Volume 1, Issue 5
Greetings, and welcome to fall. It’s been a busy month and we are getting ready for the annual Production Music Association conference (PMC 2025) next week, so if you are going to be there and watch to network or talk music provenance, reach out to info@catamountmusic.com.
How to get ahead with MusicTech, Sync Style
September brought the news that Eric Campbell, a sync musician and leader of the CTRL Camp community, had joined the advisory board of Incantio. Incantio is a startup in the musictech space with a two-way business model. It allows artists to self-license their work and set their own terms. It also allows other creators the chance to work with that catalog with AI assisted tools to find the right tracks efficiently. This seems like a great match for both, as Eric brings a ton of real world experience in the world of sync. So congrats to Eric and we’ll keep an eye on Incantio as well!
C2PA
September saw a lot of news, but I want to focus on C2PA stories first, starting with a couple of photography stories. The C2PA implementation in the Nikon Z6 III camera hit a pretty big bump in the road. After barely a week in production, an exploit was found where one could inject manufactured content into the camera by exploiting both the NEF file format and a vulnerability in the multiple–exposure implementation. Adam Horshack made the discovery and his write up over on DPReview is a fascinating read. Nikon decided to take an aggressive approach and both suspended their authentication service as well as forcing the existing credentials to be revoked while they address the underlying issues. It is a disappointing setback for sure, and illustrates out some difficulties in implementing C2PA at the hardware level.
The Pixel 10 release in September is another step forward for C2PA. The phone has the highest security rating possible at the moment, with C2PA as a standard feature creating C2PA signed files for anything shot with the Pixel camera or Google Photos app. There’s a good technical write up in the HackerNews.
I find both of these stories instructive for how they might inform implementation of C2PA in the music business. There are parallels to both. For example, the Nikon issue teaches me that being able to inject an asset into a workflow circumventing the normal intake process is a major vulnerability. Whenever you bring a new region, track, audio file, midi sequence, AI player or other artifact into the DAW, provenance needs to be established at that time. In the case of the Nikon camera, it was combination of being able to switch the storage device and the fact that in-camera software allowed for the selection of a somewhat arbitrary asset to be included in the photograph.
In the case of the Pixel 10, I immediately think of Fender Studio. This is a capable, although limited, phone-based DAW. Fender Studio should be able to C2PA seal the files it creates from recording sessions, and to assess provenance of uploaded files. If I export a track from Fender Studio, I should get a C2PA sealed WAV. Of course, Fender hasn’t implemented C2PA, and doesn’t have any plans to as far as I know, so this is hypothetical at the moment.
Moving on to some other quick hits in the C2PA space…
The South Korean government released the AI Framework Act, which says, “the law should direct MSIT and other ministries to promote voluntary provenance standards such as the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).” Way to go South Korea!
And SSL announced that they are joining Digicert, Sectigo, and others as a certificate authority for C2PA-style certificates.
Music and AI
It looks like Amuse pulled a SoundCloud. This is when you change your terms of service to allow for broad use of user generated content in AI training and other purpose without compensating the artist. We might need a wall of shame for the growing number of companies on this list…
Moises launched a new AI studio with generative AI stem capabilities on top of their existing stem separation technology. To be fair, this might have happened in August, but better late than never. This brings Moises a valid entry into the AI DAW marketplace, although it’s early days for most of these folks. Their take on generative AI music is clearly stem based, with AI generating compatible stems and providing good stem mixing functions to produce the final mix.
And finally, we’ll close it out with an awesome experiment from Ezra Sandzer-Bell, who takes four bars of piano-synth and makes it into a song in both Suno and Mozart AI. It’s pretty awesome to be able to see both products side-by-side like this.
….and September is a wrap! We’ll be back next month with a recap of the PMC and more.
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