Recording someone else's song is one of the few things in music with a ready-made legal route. Here is what the US mechanical licence actually covers, what a distributor's cover service does for you, why a YouTube cover is a different deal, and why a translated lyric falls outside the easy path.
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Creative Commons gives you six licences built from four elements, plus a public-domain tool called CC0. For musicians, two of those elements matter most: NonCommercial (NC), which shuts out most paid uses, and NoDerivatives (ND), which under the licence text blocks sync to video. Here is what each one allows, and what to pick before you release.
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Dither is a tiny amount of deliberate noise added when you cut a file down to a lower bit depth, so the rounding error turns into a smooth hiss instead of gritty distortion. Here is when to switch it on, when to leave it off, and what the noise-shaping options in your bounce dialog are doing.
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An EPK is one page that lets a writer, promoter or festival programmer judge your act in a couple of minutes and lift what they need without emailing you. Here is what belongs on it, the order to put it in, how each reader uses it, and the rights detail most artists miss on press photos.
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An email list is the one fan channel you control, but it comes with rules. Here are the consent basics under the EU GDPR, the UK PECR and the US CAN-SPAM Act, what is worth sending, and the categories of tools that can do the sending.
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One email a week: the music-tech and AI-in-music news that mattered, and what we think about it.