THE SIGNAL
Guides, tutorials, and brutally honest reviews on AI music generation, royalty-free sound, and the future of production. Tune in.
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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AI Fraud Prevention for Small Businesses: The Voice on the Phone Is Not Proof
It is 4:40 on a Friday. Your accounts payable person picks up, and it is the owner — same cadence, same slightly clipped way he says her name, same background hum of a car.
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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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AI Voice Generation for Audiobooks at Scale: Three Production Paths Compared
A mid-size publisher I talked to last winter had 240 backlist titles sitting in a spreadsheet, every one of them text-only, every one of them a candidate for an audio edition that would never get…
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The 40% Problem: A Platform Review of Work-in-Progress Sharing for Artists Who Are Done Begging the Algorithm
There's a number that gets quoted in artist Discords until it loses its edges, and it's worth slowing down on.
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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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