Licensed to Steal; More AI Where it Doesn’t Belong
Twenty-five years ago, sharing a song with a friend could get you sued into bankruptcy. Now Spotify will let you remix Paul Simon for a monthly fee, and the industry is calling it innovation. Some circles are just spirals.
The story starts with Napster in 1999. Shawn Fanning was 19 when he built it, and within 18 months, 60 million people were using it. That number should have told the labels something important: people loved music so much they’d risk lawsuits and computer viruses to get more of it. Instead, the RIAA decided the 60 million were criminals. They sued a 12-year-old named Brianna LaHara for downloading Avril Lavigne. Lars Ulrich flew to Capitol Hill to testify against the same fans who’d been trading Metallica bootlegs since 1982, the underground tape culture that built the band in the first place. In wrestling, they call that a heel turn.
The industry spent a decade at war with its own audience. And they lost, culturally if not legally, because you can’t sue people into loving you less.
Then came iTunes, then streaming, and the labels declared victory. Spotify paid out eleven billion dollars to the music industry last year, the largest annual payment from any retailer in history. They were proud of this. It is a big number, until you run it. To earn $3,000 a month from Spotify, an artist needs somewhere between 750,000 and 850,000 streams. Every month. The platform is printing money; the artists are playing a slot machine.
Now Spotify and Universal have announced a paid add-on that lets Premium subscribers make AI covers and remixes of songs from participating artists. The co-CEO called it “grounded in consent, credit, and compensation.” The labels who spent years filing content strikes against Rick Beato for teaching people about music theory have decided that what fans really wanted all along was to feed “Under the Bridge” into a machine. They just needed to find a way to charge for it.
There’s a pattern here. Fan creativity already existed. Covers existed. Remixes existed. The tech-industry move is to identify the human behavior, strip out the human, automate it, and sell it back as a feature. What’s left looks like the original thing but doesn’t feel like it. And here’s the one piece of data that actually gives some hope: a Luminate study found that consumers are “net negative” on AI music. More people are uncomfortable with it than aren’t. Gen Z, the generation the tech crowd assumed would embrace all of this, are among the most skeptical. The audience is telling them something. The question is whether anyone’s listening.
The Songs
Down Below by Jayler is the lead single from their full-length debut, Voices Unheard, and it earns every inch of the classic rock territory it’s claiming. There’s Led Zeppelin DNA all over it, screaming vocals, meaty guitar riffs, blues harmonica, but these guys have their own thing going on too. Featured Riverboat Queen back in episode 130 and was glad to return. Live videos suggest they’re even better in a room.
Masks Off by Jesse Welles is the protest song that’s been missing from rock radio for a while. Acoustic guitar, big drums, gritty vocals. Featured Jesse’s Pilgrim in Season 3 and this one hits even harder. The world feels like it’s on fire lately, and sometimes a three-and-a-half-minute song is the right response.
Capture/Release by Elder clocks in near nine minutes and doesn’t feel it. This is progressive rock for people who like early Genesis and find Dream Theater exhausting. The melodies are strong, the arrangements are genuinely inventive, and the heavier passages land in places YES never would have gone.
Radio Static by Seven Year Witch is straight blues rock with a heavier edge, early Black Keys energy with a vocalist whose delivery is the real selling point. There’s a growl in the tone that earns its place. The rest of the band holds it down, guitar riff, rhythm section, harmonies. Complete package.
Die in Cleveland by Mrs. Magician closes things out with a little surf punk fun. Poppy, slightly off-kilter, genuinely catchy. The band has been around since 2012 with a deep catalog, so if this track lands, there’s plenty more to find. And yes, as someone from the area, the title was taken personally before the first listen.
