THE SIGNAL
Guides, tutorials, and brutally honest reviews on AI music generation, royalty-free sound, and the future of production. Tune in.
What Spotify Partnerships in Afrobeats Actually Buy — and Who Gets Paid
A festival stage in Lagos, a DSP logo on the backdrop, and a press line about "investing in the sound of a generation." The easy read is that the platform bought the moment.
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AI Music Generation and Master Rights: What You Actually Own When the Model Sings a Gamelan
Last month I fed a generator a four-bar phrase built around an interlocking kulintang-style pattern — bronze gongs, a lilting call-and-response I'd transcribed years ago from a field recording.
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How AI Music Policy Is Rewriting the Path From Upload to Payout
Picture a release you scheduled for a Friday. Distributor confirmed it weeks ago, the artwork's clean, you told your list.
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AI Music Generation vs Human Musicians: Where the "Just Use It as a Tool" Advice Holds and Where It Snaps
A gamelan teacher in Kuala Lumpur said the sentence to me like it was a seatbelt: "AI is just a tool. Use it, keep your soul." He'd read it in a dozen op-eds.
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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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