The Co-Write Room: AI, Music, and the Future of Everything Creative

The NO FAKES Act cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Unanimous voice vote, on its third attempt, the first time it's made it out of committee. It now heads to a full Senate floor vote. Before you file this under "celebrity protection bill," stop. That's not what this is. Right now, there is no federal law protecting your voice. Not for the session vocalist in East Nashville. Not for...

What if the song that went viral last week was purchased? And what if the royalties you didn't earn from it were stolen on top of that? In Episode 9, Raia Kumar tracks four stories — manufactured virality, the first federal AI streaming fraud conviction, a billion-dollar funding round mid-lawsuit, and a landmark bill that could finally give independent songwriters a legal seat at the table. In thi...

The TAKE IT DOWN Act is now law. Which means platform enforcement rules are in effect — and there are two things buried in the fine print that matter far more than the headline. In this Newsflash, Raia breaks down: What the law actually requires covered platforms to do — and the 48-hour federal deadline that is now non-negotiable Why known identical copies must also be removed, closing a loophole...

A new study proved that labeling music as AI, even when it's human-made, causes listeners to emotionally disconnect. The label changed. The music didn't.  This week, Raia covers the infrastructure being built to apply those labels:  The Suno lawsuit expanding to 61,000 recordings Apple Music's AI model fingerprinting Quicksilver browser extension Protect Working Musicians Act Johnny Cash's estate...

YouTube built a button that replaces your music with AI — automatically, inside a copyright claim, at zero cost to whoever just displaced you. There is no opt-out for rights holders. The displacement is structural, and it is baked into the interface. This week Raia connects three developments that look separate but aren't: a platform feature that quietly routes around human composers, a French leg...

Taylor Swift is filing federal trademarks on the sound of her own voice. That's not a quirk of celebrity — it's a signal that the existing legal framework wasn't built for this moment, and that waiting for legislation to catch up is not a strategy. In this episode, Raia connects two stories that look separate but aren't: Swift's trademark filings through TAS Rights Management, and Björn Ulvaeus's...

An AI-generated artist just hit #1 on the iTunes global chart — simultaneously, in five countries — and the real artists it displaced had no idea it was coming. If the charts can be gamed that easily, what does that mean for musicians who are still showing up and doing the work? This week on The Co-Write Room, Raia breaks down three stories from a single week in April 2025 that, taken together, te...

The Co-Write Room — Episode 4 "The Gap Between Possible and Inevitable" Raia breaks down the Suno licensing stalemate, Kevin Griffin's SoundBreak AI launch, Anthropic's Mythos AI self-restriction, and Seedance 2.0 — and what all of it means for the artist who's trying to stay irreplaceable. Show Notes Fresh off Coachella — Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber, Bad Bunny, Nine Inch Nails, Laufey, Wet L...

Every system that was supposed to protect independent artists — copyright protection, distribution infrastructure, algorithmic discovery — has a version of itself that can be bought, gamed, or leveraged by whoever has the resources. This episode is about all three. We follow up on Murphy Campbell, the North Carolina folk artist whose Spotify profile was hijacked by AI voice clones and whose origin...

The Co-Write Room — Episode 002 "What No One Will Admit About AI" April 7, 2026 | 6:59 What if the biggest threat to your music career in 2026 isn't that AI is replacing you — it's that nobody in this industry has any incentive to admit it's already happening? In this episode, Raia covers two stories that look separate but aren't. Murphy Campbell is an independent folk singer from North Carolina w...

Voice cloning. Royalty dilution. And a $1,000 grant that might be the most important thing that happened in music this week. Suno claims "the best music starts with a human." This week, we tested that claim — three stories that together tell one story: On this episode, Raia covers three stories that together tell one story: Suno launched version 5.5 with voice cloning features that let anyone embe...