Nicholas Ponari (Overtune): AI Music Without Scraping

We taught technology to generate music before we taught it how to assign fair credit to musicians. Nicholas Ponari explains why Overtune rejects one-prompt AI music generation in favor of human-in-the-loop creation. 

Unlike platforms trained on scraped catalogs, Overtune’s AI is built on licensed music, starting with ~20,000 loops produced in-house. Producers can submit stems voluntarily, creating a clean foundation for ethical training and attribution.

The platform uses vector-based audio embeddings to measure how much each stem contributes to a generated track. This enables automated attribution and proportional royalty distribution when songs are commercialized. 

Contributions are weighted mathematically, with clear thresholds to credit primary and secondary influences while avoiding excessive fragmentation 

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