Welcome to the AI issue. Normal service resumes next week, I promise, but this one needed saying. The corporate AI machine is only just warming up, and music is the hottest thing on the menu. The major labels have spent the last couple of years suing the AI platforms, clawing back cash for having their catalogues scraped. Then, before the ink was even dry, they climbed straight into bed with them. Nobody should be surprised. The big labels follow the money, and right now the money is in the most lifeless music you will ever hear.

What always strikes me is that AI music still isn't actually very good, and its play counts are being propped up by bots. At the moment it simply regurgitates whatever came before it, like a karaoke machine with a business plan. The creativity isn't there yet, although I'm not daft enough to say it never will be.

Meanwhile, I regularly feature artists in this newsletter with fewer than 100 monthly listeners, people building their names and careers one track at a time, who are now being drowned out by sheer generic volume. It's partly why I bang on about this newsletter not being algorithm-built. The algorithms might be getting fooled, but people aren't, and I reckon human curation is about to matter more than ever. It's a complicated one, though. What do you reckon? Hit reply and tell me.

Record of the Week: Bodhi - Holding Pattern

Ever since Bodhi returned in 2022 after a four-year hiatus, the Welsh duo have been chasing a deeper, bass and garage-driven sound, a long way from the house of their breakout record 'Imperfection'. This latest one is a proper stomper, built for the warehouses, with punchy drums and clangy industrial sounds rattling through it like someone has thrown a toolbox down a stairwell, deliberately and in perfect time.

Two of the scene's coolest labels have delivered some highly anticipated EPs this week. First, ec2a has put out Soul Mass Transit System - Do I Like That from HAUSDOGS03. It's a newer sound I'm fully digging, and it follows the single 'Music Rock 4 Me', a former Record of the Week, so it arrives with pedigree. Second, Time Is Now Records has delivered J Wax - Peaches, the title track from the EP of the same name, with a glass-shattering vocal riding a brilliant bassline. Keep the good wine glasses well away from the speakers.

Plenty more to get your ears around.

Tom (japanese.knotweed)

The good: Fred again.. says he feels "no pull whatsoever" towards AI music
In notes shared on his Instagram Stories, he wrote that "the process is the magic", and that handing it over to a machine would go against everything he loves about making music. One of the biggest names in dance music, saying out loud that the work itself is the point.
Read it on Mixmag

The bad: 60% of streams on AI tracks are fraudulent, says Qobuz
Qobuz has started tagging AI-generated releases in its app, and says most of the plays they get are fake, so they're cut from royalty payouts. AI music makes up just 0.38% of its streams, but the bulk of that exists purely to farm money out of the pot that pays real artists. Less a new genre, more a pickpocket with a laptop.
Read it on Music Business Worldwide

The ugly: UKF's parent company told to pay an indie label £1.4m now, with millions more in dispute
The High Court has ordered AEI Music to make an interim payment to NoCopyrightSounds, putting the minimum owed at £4.5m before AEI's counterclaims. NCS says the full debt is £6.5m. AEI points out it isn't a final ruling and plans to seek permission to appeal. The trial is set for January 2028, so get comfortable.
Read it on Music Business Worldwide

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Murphy's Law @ ec2a HQ: It's ec2a's week, apparently. A huge SMTS EP drops, and then Murphy's Law turn up at HQ and lay down an absolute blinder of a Garage and Bass set, as if to rub it in. It includes one of my favourite ec2a dubs of all time, Four Eyes - If We Ever, alongside some of the latest belters from the likes of ATW and Hardline Sounds.

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