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 Labeling Sounds Simple. The Detection Under It Isn't.
A distributor I know got a takedown-adjacent question from a platform last quarter: prove this catalog of 400 tracks is human-made. Not "confirm you hold the rights" — that they could do.
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AI Music Labeling Is Coming to Your Upload Pipeline — Here's What the Standard Actually Says
A number has been doing a lot of work lately. Somewhere between a rights-holder panel and a product roadmap deck, "half of new uploads are AI-generated" became the load-bearing fact of the AI music…
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Music Industry News You Should Read Sideways: How Talent Firms Signal a Move Into Music
A talent management company announces a "Music Division." There's a named executive at the top, a paragraph of prior affiliations — a major label here, a management shop there, a Grammy mention if…
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AI Music Labeling: Where the Line Between "Generated" and "Assisted" Actually Breaks
A track lands in your ingestion queue. The topline vocal is unmistakably synthetic — cloned timbre, that faint plastic sheen on the sibilants at 6kHz.
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Copyright Law at the Border: Why a Quiet EU Proposal Could Pull $300M From US Artists
Last spring I pulled a royalty statement for a track of mine that had been licensed to a mid-size European retail chain — background music, in-store, the kind of use that plays a few thousand times a…
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Reading the Room: What a Single Executive Appointment Tells You About Merlin's AI Licensing Play
A press release lands in your inbox at 9am on a Tuesday. Someone you've half-heard-of takes a title you've never seen before at an organization you license through. Most people archive it.
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The AI Music Labeling System Everyone's Building: What Most People Do vs. What the Evidence Suggests
A catalog manager I know pushed 400 tracks to three streaming services last spring. One instrumental — an AI-assisted ambient bed with a live cellist over the top — came back from one platform tagged…
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Gen-Z Audience Demographics Live in Gaming, Not Just Streaming — Here's the Map
A label strategist told me last spring that her whole Gen-Z plan was a spreadsheet of playlist editors. Pitch the editor, land the placement, ride the skip-rate. That was the plan.
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Where Music Actually Lands in Esports: Reading Gen-Z Audience Demographics Before You Cut a Check
A label A&R I know spent last quarter obsessing over a mid-six-figure playlist push and never once opened a Twitch stream.
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Ticket Pricing Transparency Won't Kill the Box Office Job — But the Story Everyone Tells About It Might
There is a line you hear at every ticketing panel, delivered with the confidence of a weather report: regulate the resale market and you will destroy jobs.
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Does Ticket Pricing Transparency Actually Help Venues, or Just Give Ticketmaster Cover?
A promoter I know in the Midwest read the headline about her state's new ticketing law twice, then asked me the only question that mattered to her business: "Is this going to help me, or is this going…
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AI Music Policy Is Being Written Around One Number, and You Should Know What It Doesn't Measure
A distributor made headlines when it said something like a third of the tracks arriving through its pipe each day were AI-generated.
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