Andrew McCluskey

The A&R person is the first person to make contact with the band, and as such is the first person to promise them the moon. Who better to promise them the moon than an idealistic young turk who expects to be calling the shots in a few years, and who has had no previous experience with a big record company. Hell, he’s as naive as the band he’s... See more

But labels and rights-holders see the same tools as built on an enormous act of industrial-scale theft. Decades of copyrighted recordings, the fruits of 100 years of human artistry, have been scrapped and repurposed as training data without so much as a licensing check or a royalty paid.

I often quote the example of a metal band who produced this one acoustic ballad. That ballad was great and ended up in a big editorial playlist, generating a lot of saves and listenership. However, the band suffered algorithmically. Algorithms learned that their music was adequate for ballad lovers, recommending it to more of them. When that... See more