Artificial intelligence is doing to music what the printing press did to books and what the mp3 did to the album. But as the tools multiply and the investment pours in, a harder question is starting to surface. Who exactly are these systems built for?
On this episode, Larry talks with Drew Thurlow, former senior executive at Sony Music, Pandora, and Warner Music, and author of Machine Music, the most clear-eyed account yet of what is actually happening at the intersection of AI and the music industry. Then Rithvik Kundu, music technology researcher and co-founder of the NYU Gen Audio AI group, and Jad Al Masri, violinist, composer, and founder of Motif, join the conversation fresh off winning the Berklee College of Music AI Hackathon. Their work asks a question the major AI music platforms have largely ignored: what about the five billion people whose musical traditions, modal systems, and microtonal instruments don’t fit neatly into the Western tonal framework these models were built on?
Drew’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Machine-Music-Transforming-Musics-Next/dp/1032813555
Author: Nancy Kwamboka
Most conversations about AI and music collapse into two camps: fear that it will replace artists, or excitement about how much money there is to be made. Lucas Cantor sits outside both.
Lucas is a venture investor at Mindset Ventures and an Emmy-winning composer who got his start at Hans Zimmer’s studio before going on to finish Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony using AI, a project that became a live orchestral premiere in London. He’s also the author of Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
Larry talks with Lucas about what it actually took to complete a 200-year-old symphony with machine learning, why he thinks Suno’s multi-billion dollar valuation rests on a fundamentally wrong premise about what music is, and why, after spending a career building tools that make creation easier, he remains convinced that the hardest and most valuable skill in music has never been technical at all.
With apologies to cyberpunk author William Gibson, the technology is out in the wild. The lawsuits are filed. The licensing deals are being signed. The future of the music industry is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.
This is the third episode in Musonomics’ AI series, and it’s the one that looks forward — beyond the fear and hype to what’s already taking shape. When content becomes infinitely abundant, what gets more valuable? And who wins?
Larry sits down with Cherie Hu, founder of Water and Music, and Daniel Rowland, VP of Strategy and Partnerships at LANDR to map where things actually stand — and where they’re heading.
They cover why professional AI adoption is far higher than anyone publicly admits, how major labels are quietly re-centralizing by buying up indie distributors, what the “DAWification of everything” means for the line between assistive and generative tools, and why the music company of the future might look like a label, a tech company, and a data company all at once.
One thread runs through all of it: authenticity is still the industry’s most fragile — and most valuable — asset.
Artificial intelligence is the force reshaping the music industry’s future. And the legal battle over who gets paid, and for what, is just getting started.
In 2024, the major labels sued AI music companies Suno and Udio. Music publishers sued Anthropic this year for $3 billion. The AI companies say training on copyrighted music is transformative, and protected by fair use. Rightsholders say if you’re building a business on music, you have to pay for it. The courts haven’t settled it. Congress hasn’t touched it. But the marketplace is already moving.
Larry talks with David Israelite of the National Music Publishers Association and Judge David Strickler of the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board, both adjunct professors at NYU Steinhardt, about fair use, the shadow of litigation, why voluntary licensing deals are quietly multiplying, and whether greed, fear, or good old-fashioned bargaining theory will ultimately draw the line between innovation and compensation.
In this episode:
- Why the fair use argument is the central legal battleground, and what the courts have said so far
- How settlements with Suno and Udio are reshaping the landscape before any landmark ruling arrives
- Why voluntary licensing deals are multiplying, and what the YouTube era teaches us about where this is headed
- Whether Congress will step in, and why the best-case scenario is that it doesn’t
- What the next three to five years look like for creators, rights holders, and the AI companies caught in between
Artificial intelligence is the force reshaping the music industry’s future. And the legal battle over who gets paid, and for what, is just getting started.
In 2024, the major labels sued AI music companies Suno and Udio. Music publishers sued Anthropic this year for $3 billion. The AI companies say training on copyrighted music is transformative, and protected by fair use. Rightsholders say if you’re building a business on music, you have to pay for it. The courts haven’t settled it. Congress hasn’t touched it. But the marketplace is already moving.
Larry talks with David Israelite of the National Music Publishers Association and Judge David Strickler of the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board, both adjunct professors at NYU Steinhardt, about fair use, the shadow of litigation, why voluntary licensing deals are quietly multiplying, and whether greed, fear, or good old-fashioned bargaining theory will ultimately draw the line between innovation and compensation.
In this episode:
- Why the fair use argument is the central legal battleground, and what the courts have said so far
- How settlements with Suno and Udio are reshaping the landscape before any landmark ruling arrives
- Why voluntary licensing deals are multiplying, and what the YouTube era teaches us about where this is headed
- Whether Congress will step in, and why the best-case scenario is that it doesn’t
- What the next three to five years look like for creators, rights holders, and the AI companies caught in between