Light Box

Every AI music generator was built on other people’s songs, nearly all of them, taken without asking and without paying. The AI companies say that’s fair use, the same rule that lets a critic quote a book. Musicians say it’s theft. The answer is worth billions. Last year the U.S. Copyright Office weighed in, and the next day the head of the office was fired. So is it legal? To try and get some ans...

I found recordings online of the Beatles in 1969, goofing around at rehearsal and drifting in and out of their old songs. They totally sounded like they could be the real “Nagra Tapes” from the Get Back sessions. But... these recordings never happened. They were made with AI. I had to find the guy who made them. Using AI on the Beatles’ voices might be the most offensive thing you could do to the...

AI music is supposed to be what ends musicians’ careers. For James Hinton, aka The Range, it might be what saves his. For a decade, he made his music out of strangers’ voices on YouTube, until he couldn’t anymore. On paper, this is an episode about the past, present and future of sampling. But really, it’s about loss (and friendship). Write us: Mark@LightBoxPodcast.com In this episode: The Range,...

For a lot of people, Udio was the AI music app where they finally got to make the songs they’d been hearing in their heads for years. Then one night last fall, Udio settled its lawsuit with Universal Music Group. Downloads were switched off, and the new fine print said the songs users had made weren’t theirs anymore. After talking to Udio users all over the world, Mark realized this story wasn’t j...

A year ago, I was driving my daughter home from preschool when Spotify autoplayed a song that cut out mid-note. It was AI, and whoever made it hadn't bothered to fix the ending. So I tracked down the 19-year-old behind it. That was just the start of a trip down the rabbit hole. It turns out there's a lot of slop out there. Is it going to ruin everything? Or am I looking at it all wrong? Write us:...

Marc Ribot has played guitar for Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Norah Jones, Robert Plant, and about a thousand other people. He's also one of the most outspoken critics of AI music. He calls Suno and Udio plagiarism machines. And for him, the whole thing comes down to consent: nobody asked the musicians. I caught him on the phone somewhere between Milwaukee and Minneapolis, driving to a gig. Of all t...

A producer with 13 billion streams posts on Reddit about how much he loves making music with AI and... gets banned. We have the conversation that wasn't allowed there. In Part II of our hitmaking story, Mickey Shiloh and David Phelan say the quiet parts out loud: everyone's using it, nobody's admitting it, and if it's happening anyway, you might as well get on the trolley. Also, Mark plays his own...

There's already a #1 hit made with AI. You just don't know which one. In this episode, we go inside the world of professional songwriting camps -- where hits for the biggest artists are assembled by rooms of strangers. And we meet two hitmakers with billions of streams -- Mickey Shiloh (Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, Iggy Azalea) and David Phelan (ZAYN, Charli XCX, Jason Derulo) -- who are startin...

Composer Mark Henry Phillips logs onto an AI music generator expecting slop. Instead... he has an existential crisis. What it made wasn't slop -- it was good. Really good. This plunges him into a year-and-a-half long rabbit hole. He discovers -- with help from Sonarworks ' Helmuts Bēms -- that professional musicians are secretly adopting AI like performance-enhancing drugs. Mark also digs into how...

A sneak peek at what's coming this season on Light Box , the new show from PRX's Radiotopia. Launching September 15. Host and creator Mark Henry Phillips is a professional composer who accidentally opened Pandora's box by experimenting with an AI music generator. In this teaser, he shows his wife what he's gotten himself into. The first two episodes drop next Tuesday (September 15) and then a new...

Listen to LIGHT BOX , the new show from PRX's Radiotopia. Out now!    Mark Henry Phillips spent twenty years composing music for a living. Then one night he typed a few words into an AI music generator and it did his job better, he thought, than he ever could. In ten seconds. Basically for free. Light Box is what happened next: a composer and audio journalist investigates what AI is doing to music...

Something new? You'll just have to follow along to find out, I guess...