Now is The ChatGPT Moment for music (jperla.com)

VCs and many AI founders are misreading music the way early web startups misread publishing: they treat tracks like blog posts and assume infringement is an easy settlement. The history—Napster, Grokster, LimeWire, Grooveshark, ReDigi and others—shows repeated court defeats, large payouts, and even personal liability for founders. Music is legally dense: concentrated rights held by three majors, centralized licensing bodies (ASCAP/BMI/MLC/SoundExchange), layered protections (compositions, masters, mechanicals, sync, neighboring rights), anti-circumvention (DMCA §1201), and rising identity/voice-clone statutes. Recent moves—MMA, UMG–Udio licensing, EU TDM opt-outs and the EU AI Act—demonstrate both the feasibility and expectation of negotiated training licenses and machine-readable compliance. For AI/ML builders this means technical and business routes must be aligned with rights management: plan for provenance and training-data manifests, adopt licensing-first strategies, and build attribution/payment flows akin to sampling-era settlements. “Scrape now, apologize later” is a shrinking option as courts, Congress, and regulators reinforce rightholders’ leverage. The practical implication: sustainable music-AI products will integrate licensing, metadata, and anti-circumvention compliance from day one, and investors need domain-savvy advisors (not just litigators or incentivized founders) to navigate this uniquely hostile but license-ready ecosystem.