skinny.

Latest / The Daniel Stih Podcast

Where Did AI Companies Get the Music Used to Train Their Models?

Where did AI companies obtain the actual music recordings used to train their models?

In an earlier investigation, I discovered that some music databases described as containing stolen music actually contained metadata—song titles, artist names, streaming counts—not the recordings themselves.

That left me with a question I couldn't answer: Where did the actual audio files come from?

Recent copyright litigation involving Anthropic and OpenAI revealed how companies obtained millions of books from pirated sources. Could something similar have happened with music?

I explore several possibilities…

The skinny

The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.