THE SIGNAL
Guides, tutorials, and brutally honest reviews on AI music generation, royalty-free sound, and the future of production. Tune in.
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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Meta Platform Development and the $46 Billion Question Behind the Prediction-Market Bet
There's a number that should sit at the top of any memo about a new Meta platform, and it isn't a user count.
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The Quiet Trap in AI Training Data Licensing: What a Dataset's Curation Owns That the Songs Don't
You can clear every single track in a dataset — every Creative Commons attribution, every share-alike clause, every artist credit logged and honored — and still lose a copyright case over that…
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What Did Clive Davis Actually Hear? The Question Behind a Half-Century of A&R
Here is a question anyone who has ever sat in a chair with the power to say yes or no to a song has asked themselves at two in the morning: what was Clive Davis actually hearing that the rest of the…
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The "Open Source" Trap in AI Training Data Licensing: Why a Free Research Dataset Can Still Cost You Millions
A research dataset shows up on a university mirror. A few thousand tracks, neatly tagged by genre, key, and BPM, every file marked Creative Commons, the whole package described in the README as "open…
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The Licensing Question Nobody at the Label Wants to Answer About AI Music Generation
A sync deal I watched fall apart last year didn't die over money or taste. The placement was approved, the spot was cut, the music supervisor loved the track.
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When an Artist's Catalog Becomes AI Music Training Datasets, Who Said Yes?
Last fall a Grammy-winning singer posted that hundreds of her songs — including tracks she had never released — appeared to have been swept into a generative music model without anyone calling her…
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Reading Spotify Expansion Like a Map: What Office Openings Tell You That Press Releases Don't
A platform announces a new office in a country it was, not so long ago, publicly at odds with. There were takedown demands, a regulator's letter, a few months when the catalog felt politically…
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When SZA Said No: AI Music Generation and the Fight Over Training Data
Last month I fed eight bars of my own singing — a scratch vocal from a film cue I scored in 2016 — into a voice-cloning tool to see what would happen.
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AI Music Detection Tools Promise to Clean Up Your Playlists. Here's What They Can Actually Tell You.
A detector once told me a track on my running playlist was machine-generated. I'd seen the band play it in a basement in Oakland two years earlier — three people, one of whom broke a string.
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AI Music Training and the Consent Problem: What Your Catalog Is Actually Worth
A vocalist I know got a screenshot from a fan last spring. It was a forum thread listing the records an AI model had reportedly been trained on, and her name was on it — a specific number of songs…
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The Anatomy of Music Licensing Disputes: How a Defendant Turns "Pay Up" Into "Prove It"
The advice rights-holders run on is simple enough to fit on a notecard: assemble a catalog, document the unlicensed use, attach a damages figure large enough to command attention, and the platform…
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