How will the major labels overcome the copyright threat from AI music? By turning to the most powerful weapon available: AI itself.MBW digs through new patent filings describing a 'media rights platform' that sits between rightsholders, gen AI systems, and the end users who want to prompt AI to create derivative works from copyrighted music
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ESP32Synth : an Audio Synthesis Library for the ESP32With MCUs becoming increasingly more powerful it was only a matter of time before they would enable some more serious audio-processing tasks. [Danilo Gabriel]’s ESP32Synth library is a good example here, which provides an ESP-IDF based 80+ voice mixing and synthesis engine. If you ever wanted to create a pretty impressive audio synthesizer, then all you really need to get started is an ESP32, ESP32-S3 or similar dual-core Espressif MCU that has the requisite processing power.
Audio output goes via I2S, requiring only a cheap I2S DAC like the UDA1334A or PCM5102 to be connected, unless you really want to use the internal DAC. With this wired up you get 80 voices by default, with up to 350 voices demonstrated before the hardware cannot keep up any more. You can stream multiple WAV files from an SD card for samples along with the typical oscillators like sinewave, triangle, sawtooth and pulse, as well as noise, wavetables and more.
In order to make this work in real-time a number of optimizations had to be performed, such as the removal of slow floating-point and division operations in the audio path. The audio rendering task is naturally pinned to a single core, leaving a single core for application code to use for remaining tasks. While the code is provided as an Arduino project, it uses ESP-IDF so it can likely be used for a regular ESP-IDF project as well without too much fuss.

Authentic Soundware Space Age Colors - Volume 1Space Age Colors features a selection of muted brass and woodwinds used in the classic midcentury studio orchestra. The instruments for this volume were chosen based on their complementary nature and ability to combine in quintessential swingin' style. Space Age Colors will expand your palette of colors and bring vibrant detail to your orchestrations. Features: 7 instruments spanning muted brass and woodwinds: Flute, Alto Flute, Bass Clarinet, English Horn, Trumpet (Harmon mute), and Trombone (cup mute), plus an Espressivo Flute for lyrical solo passages. 7 orchestrated multi patches for rapid sketching and inspiration. 20 articulations including legato, sustain, tenuto, swell, grace notes, rips, falls, doits, flops, bends, scoops, and more. Runs Arranger — play realistic, performance-sampled runs in any key, any scale type, from any note to any note, with control over duration, dynamics, and resolution. Trills Arranger — play polyphonic trills and chord tremolos on a single MIDI channel, with three modes including diatonic chord trill support. 5 vintage microphone positions. Onboard tape, echo, tone, and limiter effects. Flexible articulation switching via key switch, MIDI CC, or host automation. Read More

Cre8audio unveil the Programm Boasting MIDI and CV/gate connectivity and functioning either as a standalone unit or Eurorack module, Cre8audio's new unit promises to deliver the ultimate sequencing experience for just about any setup. 

“I think ‘free’ was a terrible idea”: Apple Music VP says it is proud to not have a free subscription tierOliver Schusser, Vice President of Apple Music, thinks free music subscription tiers remain a “terrible idea”, and says Apple is proud to not offer one.
Schusser has compared the music streaming model to those for film and TV, and believes much higher numbers subscribe to these visual services rather than music services because platforms like Netflix and Disney+ do not offer free tiers, unlike music giants like Spotify.

READ MORE: The Apple Mac Pro – the go-to computer for high-end music production – has been discontinued

During his appearance on Billboard’s On the Record podcast, Schusser says, “I think “free” was a terrible idea. Apple Music is the only service that doesn’t have a free tier, and believe it or not, we are really proud of that.
“First of all, we really look at music like art… We think when an artist spends nine months in a studio to make a piece of [incredible] work, no one in the world should think it’s okay to give that away for free.”
He adds, “If you look at – I don’t know if you watched [Severance], which was, at the beginning of the year, the biggest and hottest TV show on the planet – the only way to watch [Severance] was, you have to sign up for Apple TV+… You can’t just go anywhere on the internet and consume all the shows for free.”
Schusser goes on to explain how the availability of free tiers means not enough people pay for music overall: “In my view: the fact that all paid services have to compete with free means not enough people are paying because they can get it for free, and the paid services can’t actually charge the correct price for the service because they’re always competing with free…”
He later adds, “I don’t want to comment on any of our competitors, but if you look at them in aggregate, the monetization of [a] free service is so poor and so little. It’s not like it’s paying the bills for them. I would argue it’s the cheapest marketing mechanism in the world, where the labels have given everyone the right to basically do free marketing – like, take all our content and use it for marketing and then upsell.”

In other Apple Music news, the platform is rolling out what it calls “Transparency Tags”, a system for flagging AI-generated content on its platform. On 4 March, Apple sent a newsletter to industry partners announcing that AI disclosures would now be a “delivery requirement” for content submitted to the service. The tags cover four categories: Artwork, Track, Composition, and Music Video, each intended to indicate when AI contributed a “material portion” of the work.
The post “I think ‘free’ was a terrible idea”: Apple Music VP says it is proud to not have a free subscription tier appeared first on MusicTech.

Temecula DSP now emulates the classic Alesis Microverb reverb unit
Temecula DSP is offering two classic Alesis reverb unit emulations (MDV-II & MCV-I) for macOS and Windows for free! It was just around a month ago when we covered MDV-II by Temecula DSP. MDV-II is a faithful emulation of the classic Alesis Midiverb II, one of the most iconic budget-friendly pieces of hardware ever made. [...]
View post: Temecula DSP now emulates the classic Alesis Microverb reverb unit

Pre-orders are now open for Behringer’s Jupiter clone, the JT-2After premiering its Jupiter-8 clone, the JT-2 at NAMM 2026, Behringer has announced the unit is now available for pre-0rder – though an exact shipping date is yet to be confirmed.
The JT-2 was initially teased over three years ago, with everything from fonts to the chromatically ordered coloured buttons a nod to Roland’s original polyphonic classic synth.

READ MORE: “AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon”: 44% of music uploaded to Deezer every day is AI-generated

As the title suggests, the JT-2 offers two voices that the JT-16 will eventually include. Those who are looking for a bigger paraphonic instrument can polychain up to 16 JT-2s, making for 32 voices. While there’s not a keyboard as on the JT-16, there’s double the voices, massively increasing the sonic potential.
In terms of pure technical building blocks, the JT-2 includes two analogue VCOs, PWM, hard sync and cross modulation, an analogue low pass filter with cutoff and resonance, a high pass filter with only a cutoff, an LFO, and two ADSR envelopes for the filter and VCA. This piece also allows for external audio to be run through its filters, a feature that has become standard for Behringer.

The VCOs and VCFs are the core of capturing the Jupiter 8 sound. Considering that synth was used by everyone from Michael Jackson to Knife Party to Kraftwerk, having a version that doesn’t run nearly $30,000 comes handy for modern producers…
Equipboard.com says of the Jupiter-8: “If the TR-808 was Roland’s rhythmic revolution, the Jupiter-8 was its crown jewel. A statement of analog perfection that defined 1980s pop, funk, and electronic music. Unlike the 808, whose cult status came through commercial failure, the Jupiter line embodied success: a flagship designed with no compromise that became the sonic benchmark for every polyphonic synth that followed.”
The Behringer JT-2 is currently available to pre-order for $189. For more information, head to Behringer.
The post Pre-orders are now open for Behringer’s Jupiter clone, the JT-2 appeared first on MusicTech.

“Training on lyrics is transformative”: AI firm Anthropic argues “fair use” against UMG in ongoing legal battleAnthropic, the company behind AI-powered chatbot Claude, is arguing that the use of song lyrics to train the bot is ‘fair use’ amid an ongoing lawsuit filed by Universal Music Group and other music companies.
The lawsuit against Anthropic was filed back in 2023, with Universal Music Group taking the lead on the suit but joined by other music publishers, and accused the AI startup of “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics”.

READ MORE: “AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon”: 44% of music uploaded to Deezer every day is AI-generated

UMG and the other music companies urged a federal judge last month to find that Anthropic’s use of lyrics by its artists was not fair use. “Transformative use” is part of this fair use defence, and allows for works to be built upon with a different purpose from its original form.
Anthropic essentially argues that its bot transforms the works of others into something completely new, meaning this should count as fair use, and claims that the publishers have no evidence that Claude is harming them in the market, another element of fair use.
In a Monday (20 April) brief, Anthropic argued that the publishers cannot “meaningfully dispute that training on lyrics (and other copyrighted text) is transformative”, as per Billboard.  Anthropic also claims that Claude does not only ingests lyrics, but also trillions of other words to “understand the interrelationships between words and concepts in human language” so it can code software, conduct research and write documents.
“Claude’s transformative training creates a flexible, general-purpose model that can be used in myriad beneficial ways — the vast majority of which are wholly unrelated to lyrics or music,” states Anthropic’s lawyers.
In a statement provided to Billboard on 21 April, a representative for the music publishers fired back against Anthropic’s arguments, saying, “There is no excuse for Anthropic’s blatant infringement of Publishers’ copyrighted song lyrics. Anthropic’s recent filing is wrong on the facts and the law in numerous respects, and Publishers look forward to rebutting those arguments and correcting the record when they file their opposition brief.”
The post “Training on lyrics is transformative”: AI firm Anthropic argues “fair use” against UMG in ongoing legal battle appeared first on MusicTech.

Sennheiser introduce the HD 480 Pro Sennheiser's new flagship closed-back headphones claim to eliminate two of the most common complaints about closed-back designs: accurate bass reproduction and comfort. 

UJAM opens its Gorilla Engine plugin development platform to third-party developersUJAM has announced that its Gorilla Engine is now available through structured public licensing for independent developers, studios, and enterprise teams worldwide.
Gorilla Engine is the professional plugin development platform behind its own commercial catalogue, as well as products from Avid, Reason, Loopcloud, Crow Hill, and others.
Just in time for the launch, UJAM has also released a Gorilla Engine 26.03 update, which introduces third-party Product Hub support: a fully integrated licensing and delivery system where developers can manage products, builds, and releases from a single interface.

READ MORE: Add some Latin groove to your mix with UJAM’s Groovemate LATIGO

UJAM’s decision to open up Gorilla Engine also arrives off the back of Native Instruments entering insolvency proceedings. The company is behind the Massive soft synth, Maschine workstation, the Kontakt creation platform, and more. NI CEO Nick Williams reiterated last month that the brand is still “working to secure a healthy, financially sustainable future”.
As Gorilla Engine is UJAM’s own platform, it receives continuous investment as a first-party product, and is maintained by a team “whose commercial success depends directly on its quality and reliability”.
In a press release shared with MusicTech, UJAM says Gorilla Engine offers a “practical path for teams migrating from Kontakt”, and that Gorilla Script, the platform’s scripting language, is intentionally similar to Kontakt Script (KSP), meaning many existing scripts carry over with minimal modification.
“Core group and mapping parameters export directly, interface design and control logic move to a JavaScript-based UI layer, and modulation, filter, and effect chains can be rebuilt quickly inside Gorilla Editor. Teams with years of accumulated KSP investment do not need to start from scratch,” it explains.
It also assures that a plugin built with Gorilla Engine ships as its own product, with its own installer, its own brand, and its own presence on a customer’s system.
“We built Gorilla Engine because we needed it for our own releases, and it has been the platform behind everything UJAM has shipped commercially,” says Wolfram Knelangen, COO at UJAM.
“Product Hub is the piece that closes the loop. With it, a developer on Gorilla Engine gets the same licensing and delivery infrastructure we use ourselves, without having to build any of it. We think that changes what is possible for independent developers and for the enterprise teams who have spent years building and maintaining their own delivery infrastructure.”
For more information, head over to the Gorilla Engine website. 
The post UJAM opens its Gorilla Engine plugin development platform to third-party developers appeared first on MusicTech.

Judge orders Anna’s Archive to pay $322 million for scraping 86 million tracks from SpotifyAnonymous shadow library Anna’s Archive has been ordered to pay $322 million in damages as punishment for scraping millions of tracks from Spotify.
The order comes as a result of a lawsuit from Spotify and the three major labels: Universal Music Group, Sony, and Warner Music Group.

READ MORE: “AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon”: 44% of music uploaded to Deezer every day is AI-generated

On April 14, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District Court for New York found Anna’s Archive guilty of charges including copyright infringement, breach of contract, and violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The prominent music companies initially sought the massive figure of $13 trillion in damages for “brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings”.
The amount was justified via $151,000 for the 86 million songs Anna’s Archive claimed to have illegally downloaded from Spotify. Anna’s Archive also retrieved 256 million rows of metadata, including artist names and record titles.
Anna’s Archive stated goal was to share all the music for free via BitTorrent, creating “the largest truly open library in human history.”
The $322 million in damages is a far cry lower than the quite-frankly ludicrous figure of $13 trillion – a significant portion of the $30 trillion total US gross domestic product in 2025, for reference. But how exactly Anna’s Archive will be forced to pay, or whether it’ll even be able to, is currently a question mark. The identities of those behind Anna’s Archive are currently unknown, and they haven’t appeared for any court proceedings.
As such, plaintiffs requested a favourable ruling on the grounds of “failure to answer or otherwise defend against the claims in the Complaint”.
Should payment be made, however, $300 million of the $322 million settlement will go to Spotify. The three major labels will split the rest, receiving roughly $7 million each.
So far, Judge Rakoff has been able to file a preliminary injunction against the group, which ordered internet hosting providers to block domains associated with Anna’s Archive, such as annas-archive.org, annas-archive.li, and annas-archive.se.
The post Judge orders Anna’s Archive to pay $322 million for scraping 86 million tracks from Spotify appeared first on MusicTech.

Vibe-coded plugins are giving me SynthEdit déjà vu
The comments under our recent Amorph piece have been bouncing around in my head for the past few weeks. Some BPB readers are excited about being able to type “give me an overdrive that sounds like a Tube Screamer” and get a working plugin out the other end. Others are pretty concerned that we’re about [...]
View post: Vibe-coded plugins are giving me SynthEdit déjà vu

“AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon”: 44% of music uploaded to Deezer every day is AI-generatedFrench music streaming service Deezer is seeing 75,000 AI-generated songs uploaded to the platform every day, equating to over two million tracks per month – over 44% of new music uploads.
These numbers are in keeping with a continued rise in AI-generated content uploaded to the platform. In January 2026, the daily number was 60,000, which made up 39%. Before that, in November 2025 the number was 50,000, 30,000 in September, and 10,000 when Deezer introduced its patent-pending AI detection tool to its system in January 2025.

READ MORE: “AI music is never going to take risks because it’s bad for business”: Tallinn Music Week panel plays down concerns around AI music

“AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon,” says Alexis Lanternier, CEO of Deezer. “As daily deliveries keep increasing, we hope the whole music ecosystem will join us in taking action to help safeguard artists’ rights and promote transparency for fans.”
Deezer has taken significant steps to ensure users are engaging with human-made music. In response to the increasing numbers, Deezer will no longer store high-resolution versions of AI-generated tracks. This comes after it banned AI content from algorithmic recommendations and editorial playlists.
In terms of who is listening to these tracks, according to Deezer, 1-3% of total streams are for AI-generated music, and 85% of those streams are reportedly fraudulent.
Deezer also claims it’s the first major streamer to independently identify AI-generated music. The practice began in June 2025 and has now tagged 13.4 million AI-generated tracks.
“Thanks to our technology and the proactive measures we put in place more than a year ago, we have shown that it’s possible to reduce AI-related fraud and payment dilution in streaming to a minimum,” Lanternier continues. “Since January, we have made our detection technology available for licensing, and we’re looking forward to seeing industry peers of all kinds join us in the fight for fairness in the age of AI.”
The post “AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon”: 44% of music uploaded to Deezer every day is AI-generated appeared first on MusicTech.

LinkedIn’s CEO is moving on; please hold your tearful video tributesRyan Roslansky has stepped down as LinkedIn's CEO after six years running the world's largest professional network. Dan Shapero, the company's COO, takes over immediately.

Martin Guitar Celebrates Earth Day 2026 with New Biosphere® GuitarNews broke on Wednesday that, "In honor of Earth Day 2026, C. F. Martin & Co.® continues its long-standing commitment to sustainability with the release of the 00L Biosphere IV and its latest Impact Report. Together, these initiatives reflect Martin’s belief that protecting the planet and creating exceptional instruments go hand in hand."

"In the Biosphere series, we have been following a story around the world, and this year we picked the Emperor Penguin in Antarctica for our focus," said Robert Goetzl, who creates the artwork for the Martin Biosphere guitars. "The instruments showcase the biodiversity of water around the globe and highlight the importance of water to all life. The guitars are not only made sustainably, but they also highlight different areas of our planet. They thread together in a larger message of the importance of protecting our environment for all life worldwide."

A company statement reads as follows:

Introducing the 00L Biosphere IV: A Tribute to Antarctica 

Each Earth Day, Martin unveils a special Biosphere guitar that brings together meaningful artistry and responsibly sourced materials—and this year’s model turns its focus to one of the most extreme and fragile environments on Earth. 

The 00L Biosphere IV features original artwork by renowned artist Robert Goetzl, capturing a powerful moment between an emperor penguin parent and its chick. Shielded from the Antarctic wind, the image reflects both resilience and vulnerability in a rapidly changing world. 

“When your environment is at threat, you feel very protective of your offspring—and the creatures around you that need protecting,” says Goetzl. “That’s what this piece is about.” 

Crafted entirely from FSC-certified woods, this sloped-shoulder 00L model features a Sitka spruce top, sapele back and sides, and flamed maple binding. It’s a guitar designed not only to be played, but to spark awareness and inspire action. 

As part of this year’s release, Martin is proud to support the Global Penguin Society with a donation to advance its mission of protecting penguin species, preserving critical coastal ecosystems, and fostering environmental education worldwide. 

2025 Impact Report: Measurable Progress, Meaningful Change 

Alongside the launch of the new Biosphere guitar, Martin is also releasing its 2025 Impact Report, highlighting continued progress across environmental stewardship, community engagement, and philanthropy.  Key highlights include: 

103 grants awarded through the Martin Guitar Charitable Foundation, totaling $594,750 $35,000+ in donated instruments for music education and environmental causes First Martin Sustainability Summit held at the solar-powered Commerce Lane facility Six new instruments built with sustainable and domestically abundant tonewoods 200+ tons of recycled material across Martin facilities 

These efforts represent tangible steps forward in Martin’s ongoing journey to reduce its environmental footprint while supporting the communities it serves. 

A Commitment That Continues 

For nearly two centuries, Martin has relied on the natural world to craft its instruments—and protecting those resources remains essential to its future. From responsible wood sourcing to partnerships with global conservation organizations, sustainability is embedded in every part of the company’s work.  

To learn more about the 00L Biosphere IV and explore the full 2025 Impact Report, visit martinguitar.com/sustainability. The post Martin Guitar Celebrates Earth Day 2026 with New Biosphere® Guitar first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.