearing from licensing desks, phrased a dozen slightly different ways: do I wait for a single, agreed AI music labelling standard, or do I build my compliance path on the…
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Why Latin Music Acquisitions Are the Cleverest Bet in the Catalog Business
Here's the claim, stated flat so you can argue with it later: the investors circling Latin catalogs right now are not buying nostalgia.
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What AI-Generated Music Statistics Actually Tell Us — and What They Hide
The number that traveled this year wasn't a total, it was a share: on one large streaming service, more than half the tracks uploaded on an average day were generated by software.
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Suno and the Bet on AI Music Generation: What the $5.4B Valuation Actually Prices In
The advice making the rounds among people writing checks into AI music is tidy enough to fit on a napkin: buy the growth, the lawsuits are noise.
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Spotify Features Keep Deciding What Your Song Means — And Artists Are Pushing Back
You publish a track. Weeks later, someone screenshots the page and sends it to you: under your song title, a paragraph you didn't write, generated by a model, telling listeners what your song is…
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