WHERE THE LINES ARE.

The obvious conflict

City of Punk makes a commercial AI sound engine. The Signal — our blog — reviews AI music tools, including direct competitors. That's a real conflict of interest, and pretending otherwise would be the actual problem. So instead of pretending, we publish the rules we hold ourselves to.

The rules

• No sponsored reviews. Nobody can pay for coverage, a score, or a softer verdict on The Signal. Pitches for sponsored posts are declined.
• Competitors get their wins. Every comparison page and review names what the other tool does better. If a competitor is the right answer for your workflow, the article says so by name.
• Structured comparisons are data, not copy. The scoreboards and feature tables on our /compare/ pages are maintained as editorial data, reviewed against the competitor's current public product, and corrected when they ship changes. Tell us when we're out of date.
• Articles must stand alone. Every guide and tutorial has to be useful to a reader who never touches our product. Product mentions appear where they're genuinely relevant; the page furniture carries the marketing.
• Corrections are public. When we get a fact wrong, we fix the page and note the change. Corrections go to signal@cityofpunk.com.

Affiliate links

Some articles may link to third-party tools or services through affiliate programs, which can earn us a commission at no cost to you. Affiliate status never affects a verdict — several of our highest-scored tools pay us nothing. Where a link is an affiliate link, the article discloses it once, near the top.

AI-assisted writing

The Signal uses AI tooling in its editorial pipeline — fitting, given the subject. Pieces are generated from editorial briefs and source analysis, then published under the same standards as anything else here: claims must be verifiable, prices and license terms must trace to the vendor's published terms, and the voice rules ban hype the same way for our product as for anyone else's.