POW Mag's Gordon catches the central irony: Miley Cyrus, who since a 2022 onstage panic attack performs only in intimate venues and wants to be home by 10 p.m., has made a party album that scolds the kids for not dancing. Bass Persuades is full of prudish refrains about fentanyl and phone addiction, Gordon writes, dance music "for people who, like her, eat dinner at 5:30." The verdict: Miley doing impressions of other artists, "woefully lost beneath the mix."
Joel Gouveia walks through a nightmare any independent artist can now imagine: his friend Josh Sahunta woke to find his 2023 album, made with zero AI, purged from every platform by DistroKid's automated scanners, no appeal form, no human to call. The trigger was UMG's September lawsuit and the math of asymmetric liability: $25 a year versus $150,000 per flagged song, so the system deletes first. At 99.8% accuracy across 60 million tracks, that's 120,000 human songs gone.
In his 2004 New Yorker rave, Sasha Frere-Jones called indie hip-hop "a version of graduate school," a safe zone for idiosyncratic work. NPR Music uses Madvillainy's climb from if-you-know-you-know classic to dorm-room poster to tell the oral history of Stones Throw, the LA label that made that ethic a business model.
01Music & SceneWriting about music and the culture around it. Criticism, profiles, interviews, and scene reporting, selected for insight rather than news value.
Madonna at seventy, corset and dead lasers on the MTV stage, becomes the hinge for a brutal essay arguing that the industry won't let its icons retire until they die performing. Threading Monk's backstage class struggle with the Rothschild heiress, a livestreamed firing squad, Dionne Warwick canceling at eighty-five, and D'Angelo's death at fifty-one, this reads spectacle as empire's slow homicide.
The Guardian traces Afrohype (or lamba), the sub-genre where Lagos hypemen like Toby Shang perform ad-libbed, onomatopoeic vocals over beats like Dorime while patrons spray cash. The piece roots it in griot praise-singing and Kinshasa's 1980s atalaku tradition, and clocks the economics: as post-Covid artist fees ballooned, promoters turned to hypemen now earning up to 8m naira per set.
Brussels now exerts the pull Amsterdam had during De School's golden years, but Resident Advisor argues its renaissance runs on borrowed rooms and nomadic parties like Sundaze precisely because durable infrastructure is impossible. Belgium's split linguistic-territorial bureaucracy and a six-decibel noise law let one neighbor's complaint sink Le Lac, whose founders poured 30,000 euros into a permit they never got.
Futurism Restated profiles L.A. synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, whose four-year run (the SML quintet, duos with Marta Sofia Honer, a record with the late Ariel Kalma) builds toward Edge Conditions, his most fully realized solo work. The through-line is scene as infrastructure: Chicago house tapes, cheap vintage Rolands traded as 'synth school,' and the improvising circle around Jeff Parker's shuttered ETA nights that fed the album.
The Quietus maps Iran's electronic music scene across five entry points, from Dariush Dolatshahi's 1985 Columbia experiments to the SET and TIEMF festivals that drew international acts to central Tehran. The argument: restrictions on public dancing pushed the music toward abstraction and high-art justification, giving it a cinema-like international prestige.
Line Noise uses Fontaines D.C.'s fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, to ask how a band gets stadium-big while staying this strange. The answer: choruses let you stick spokes in your own anthem's wheels and grow anyway, as U2 did on Achtung Baby. The quietest tracks win here, especially Japan, called possibly the best song in the catalogue.
Much of the friction around AI artists is a category error, Zinstrel argues: authorship, authenticity and success get judged on criteria that don't fit. The sharpest example is Deezer CIO Aurélien Hérault conceding that a Suno song built from your own hummed melody and lyrics is still "fully AI" output, a tag that excludes it from algorithmic recommendations.
The Met's largest gesture of Ukraine solidarity isn't an anthem but a commission: "The Mothers of Kherson," premiered in Warsaw, builds the real deportation of Ukrainian children into opera's oldest plot, a mother's descent to rescue her child.
View From Nashville runs the numbers on who actually gets into the Grand Ole Opry: of 75 traceable current members, 79 percent are Southern, New England has produced none in a century, and only three Black members ever. The point is that nobody says "no Yankees" out loud. A member delivers the invitation, Vince Gill delivered ten of 40 since 2011, and the structure does the gatekeeping for you.
02Music Industry AnalysisAnalysis of the music business. Deals, streaming economics, rights, and the power dynamics that shape what gets made and who gets paid.
The music world's embrace of direct-to-camera content is diluting the discourse and, worse, running on free labor. First Floor argues that as writers like Philip Sherburne and Gary Suarez pivot to Instagram video, the "creator economy" is just the old exposure model repackaged: tons of unpaid work for Meta and ByteDance, in hopes of eventually landing brand sponsorships. That's not journalism.
A-Wall's 2019 "Loverboy" snapped back to 5.2 million monthly listeners on a wave of TikTok "nanostalgia," and MUSIC x traces the catch: Duetti owned the master and ran a paid creator campaign within 24 hours, juicing the revival that now cosplays as yearning for a less-commercial app. The real argument is about artist services converging, with catalogue buyers and distributors both climbing toward label-style development. The test is whether revival attention becomes new work.
Flashlight makes the case that Apple has assembled, almost by accident, the parts of a genuinely open music platform: Shazam's 100B+ recognitions, GarageBand, Logic's Stem Splitter, Apple Music Sing, and a payments layer no rival can replicate. The problem is that these act like separate buildings.
Flashlight reads UMG's latest exits, Tunji Balogun, Jim Roppo, and two Interscope A&R chiefs, through its €250M cost-cutting target and Coase's theory of the firm: once labels can coordinate a release through outside vendors, a salaried executive who builds a decades-long asset becomes expensive. The wager is that the next executive class shows up owning the companies they negotiate with.
California's seven-year rule should free any worker from a contract after seven years, but a 1987 carveout lobbied for by labels lets them sue artists for undelivered albums. That's why Interscope is demanding $50 million from Summer Walker for the two albums left on her 2017 deal. Billboard walks through why the rule works as leverage for everyone except musicians.
The flat-fee promise that made DistroKid the biggest DIY distributor is exactly what AI now threatens: when each extra upload costs nothing, there's no brake on the Suno-slop pipeline UMG names in its September suit, which alleges DistroKid delivered nearly 12 million tracks to one service in six months.
After years of seeking acceptance from Americana’s institutions, one artist reflects on the cost of chasing industry validation; and the freedom of not belonging.
The DOJ is suing San Diego broker REPS & Co. for allegedly netting $120 million flipping 18.5 million tickets to Beyoncé's Renaissance tour and others, Billboard reports. The scale dwarfs prior FTC cases ($3.5M-$6M), and the details are damning: offshore workers in the Philippines, thousands of fake accounts, and an 'Error Bible' tracking Ticketmaster's security codes to bypass buying limits.
03Music RecommendationsNew and recent music worth hearing. A featured pick plus additional recommendations, each with brief context and a link to listen.
Flow State picks the title track from Samantha Poulter's new album as part of the mix's quickening pace, slotted alongside Loidis and Charanjit Singh as the energy picks up.
REC 01
Andrew Tuttle & Darren Cross
AT/DC
♪ ambient folk / cosmic country
Tuttle is a banjo and guitar-wielding ambient folk producer out of Brisbane who's kept company with Steve Gunn, SUSS and Luke Schneider; Cross brings guitar, synth and a hard drive of field recordings from Sydney. Trading files across distance with a few shared parameters, their mutual love of drones opens the portal: 'Athletic, Eup' starts with nature sounds and pastoral picking before 'pink Skyyy Sixth Prize' prods the boundaries of cosmic country, and 'Afternoon Sunrise (I Saw Galadriel at 711)' drifts into weightless, star-spotting ambience.
Shatter the Standards frames Dawn Richard's latest as the next chapter in a career spent singing through characters, from the Danity Kane manga superhero she drew for Diddy to D∴WN, the triangle-spelled solo persona staking a claim to revolutionary R&B. creole culture centers on a New Orleans monarch bearing her likeness, reckoning with the city she fled for Baltimore after Katrina.
A Songs in the Key of Life outtake that sat on a shelf for half a century, released on the album's 50th anniversary and mixed by two original engineers. Soulpolitan has rotated it the most of the four-track EP: Stevie planting a woman in his garden of love to turn her into a flower, a twisted conceit sung over bossa, with lyrics by Susaye Greene of The Supremes, who co-wrote "I Can't Help It" for Michael Jackson.
Beat Connection found this scrambled its head on a second listen: unpredictable even after already hearing it. The powerful lift-offs resolve efficiently rather than feeling glib, the subs get a cleansing workout, and the momentum is giddy, varied, and ravey without everything sounding early-nineties. "How to Build a Bassline" lands as the funniest track encountered in an age.
One of the first jazz big band records from Egypt, Dinner Music frames it as a response to the American jazz scene of the 60s and 70s, drawing influences from Mongo Santamaria to Randy Weston to Sun Ra while asserting Arab musicians' own history within the Western tradition.
Shatter the Standards ties Duke Deuce's crunk revival to Noble Drew Ali's Moorish Science and a century of contested indigeneity, threading those messages through his buck anthems. Deuce, who fell asleep to the same drums his father Duke Nitty made for Gangsta Blac, leans into buck's territorial edge, the older Memphis form crunk grew out of.
The Line of Best Fit flags this among a trio of brilliant Irish records landing on the same day: Gilla Band's noise-rock ravages here, alongside Trá Pháidín's boggy post-rock and Gurrier's pounding post-punk.
The final track from DePlume's instrumental EP 'Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue' on International Anthem, 'Glass' sends his saxophone unfurling with understated verve over a trance-like electronic loop, Shahzad Ismaily's bass, and Tcheser Holmes's drums. Recorded on a Brooklyn off day mid-tour, it captures a trio rapport built over weeks playing 'A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole', DePlume framing it around endurance: how something shattered still refracts light.
The duo of John Thayer and Lea Thomas swirl together folk, dream pop, post-rock, and shoegaze, putting a strong personal stamp on well-worn sounds. Futurism Restated hears a higher-fidelity Grouper and a more blown-out Mazzy Star, plus telling details: an unexpected twinge of Auto-Tune on the Total Blue-like 'Go Easy,' feedback singeing the edges of 'What Gathers at Dusk,' and the dubbed-out murk of 'Night Garden' echoing Talk Talk.
The New Yorker's Infinite Scroll column uses the viral 'Hotel Lobby' deepfake trend, where anyone from Sam Altman to cartoon characters gets superimposed onto Quavo and Takeoff, to argue that A.I. face-swapping is the latest iteration of a much older dynamic: appropriating Black performance as a frictionless template. The kicker is an ACC video where actual college athletes, awkward and earnest, outshine every deepfake by simply being themselves.
A personal essay reflecting on the author's transformation through AI augmentation, becoming a 'transhuman' with coding and writing prosthetics, and the launch of Monstrous Times, a new protocol fiction magazine.
Isabel 1000 uses the "-maxxing" suffix as a lens on Adorno's argument that capitalist logic colonizes every corner of life, then turns it back on the culture-critic character class: picking universal wrong as your stat to max gets you points on Bluesky, but Criterion and MUBI now cost less than Netflix, which complicates the 1940s context those critiques still assume.
The Believer's Resurrector column turns its lens on Hal Hartley's 1998 millennium film, with a writer who has never found anyone who saw it without being forced. The Book of Life lands Jesus at JFK on New Year's Eve 1999, PJ Harvey as Magdalena, Yo La Tengo as a Salvation Army band, and salvation reframed as the sheer stubbornness of the world insisting on going on.
More than 600 Brazilian fan accounts, from Beyhive to BTS Army to Swifties, have unified behind Lula's re-election campaign after the first round, deploying the same organizational infrastructure they use to flood artists' social media into a get-out-the-vote machine called Fandoms Pelo Brasil. The Guardian reports that Lula's team has been courting these communities since at least August, when he signed a 'fan decree' cracking down on ticket-scalping bots.
Isabel Pabán Freed reviews Nathan Fielding's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, 'You Can See Everything,' analyzing it primarily as a film about abuse and control, examining the patterns of manipulation in Holmes' relationships and the film's treatment of sexual violence.
The New York Review of Books sits down with Lola Seaton, a critic who writes across the left political press and literary venues from the LRB to Harper's, to talk through what it actually means to read closely. Her answer: criticism is confidence, built through exposure, that converts personal reaction into authoritative claim. On the edit-versus-write tension, she's clear that editing slows first drafts because the activities 'bleed treacherously into each other.'
The Believer excerpts a new essay tracking the life and mysterious final years of Loren Rex Cameron, whose 1996 book Body Alchemy gave a generation of trans men their first visual proof of their own possibility. The writer's path into Cameron's Cornell archive is also a personal reckoning: studying his archive means saying his name aloud to librarians, which felt like a self-outing.
A review and analysis of Nathan Fielder's documentary 'You Can See Everything' featuring Elizabeth Holmes, examining how the failed Theranos founder presents herself and attempts to reclaim her narrative through the documentary.
Clare's answer to her own question is deliberately deflating: You Can See Everything is popular because Elizabeth Holmes is famous, and everyone loves true crime. The essay earns that landing by threading Catherine Liu's 'people need projects' against the cultish Nathan Fielder fandom and the genre's carceral logic, arguing that true crime feeds a mass need for legible shepherds in an era of total alienation.
05Sound on Sight Video ArchiveOne music video from the archive in each issue, ranging from a few months to sixty years old, with a short note on why it holds up.
▶
Jim WIlson — "Center Core Never More"
Early 90s · instrumental rock
Jim Wilson plays guitar the way you'd expect from someone who spent years alongside Harvey Mandel and Rcollins: dense, exploratory, allergic to the tidy hook. "Center Core Never More" is the kind of early-90s instrumental that got buried under grunge, worth pulling back up for the way the tone keeps mutating under your ear.
SOS 01
The Stripes
Ecstasy (Plattenküche)
♪ 1980
The singer is Gabriele Kerner, three years short of '99 Luftballons.' The Stripes were her first band, formed in Hagen in 1979 and finished by 1982. The show is Plattenküche, a WDR variety hour with fountains, a filing cabinet that toppled every week, and a working kitchen where the co-host cooked dinner on air.
Nick Uff, a gardener by trade, drew it frame by frame on 16mm without a storyboard, letting the film go where it took itself. That scratchy hand-made animation sits over an arpeggio Adrian Utley couldn't get a sequencer to play, so he recorded the notes one at a time and edited them into the loop.
Before Tom Rubnitz became downtown New York's patron saint of camp, he helped make this: a performer named Frieda rapping backed by a chorus line of dolls, production values scraping the floor on purpose. 'Plastic Rap' is Lower Manhattan circa 1980 deciding that cheap and ridiculous could be an aesthetic, not a limitation.
Spike Jonze gives Ludacris a pair of prosthetic Popeye arms and aims them at a man who won't observe bathroom etiquette. Interestingly enough, the man is Fatlip, the Pharcyde rapper whom Jonze had filmed four years earlier narrating the worst day of his life. In 2004, he is still the one getting hit.
Zürich, 1981. Mother's Ruin had been going since 1978, early enough that Swiss punk barely existed, and director Paul Grau shot 'Lost in Town' for the 'Want More' LP while the scene was still inventing itself. Snarl from a country nobody files under snarl.
Out of Los Angeles, Dorothy Fuzz stack sweet vocal harmonies over trippy psych and title the album 'Mad Art For A Mad Age,' which about covers it. '1 2 3 Understand Me' keeps reaching for connection and dissolving into haze before it can close the gap. Sunshine on top, something woozier underneath.
Jonathan Glazer sends a man stumbling through a tunnel, getting hit by cars over and over, muttering Thom Yorke's looped prayer. Each impact lands harder than the last until the final one doesn't. UNKLE and DJ Shadow built the track from dread and strings; Glazer turned it into a parable that earns its resurrection.
Spike Jonze films it like a pratfall in slow motion: Fat Lip narrating his own worst day, every small humiliation landing square on the beat. It's tragi-comedy played dead straight, an itemized series of humiliations played with a stand-up's timing. The Pharcyde's sharpest tongue turns self-loathing into the funniest, saddest three minutes the West Coast underground ever produced.
A Romanian pop grande dame, who'd spent five decades exploring the outer boundaries of samba, soul, and disco-pop, takes Pulp’s 'Common People' and sings it in her own language. The pairing is the pleasure: a voice raised on the state airwaves wrapping itself around a Britpop anthem about class.
06The Shrinking Spaces for Developing ArtistsThe routes that built new artists, from small venues and festival stages to TV, music videos and human A&R, are thinning as data labels and AI move in.
The Music Venue Trust counted 30 UK grassroots venues shut for good between July 2024 and July 2025, and 53.8 percent of the ones still open made no profit. Meanwhile, festival sponsorship is the fastest-growing line on the industry's balance sheet. Writing for Clash, Aufa Dasayoga argues those are the same story. The small rooms are where DJs "get bad and then good," which makes them "unpaid R&D" for the rest of the business. In Dasayoga's telling, a brand doesn't sponsor the 100-capacity room over a pub where a genre is being invented. It sponsors the headline stage three years later, once there's an audience a media buyer can count.
For almost 20 years, Reading and Leeds kept a BBC Introducing stage for unsigned acts put forward by regional DJs. Before the 2026 edition, the festival replaced it with the Canopy, which organizer Festival Republic says opens the stage to "a much wider pool of emerging talent." Fans noticed who got booked, including December 10, a boyband already signed after forming on Simon Cowell's Netflix series. The Big Moon's Juliette Jackson, who played the stage a year after forming, remembers what it meant: "It was a really big deal to play that as a new band with no money."
The joke goes that American Idol set out in 2002 to find the country's best undiscovered singer and got it right on the first try, with Kelly Clarkson. Chris Dalla Riva runs the chart numbers behind it: no Idol winner after Phillip Phillips in 2012 has scored a top 40 hit, and no Voice winner from Sundance Head's 2016 season on has either (Head never had one). Dalla Riva puts it down to "mostly timing." Idol peaked at 30 million viewers twice a week; The Voice never averaged more than 16 million, in a TV audience splintered by Facebook and Twitter. In Dalla Riva's words, the shows' hits were a product of "television monoculture."
A label brief for a music video, as director Ella Ezeike describes it: a 10k budget, two days to write the treatment, and a pitch against 15 other directors. Ezeike, writing in the newsletter behind the frame, argues videos were "one of the few places" where Black artists could "exercise visual authorship at scale," and where directors like Hype Williams and Melina Matsoukas built their visual language before Hollywood. Ezeike mourns the budgets of the 90s and 2000s, when a video was "an introduction to the world of an artist." Ezeike's own first video, "Babe" by Louis Culture and Tora-I, was made with no label and passed 670,000 views.
Major labels once depended on figures like Irv Gotti, Chris Lighty and Dame Dash to spot Black cool for white executives and package it for the masses, Andre Gee writes. They had their misses (the occasional Victoria Beckham signing), yet Gee insists: "Their ears were respected for a reason." Those middlemen now feel like a relic, and Gee sees an overflow of "purely number-crunching" A&Rs signing reality stars and skit-makers for their follower counts. Gee's guess at who will speak up for the culture: "Maybe it's gotta be the artists themselves."
Thom Yorke accused the industry of pouring money into catalog instead of artist development, so Benjamin James of STVDIO went looking for numbers. The data came back "quite hopeful." Rostr data showed the majors had signed 124 new acts in 2026 by early June, close to one a day, and UMG's artist advances more than doubled in a year to €402 million. What the figures can't show, James concedes, is whether those deals are long-term development or short-term single spikes.
7cult Records, a new independent label run by digital marketer Dalton Piché, decides whether to sign an act by running Meta ads on its unreleased music first. When a test hasn't landed, 7cult has walked away, even from projects the team loved. Piché tells Billboard's Kristin Robinson the aim is "100% certainty that our efforts will have impact" in what Robinson calls a business with "a relatively low batting average." The model act is oskar med k, built on heavy ad-testing of demos and top lines, with no need to post daily or go viral.
Suno, the AI music company valued at $5.4 billion, runs an incubator for unsigned artists called Spark: grants into the tens of thousands of dollars, a dedicated manager and songwriting camps. Bruce Ramos, co-founder of the Latin distributor DSTRO7 and a competitor for the same acts, calls the package "a development deal," minus the part where the label takes ownership. Artists keep their rights and choose their distributor. For Ramos, it adds up to "the front end of a label, built by a company that doesn't call itself one." Ramos flags a routine non-disparagement clause, a section titled "Good Vibes Only" that bars participants from portraying Suno in a negative light.
In June 2026, Deezer was taking in nearly 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks a day, more than half of all new uploads for the first time. Murray Stassen's Music Business Worldwide report sets that against listening: those tracks draw 1% to 3% of streams on the platform, and Deezer says up to 85% of their streams in 2025 were fraudulent. Deezer's detection tool picks out music from models including Suno and Udio, the same Suno that runs Spark. Deezer says the primary purpose of uploading these tracks is fraud, which dilutes the royalties owed to human artists.
Bas Grasmayer, who leads growth strategy at Vandall, starts from the Deezer figures and reaches a calmer conclusion: "upload volume is not the same as cultural impact." His prescription is simple: keep putting people in rooms and keep running the writing camps. The risk Grasmayer sees comes afterward, when a song written in a week can spend six months stuck across inboxes, WhatsApp threads and expiring links. The companies that thrive, Grasmayer argues, will be small teams coordinating large networks of artists, writers and producers, with AI possibly taking more of the coordination and admin off people's plates.
07StorylinesStandalone features that follow one story in full. Each gathers the coverage as it appeared, annotated and in sequence, with a written introduction.
Watching the Watchmen: On AI Composition and Detection
21 articles · story collection
After AI slop overwhelmed their services, the platforms struck back, with Substack releasing an AI detection tool and LinkedIn adding a button that lets users report slop. Whether this was good stewardship or evidence of a witch hunt is an open question, and we dive into the debate with 21 articles that wrestle with how we value AI (and human) writing.
Me and the Devil: Fenix Flexin's AI Authorship Fight
11 articles · story collection
Maybe Fenix Flexin won't be remembered as the Elvis Presley of AI music, but his track "Rubberz", which delivers street-rap verses over '80s synth-pop, reached the Hot 100, drew months of accusations, and ballooned into one of the biggest stories of 2026. We track the story's twists and turns, and consider where we're going (and where we've been).
Between a billion dollar Michael Jackson biopic, a blockbuster Madonna album, and the return of "Wonderwall" and "Mr. Brightside" to the charts, 2026 could be defined not so much by what we created, but by what we remembered. We survey the landscape, and consider what it means when culture turns into a hall of mirrors.
For years, the labels sued to stop fans from generating AI covers of licensed content, and then Universal and Spotify signed the deal for a tool that does just that. Beneath the product announcement lies the story of how billion dollar catalog acquisitions have created incentives for the industry to recycle the catalog rather than invest in new music.
Miles was the avatar of cool who kept detonating his own styles, a privileged Black artist who declined every story offered to him about privilege or suffering, and both an undeniable genius and a man who hurt others, particularly women. And a hundred years on, he remains a mystery and a contradiction, which is probably what he would've wanted.
07This Has All Happened BeforeProducers and performers argue AI is the next sampler or synth, critics say this time is different, and US copyright already draws a line.
"These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country," John Philip Sousa told the House Committee on Patents in 1906. Kelefa Sanneh, in The New Yorker, follows that fight against "musical fraudulence" from Sousa's "canned music" to Queen's 1973 sleeve credit ("and nobody played synthesizer") and on to Fenix Flexin's "Rubberz," a hit plenty of listeners guessed was made with A.I. In Sanneh's telling, most A.I. music gets disdained less for lacking quality than for lacking context: on its own, it is "bootleg music." Queen, for its part, opened its 1980 album The Game on an Oberheim OB-X.
Joel Gouveia runs the full catalog of panics at The Artist Economy, from Dylan booed at Newport in '65, the TR-808 dismissed as a plastic toy and Auto-Tune as the death of vocal talent in 1997. "Every single one of those tools was the 'death of music' right up until the moment it simply became music," Gouveia writes. Gouveia holds the line at the song itself, and wants generative tools to track their training data and pay the artists behind it: "make the tool pay rent to its creators."
Carrie Marshall remembers 1982, when members of the UK Musicians' Union wanted synthesizers and drum machines banned. She knows the rest of the list too, from the Mellotron to Auto-Tune, and still writes at TechRadar that "generative AI is very different from the tech that came before it." AI mastering and stem separation are helpers; generators are something else. Her worry is that the music human artists make won't be heard, because on streaming services generative AI is pouring in as slop: "It's being used to drown them out."
Questlove calls 1988 to 1991 sampling's "Wild West." "No one was policing us," he tells Billboard's Kristin Robinson. The Roots member and music historian runs from the Fairlight, a machine that took $100,000 to operate, through Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back to the Biz Markie litigation that, per Billboard, ended the free-for-all. Then he puts AI on the same line: "I see AI as a parallel to sampling culture." He isn't sold on the sound yet (the digital distortion bothers him), and he wants AI companies open about what they trained on, with compensation for it.
At midnight on New Year's Eve 1947, the American Federation of Musicians ordered every union musician in the US to stop recording, in a fight over revenue from recorded music displacing live work. Musicians were fighting a technology for their livelihoods, and Michael Daniels, writing at Jazz Noted, follows what the ban did to Dizzy Gillespie, whose big band went a full year without a studio session. Singers weren't union members, so the ban didn't touch them, and labels "pivoted hard toward vocalists." The final connection is Daniels's own argument, and Daniels says so: Gillespie's vocal numbers and novelties arrived just when a horn player couldn't legally make a record and a singer could.
In January 1982, Barry Manilow toured the UK with synthesizers standing in for orchestral players, and the Musicians' Union was furious. That May (on Bob Moog's birthday, no less), the union passed a motion to ban synths, drum machines and other electronic devices that could recreate conventional instruments (MUHistory.com says it was never actual MU policy). Andy Jones tells the story at MusicRadar: the NME called the union "Loonies," synth players formed a Union of Sound Synthesists, and the barely enforced ban was lifted in 1997. Jones grants the union's fear for its members' jobs, then imagines the next headline: "Loony Tunes! MU bans AI".
Todd Edwards, the house and UKG producer, built his sound from hundreds of micro-samples, "treating records like paints." Clearing that many would be a Herculean task, and by early 2025 making "samples without samples" with synths and Splice had him feeling down. Where Questlove hears a parallel to sampling, Edwards uses AI as the sample source itself: he tells MusicRadar's Ana Yglesias he puts his own ideas into Suno Studio, makes disco or soft rock songs, then cuts them up, "and never worry about another lawsuit again." To critics who say he's taking money out of artists' mouths, he asks whether every producer on Beatport clears samples.
Fred Falke started out as a session bassist, often hired to replay samples so artists could avoid copyright issues. So when he and Alan Braxe, the French house producers behind Intro, talk Suno with MusicRadar's Si Truss, Falke is the one using it as a sample source, and he recognizes the job. Going in "knowing exactly what you want" is "just like being a producer in the '60s," he says. Braxe feeds it his instrumentals for new arrangements and calls it "one stage further" than sampling, since the material comes "from nowhere." Truss notes this glosses over what the tools are trained on.
On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot by an immigration agent during a traffic stop in Houston's Magnolia Park. Jaime Velasquez, 42, who grew up in the neighborhood, pulled the details from news broadcasts, wrote a Spanish-language corrido in Araujo's voice and used AI tools to produce it in hours, where the form once took days or weeks. The New York Times places this inside the corrido's long work as news set to music. The form has bent to its technology before: corridos were once cut down to fit three-minute recordings.
Dr. Dre tells acquaintances who oppose AI that they sound like people who would have opposed the drum machine, or synthesizers. In an interview with The New York Times' Jordyn Holman, he says he uses AI in production to see what it does with something he has just made, and that the only people who see it as a threat are those who have trouble creating. Jimmy Iovine, his partner since the 1990s, sees no downside at all; his one complaint is the AI companies' public relations. No one in the piece argues the other side.
Damon Krukowski, writing at Dada Drummer Almanach, points to a twist in the long fight between artists and capital over music: in the US, generative AI music can't be copyrighted, so "the capital pushing generative AI music cannot own it." Copyright Office guidance says prompts "function more like instructions to a commissioned artist," with the machine deciding how they're carried out. For musicians unsure where their own use of machine-learning tools stops and generative AI begins, Krukowski calls copyright "a relatively clear and bright line." By Krukowski's reading, any human music, machine music included, can carry a copyright.
