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 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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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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