The archive

Splice's terms say a downloaded sample is licensed, never owned

Splice's terms of use grant a broad usage licence while withholding ownership of the underlying sounds.

A 1983 protocol let rival instrument makers speak one language

The MIDI Association's own specification pages date and describe the shared message format that made instruments from competing makers interoperable.

November 27, 2023

IFPI recorded a ninth year of recorded-music revenue growth

IFPI's 2024 report documents 10.2% revenue growth in 2023 and names generative AI as a risk fans and the industry want managed responsibly.

July 1, 2021

Holly Herndon released her own voice as a governed instrument

Holly+, launched in 2021, turns audio into Holly Herndon's voice under a governance model her own studio describes but does not itemise.

December 15, 2022

A hobby fine-tune turned an image model into a music one

Riffusion repurposed Stable Diffusion to paint spectrograms, showing image diffusion could generate usable audio.

August 30, 2019

YACHT turned three years of machine-generated fragments into an album

The band's own DFA notes and Bandcamp page describe building an AI process, then choosing which fragments became songs.

December 17, 2017

A shared dataset made separation scores comparable, not perceptual

MUSDB18 and the SDR metric let separation systems be ranked by decibels, which the campaign's own paper says diverges from listening preference.

March 16, 2023

A distributor now requires licensed data behind generated tracks

Copyright Office registration guidance, a distributor’s new GenAI framework and Spotify’s disclosure policy set three separate gates.

June 17, 2023

The Grammys ruled an AI voice cannot itself win an award

The Recording Academy's own interview and current rulebook require meaningful human authorship before AI-assisted work can win.

November 11, 2025

A German court ruled ChatGPT infringed on song lyrics

Munich's Regional Court found OpenAI liable for reproducing GEMA lyrics; OpenAI has appealed, and a Suno ruling followed in 2026.

Soundraw and Beatoven license background music, not a master

Both services licence generated tracks for use inside your own project, with distribution and ownership handled differently.

TuneCore's terms name which AI platforms it will not distribute

The distributor's own Terms of Service set a training-data-licensing test that decides whether generated music can go to stores.

June 3, 2005

Get a license or do not sample, a court held in 2005

A sampling ruling and the Copyright Office’s separate work on digital replicas show why a cleared sample and a generated sound-alike differ.

November 16, 2023

Dream Track built a generator around named, consenting artists

YouTube and DeepMind's Lyria experiment paired opt-in artist consent with SynthID watermarking on every clip.

January 30, 2024

Universal Music pulled its catalogue from TikTok, then it returned

UMG's own open letter and the joint press release with TikTok show what was disputed and what the new deal changed.

A stock-music licence excludes work you do not own

Soundraw’s and Beatoven’s own licences show a generated temp cue can breach terms before a composer delivers the real one.

March 1, 2024

Live 12 put MIDI generators and a neural sound search in the browser

Ableton's release notes describe MIDI Transformations, Generators and a neural-network Similarity Search shipped with Live 12.

March 22, 2024

Tennessee made voice a protected property right against AI clones

The ELVIS Act, signed March 2024 and effective 1 July 2024, added voice to Tennessee's right-of-publicity statute and reaches cloning tools.

April 25, 2019

Jukebox generated singing from raw audio and stayed a demo

OpenAI's two music systems show a research trajectory from MIDI notes to raw audio, released with unusually candid limitations.

Fingerprint matching finds registered recordings, not resemblance

Audible Magic and Content ID documentation describe matching acoustic fingerprints, not judging style or originality.