Generative AI’s threat to music sample libraries is existential — Splice thinks it has a solutionRecently, a music tech company asked Ms Mavy, a notable Afrohouse DJ/producer, if she would appear in an ad for their new AI product. There was a problem, though: the product was an Amapiano music plugin that would directly compete with Mavy’s own sample library business, Afroplug.
“It was crazy,” says Mavy. “It was like I was a child – you want my face, and you’re taking my business.”

READ MORE: Study shows “78% of musicians are now using AI” – but is everything really as it seems?

Mavy is calling from Belgium, where she lives; she has just dropped one of her sons off at school and is sitting in her car in a parking lot with her other son, who’s snacking in the back seat. Born in France and with roots in Cameroon and Guadeloupe, Mavy (born Maëva Nkouwap) built Afroplug after seeing that sample marketplaces weren’t keeping up with the exploding interest in genres like Afrobeats, Amapiano and Afrohouse. She now has a six-figure business selling samples on her own site, as well as on other sample marketplaces such as Splice.
As a businessperson, Mavy sees opportunities in building AI tools — Afroplug has released an AI music agreements generator, and has plans for other AI products. But it’s also an existential threat. Mavy’s entire business is based on her deep knowledge and contacts with music makers from across Africa and the Caribbean.
For now, that knowledge is her business’ “moat” against AI tools. “I know I have a treasure with my niche,” she says. The attempts she’s heard from AI full-song generators to create Amapiano and other music from the African diaspora “don’t sound authentic,” she says. “It’s harder for AI to replicate” the dozens and dozens of genres and subgenres (she estimates around 100).
But when they do get better at it, it could be all over for Afroplug. It’s for that reason that Mavy doesn’t listen to tools like Suno; she says she needs to protect her mental health, and doesn’t want to spend too much time obsessing over them. “I cannot lie, I’m very shocked [with them]…. It’s easy to fall into a toxic mindset.”
Ms Mavy. Image: Adèle Boterf
Trust issues
“We have a trust and a tooling problem,” says BT, the electronic artist and film composer, about full-song AI tools. He’s no AI sceptic; he’s been experimenting with music and technology for decades and runs an AI music start-up called Sound Labs. But he sees a lot of “righteous anger” from fellow artists and producers about the copyright and attribution questions with full-song AI tools. In this case, he says, the classic Silicon Valley saying “‘move fast and break things’ has become ‘move fast and break musicians’.”
Generative tools now do something that many producers usually want to do themselves – build an entire song — with ingredients they might not have chosen. Writing a prompt to generate a song is “a really unnatural interface for a musician,” says BT. “We’re not conditioned on language.”
And while some full-song tools now offer advanced features such as stem separation, they still don’t provide the granular control that experienced producers demand. A single sound can “show me what’s missing” when BT’s making a song, he says. “Some little Rhodes piano loop — I hear it and I go, ‘Oh, shit, I know what that’s supposed to be carved into.’” If those ingredients are off, Mavy can tell right away: the song doesn’t “sound like my husband,” she says; “the guy making reggae music on my island.”
BT. Image: Lacy Transeau
With AI song generators, “the output is more important than the input,” says Ale Koretzky, Splice’s head of AI. Despite their limitations, AI song generators pose a deep challenge to companies like Splice, which are built on a catalogue of fixed sounds.
“Static catalogues are now under existential threat,” says Koretzky. “When you can create what you want on the fly, and it’s unique to you, that is a very compelling value proposition.”
Variations, which Splice launched in April after two years of internal development, is the company’s wager on a way through. Rather than building a full-song generator, Koretzky and team built a tool that can take any sample in Splice’s catalogue and generate new versions of it. Most important, it preserves what Koretzky calls the sound’s “DNA” — its timbre and close-to-undefinable character — while giving producers the ability to change the melody and structure. A producer who loves a flute sample’s tone but needs a different melody can now generate alternatives that match its tone, with each licensed variation triggering a payout to the original creator.
Trying to compete with full-song generators directly, Koretzy says, is “a lost battle starting from the data.” Splice isn’t scraping terabytes of data from YouTube and other sources for its model. The bet is that producers will value something different. BT says he does: “If I can play one guitar part and repurpose that guitar part as a marimba part — these are tools that would be so useful for me personally.”
“What we are proposing,” says Koretzky, “is that input is just as important as output.”
Ale Koretzky. Image: Press
Liquid sampling
A musician and electrical engineer from Argentina, Koretzky was part of the University of Southern California team that pioneered techniques for stem separation, the technology that lets you pull individual instruments out of a finished mix; he’s been at Splice for eight years.
A couple of years ago, Koretzky proposed what he describes as a moonshot: make the Splice catalogue “liquid.” Instead of a fixed library you browse, he wanted to build a system where any sound could be reshaped, extended and made your own.
The core technical challenge was one that researchers have wrestled with for decades: how do you capture the essence of a sound? The qualities that make one flute recording distinguishable from another — the room it was played in, the timbre, the player’s breath and articulation, the microphone and signal chain — have resisted measurement for decades. “This is literally an impossible problem in the field of psychoacoustics and signal processing,” Koretzky says. “I’m crazy enough to think that we can solve these problems, and we sort of did.”
The breakthrough came when his team trained a model to learn a sound’s identity (its DNA) by telling the model to analyse everything except measurable aspects, such as the melody and structure. The result is a system that can extract the indefinable parts of a recording — the attack of a musician’s playing, room acoustics — and then inject that fingerprint into a generative model to create new variations.
Koretzky describes it as “the world’s first universal synthesizer, able to reproduce any sound in the universe.” A cello variation can capture the air of the bow, along with reverberation and compression, which are elements that would take a sound designer hours to approximate manually, if they could approximate them at all. The same model can blend two samples into a new hybrid; Koretzky calls this “semantic sound design.” A producer can specify a ratio (30% of one sound, 70% of another), and the model synthesizes something new that carries the DNA of both. Crucially, both original creators are credited and paid.
Andy Thompson. Image: Press
The philosophical risk
Many Splice staffers are musicians, so internal debates around AI and music during the development of Variations reflected the outside world. Andy Thompson, Splice’s product lead for the project, describes spending hours one weekend playing with a full song generator and an AI vocal persona he’d built, generating roughly 40 versions of a track with “Maggie Rogers energy.” When he finally tried to pick up his bass to play, for the first time in two months, he couldn’t. “I just was stuck in that moment,” he says.
“After hearing the final output so many times, I didn’t know how to put myself back into it.” That experience, he says, crystallised what Splice was up against. Thompson calls it a “philosophical risk” alongside the obvious competitive one: that “the value of making music would be eroded, and the struggle that people go through to become really good at their craft would be diminished.”
The same anxiety surfaced inside Splice’s own testing process. Thompson runs an internal program called Soundcheck, in which over 80 producers, vocalists and artists give unfiltered feedback during the development process. On consecutive days during one round of testing, two creators — one from Splice’s content team, one of them an external producer — heard outputs from an early version of the model and gave Thompson nearly identical reactions: “This is really cool,” followed by, in his paraphrase, “What’s my role? What happens to me in the future?”
Mavy, who played with Variations before the public launch, had a different reaction. “I love that you can play with it but it doesn’t distort the original samples or loops,” she says. She also sees a practical advantage for creators who’ve heard the complaint that too many producers use the same Splice packs — something that Julian Bunetta, producer for Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso, heard when other Splice customers noticed he was using samples from Power Tools: Sample Pack III, made by veteran producer Vaughn Oliver. “Now you don’t have that excuse anymore,” says Mavy. “You can take the loops and make another variation.”
Mavy is optimistic about where AI music tools eventually land. “I think the real artists and real creators will have more value,” she says. “People want authenticity.”
BT, for his part, ends with the same diagnosis he started with. The industry, he says, is in “an awkward moment” that it will eventually move through — but only by working across two conversations at once. “You really can’t have one without the other,” he says. “The trust problem is still there. The tooling problem is still there. This is one of the most exciting times to be alive as a musician. We just need to fix the ethics piece of it.”
The post Generative AI’s threat to music sample libraries is existential — Splice thinks it has a solution appeared first on MusicTech.

What the next wave of music creators is learning at Tennessee State University
The Splice team traveled to Nashville to spend the day with students from Tennessee State University (TSU) as part of the Music Business Accelerator program.

Sonic Republic Pluginize!Pluginize! is a native macOS application that scans, catalogs, and organizes installed audio plugins across AU, VST, VST3, AAX, CLAP, Universal Audio (UAD DSP and UAD Spark), and Waves. Pluginize! is the first plugin manager that handles individual Waves bundles and individual UAD plug-ins as separate items, rather than only operating at the vendor-folder level. Producers can. enable or disable a single Waves bundle (e.g., a specific compressor) or a specific UAD plug-in without going through Waves Central or UAD Connect, and without uninstalling anything. A whitelist. and auto-restore system protect user organization across vendor updates, which historically reset everything to "all enabled". Other features: - Cross-format grouping — AU, VST, VST3 and AAX versions of the same plugin are treated as one entity, switchable together with a single click. - Plugin Sets — saved active-library configurations (e.g., "Mixing", "Mastering", "Sound Design") switchable in one click. - 40+ auto-detected subcategories (Synth, Drum Machine, Reverb, Saturator, Vocal Tuner, etc.). - Storage breakdown with charts, broken down by vendor, format, and processing type. - Plugin Catalog Pro — visual catalog with editable icons and previews. - Setup Assistant — first-run guided configuration with vendor folder detection. - Menu bar integration. - Email-based activation, no serial keys. - Non-destructive by design — plugin files are moved between Active and Unused folders, never deleted. Platform: macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Universal Binary (Apple Silicon + Intel). Apple Developer ID signed and notarized, Hardened Runtime. Pluginize! is a standalone application — not a plugin. Read More

RIP Jack DouglasMC was saddened to learn of the passing of celebrated producer Jack Douglas. A note on social media from his family reads, "He passed away peacefully on Monday night. As many of you who follow him know, he produced great music, and lived a colorful life. We know that he touched many of your lives; we would love to hear more about that in the comments. He will be missed."

We look back on our 2017 interview, courtesy of writer Rob Putnam as part of his "Producers Sound Off" feature...

Jack DouglasClientele: John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Aerosmith

In the ‘60s, Jack Douglas was a musician with a label deal in hand and stars in his eyes. Encouraged by the Isley Brothers, he was inspired to engineer and ultimately to mix and produce. The now legendary producer’s first taste of studio work came as a janitor at New York’s then-new Record Plant studios. As his repertoire expanded, he was tapped to engineer John Lennon’s Imagine and later to produce the former Beatle’s final album, the Grammy-winning Double Fantasy. Originally from New York, Douglas has worked in London and currently splits his time between L.A. and NYC.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing producers today?Convincing major labels that, after mixing dozens of singles and albums, I can mix a record. When I’m hired to produce, I include a mix in the price. I’ve been told many times “But you’re not a mixer.” I find that challenging and hard to understand. It’s caused a lot of homogenization in pop music. But finding work isn’t difficult. There’s tons of it, as long as you keep all of the avenues open and are willing to diversify. But that’s only speaking for myself. I bet a big problem for a lot of producers is finding work.

What’s an ideal client for you?There’s no such thing. They’re all different. I may work with a brilliant artist who’s a fall-down drunk. I may work with the nicest guy in the world, but he needs so much help with his music. Maybe John Lennon was the ideal client. He had more talent than he could ever imagine. He delineated between who was the artist and who was the producer. My job was to direct him and bring an objective opinion of his work. His job was to write and perform. It made working with him simple.

When does a producer become a co-writer?For years I co-wrote with Aerosmith and didn’t take the credit. I thought that it was the producer’s job to facilitate the song in any way: writing bits and bobs and pieces along the way. I did that for a few albums and then caught on that I was missing a big chunk of dough. You start to see my name as a writer around [1977’s] Draw the Line. But I don’t jump in to write unless I’m invited or I feel the need. Otherwise it’s an intrusion. I have to write a big chunk [of a song] before I ask for a percentage. Not words here, chords there. That’s a producer’s job.

What’s your strategy for putting an artist at ease?During pre-production, I like to discover what makes an artist tick long before we get into the studio so that I can facilitate his or her dream. When we do go in, we feel like we came together in the same car. I do pre-production with all of my artists. With a band like Aerosmith, it may last a month. Other artists come to me with a demo that’s worthy of release. I feel it out as I go.

What have been your favorite technical developments over the past few years?Good copies of older equipment. Companies are making great stuff—reproductions of Fairchilds that sound better than [the original] Fairchilds. And these don’t have to be rack-mounted. They can be virtual. They’ve taken the [original] idea and improved on it.

How do you establish a strong relationship with a mastering engineer?I have a 35-year relationship with everyone at Sterling [Sound], starting with George Marino and Greg Calbi. Aside from things done by Doug Sax or Bob Ludwig, Sterling’s done 80 percent of my mastering.

What are the best ways for artists to save money in the studio?Own your own studio. No matter how big or small. Otherwise, be prepared when you go in. But allow for improvisation. Don’t be so stiff that nothing’s going to change.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve ever faced in the studio?I put a lot of pressure on myself. I’m a nervous wreck before I start a project—it doesn’t matter who it is. I’m challenged every time I go into the studio. I try not to show it, but internally there’s a bit of stage fright. Once it gets going and I see that it’s on course, everything’s fine.

What does the future hold for major labels?To buy records cheaply that are already made and distribute them. This means whatever the record-buying public is into. They’re not going to take any chances. Major labels have lost their way. They’re only interested in pop, urban music, a little country and not much else. Fortunately, there are avenues for every kind of music. We don’t need the majors except to compete with artists in the mainstream genres.

Who are some of your dream clients?The Rolling Stones. My buddy Don Was produces for them and he does it well. My other dream client was Bob Dylan and I’ve worked with him [on Allen Ginsberg’s 1983 record, First Blues].

What’s the key to identifying talent?Originality. I don’t like chasing trends. Hearing something I’ve never heard before is what turns me on. It keeps me interested.

Photo, by Joanne.nathan, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The post RIP Jack Douglas first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Senate confirms Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve governor, with chair vote expectedThe US Senate voted largely along partisan lines to confirm Kevin Warsh as a member of the Fed's Board of Governors, despite many Democrats’ concerns about the central bank’s independence.

CRTs Are Too Mainstream, So Game on a Mechanical TV InsteadAside from nostalgia, people claim to like CRTs because they’re apprehendable– the technology just makes more sense than the arcane wibbly-wobbly solid-state madness going on inside the driver chip of your new OLED. CRTs weren’t the first technology used to display moving images though, and their mechanical forebears were even easier to understand. For that reason we suppose it was only a matter of time before one of The Youths– in this case a British YouTuber by the name of [smill]–tried gaming on a mechanical television display.
The game in question was Minecraft— because of course it was, that’s the new generation’s DOOM–and the mechanical TV in question is not a priceless 1920s antique but a commercial kit that reproduces [John Logie Baird]s 1925 televisor. If you’re not familiar, it uses a flat disk– called a Nipkow disk after its inventor– with a series of holes in a spiral to demodulate a single lamp’s brightness variations into monochrome image made of scan-lines. As you might imagine, the resolution depends both on the size of the disk and its speed, so with a tabletop example you’re not going to get much– in this case, 32 holes for 32 lines. At least they’re not interlaced this time.
Getting a video signal from the computer to the LED in the televisor kit was the hard part of the hack. Aside from actually playing on the diminutive monochrome display, that is. There is a “video2NBTV” tool that can do the job, as the Narrow Band TV signal used by amateur radio enthusiasts still has the compatible timing values and modulation as what the televisor kit uses. We suspect that’s because the Televisor people used the modern NBTV standard as a starting point for their electronics, since [Baird]’s device reportedly ran 30 lines at only 5 frames per second, compared to the 32 lines at 15 FPS here.
Some of you may turn your nose up at this as a mere YouTube stunt, which is fair enough. At the same time, we cannot wait for the eventual arms race. Imagine when someone decides to go for 4K cred? Staring through a supersonic Nipkow disk makes pointing a particle accelerator at your face downright mundane. The kit [smill] used was monochrome, but if you want to repeat his antics in glorious colour, you can 3D print your own TV.

Warner Music Group’s Armin Zerza adds COO role to his remit, just one year after joining as CFOZerza's new remit as COO will encompass corporate development, central marketing, business and market intelligence, and WMX
Source

Kevin Hartz’s A* just closed its third fund with $450 millionEarly-stage venture firm A* Capital just took the wraps off its $450 million Fund III.

New study shows how electronic music soothes anxiety and increases feelings of joy and connectionA new AlphaTheta backed study has revealed how movement to electronic music can help to keep anxiety at bay and increase feelings of joy, immersion and connection to others [via MusicRadar].
The study was carried out by Emma Marshall, founder of Music And Movement Is Medicine (MIM) with research led by Professor Paul Dolan from the Behavioural Science faculty at the London School of Economics.
Hosted at Drumsheds nightclub in London, participants were guided through quiet listening and breathing exercises, through seated movements, to standing, and eventually free dance, all while using devices to measure their heart rates. Approximately 60 people took part, with over 600,000 heartbeats captured across the event.

READ MORE: Superbooth 2026: The coolest new synths and music tech gear – and everything else you need to know

During the ‘guided breathing and seated’ stages, there was an 18.5 percent rise in heart rate variability, a sign that the nervous system was shifting to a calmer state. The research also revealed that when the DJ dropped the tempo during breakdowns, participants’ heart rates stayed elevated, suggesting the body had entered a state of sustained immersion. Self-reported data collected from the participants also revealed that anxiety scores fell, joy scores rose, and feelings of connection to others increased significantly.
Mark Grotefeld, AlphaTheta’s General Manager, says of the study: “At AlphaTheta, we’ve always known that music moves people – and this research offers fascinating insight of how and why. These findings open up conversation about how the tools DJs use every day can have a measurable impact on human physiology, and should change how we think about the role of music in people’s health and wellbeing.”
Paul Dolan states, “Thanks to these data, we can see how the body immediately reacts to changes in BPM. It turns out the DJ is doing something physiologically significant – not just playing music but guiding the nervous system. This opens up new ways of thinking about electronic music.”
Emma Marshall adds: “This isn’t just about dancing. When the music and the experience are structured in a specific way, they guide the body through a clear cycle – calm, build, peak, and recovery. The data shows measurable stress regulation happening in real time, not as a side effect, but as the direct result of how the experience was designed.”
Luke Huxham, Managing Director of Broadwick Live (Drumsheds) has also said the study provides language and evidence to take to local councils, policymakers, licensing authorities, and public bodies “to make a stronger argument for why [nightclubs and live music] spaces need to be protected. That feels overdue, and we’re proud to have helped facilitate this first phase of research.”
The post New study shows how electronic music soothes anxiety and increases feelings of joy and connection appeared first on MusicTech.

Get 30% off u-he Repro at Plugin Boutique for a limited time
You can now get 30% off the u-he Repro at Plugin Boutique for a limited time. Repro (includes Repro 1 and Repro 5) combines the sound of two legendary synths by Sequential: the Pro-One and the Prophet 5. Plugin Boutique’s 30% discount means you can buy Repro for $104 (usually $149) until the offer ends [...]
View post: Get 30% off u-he Repro at Plugin Boutique for a limited time

Charli XCX has invested in consumer tech brand NothingNothing – the consumer tech brand behind a series of market-shaking smartphones and ChatGPT-integrated over-ear headphones – has announced Charli XCX as its latest investor and first Global Brand Ambassador.
Though details of the partnership are minimal at this time, a post made on Nothing’s socials shows Charli wearing a pair of Nothing (a) over-ear headphones and ear (3) earbuds, and holding a (4a) pro smartphone.
“This isn’t a traditional endorsement deal,” the brand writes. “Charli is investing in Nothing and helping shape what we build from here. The campaign today is just the start. Charli is the first of more to come.”

Charli xcx is joining Nothing as our latest Shareholder and our first Global Brand Ambassador.
This isn't a traditional endorsement deal. Charli is investing in Nothing and helping shape what we build from here.
The campaign today is just the start. Charli is the first of more… pic.twitter.com/kTMorITK4N
— Carl Pei (@getpeid) May 12, 2026

And in a true display of hospitality, Nothing says it put its new guest and shareholder Charli XCX in a room for five days straight to test the battery of its Headphone (a) model. “It lasted the whole time,” the brand confidently writes.

“Our first Global Brand Ambassador and latest shareholder, Charli XCX brings her genre-crossing instincts to our new partnership,” the brand says. 
“Together, we’re changing how things are done – with music and tech for a new generation.”
“When I’m creating, I’m always thinking about how my work will be experienced out in the world and I love how Nothing headphones sound and are designed,” says Charli XCX [via Rolling Stone]. “Its ethos of prioritising creatives is really something I look for when working with a partner.”
“I’ve been a fan of Charli’s work for years, and what struck me when we started talking was how much we agreed on,” adds Nothing co-founder and CEO Carl Pei. 
Credit: Nothing
“The tech industry has spent a decade making everything quieter, more minimal, more monotonous. Charli has spent her career going the other way in pop. We want Nothing to feel more like that.”
Other music artists who are investors in Nothing include the one of the biggest artists in the world by Spotify monthly listeners, The Weeknd, and legendary DJ trio Swedish House Mafia.
Nothing has made waves in the consumer tech world since its foundation in 2020. Last year, we got our hands on the brand’s Nothing (1) headphones, commending their class-leading battery life and alluring looks and giving them a solid 7/10 rating.
Learn more about the new partnership at nothing.tech.
The post Charli XCX has invested in consumer tech brand Nothing appeared first on MusicTech.

Cavitation Fractures is a new FREE fluid-dynamics distortion plugin for macOS
Unusable Engineering has released Cavitation Fractures, a free distortion plugin for macOS inspired by fluid dynamics. I love distortions in general, and I especially enjoy trying new ones that don’t follow the standard overdrive/clipping playbook. Cavitation Fractures is one of those. It’s different but not weird in a way that you don’t know how to [...]
View post: Cavitation Fractures is a new FREE fluid-dynamics distortion plugin for macOS

Reason 14 now available With the launch of the latest version, Reason has been treated to a visual design overhaul, gained some powerful new sequencing capabilities, kitted out with new built-in effects and more. 

Get 92% off the Solid State Logic Fusion Bundle at Plugin Boutique (limited-time offer)
You can now get 92% off the Solid State Logic Fusion Bundle at Plugin Boutique in a limited-time offer. The Solid State Logic Fusion Bundle delivers the core elements of the SSL Fusion analogue 2U rack processor. SSL Fusion Bundle includes five distinct plugins, each taken from a section of the hardware unit. Fusion HF [...]
View post: Get 92% off the Solid State Logic Fusion Bundle at Plugin Boutique (limited-time offer)

Black Lion Audio introduce the Auteur 8DAT Black Lion Audio’s latest delivers an eight-channel preamp and master clock unit that can be used to expand any interface with spare ADAT I/O.