The Independent Musician's Library · 5 guides
The AI Musician Bundle
AI is changing everything — and as musicians that's our chance, not our threat. Let the machine take the boring half (the posting, the admin, the chasing) so you can pour more of yourself into the half that actually matters: the music. These five guides are exactly how I do that.
By Aaron Norton — independent solo artist running every one of these systems on his own music since 2006.
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Each of the five guides is also sold on its own — but this bundle is the best value.
What's inside
- ◆Build a Gig-Synced Musician Website in a Weekend — a site that updates itself for about £10 a year.
- ◆The Automated Musician — hand the social media, newsletter and gig admin to a machine.
- ◆Using Suno as Your Session Musician — AI demos and arrangements without losing the song or the royalty.
- ◆Make a Music Video with AI — a four-minute, hyper-realistic video for £0 in generation cost.
- ◆The Songwriter's AI Toolkit — ChatGPT and Claude in the writing room, without letting them write the chorus.
The Latest in AI & Music
Across all five AI guides — what's moving in AI music, video, songwriting, promotion and the web, with my take and a link to the source.
The EU's AI content rules kicked in on 2 August — if your video is AI, you now have to say so
The European Commission's guidance says Article 50 of the AI Act applies from 2 August, so anyone publishing AI-generated video that could pass for real now has to disclose it clearly, at first view. The bit that matters for a music video is the carve-out: where the work is obviously artistic or fictional, the Commission says the disclosure only has to be made in a way that doesn't hamper the enjoyment of it — an end card or a line in the description, not a banner across the whole thing. I'm in the UK, but plenty of the people watching aren't, so I'd sooner label it than find out the hard way.
The Munich verdict landed — GEMA won, and Suno has been told to stop, disclose and pay
Music Ally reports that on 31 July the Munich court found for GEMA, ruling that six songs — Rasputin and Mambo No. 5 among them — are reproducibly contained in Suno's models rather than merely analysed, and ordering Suno to stop, to disclose what it earned and to pay damages. Suno says the ruling rests on a mischaracterisation of how its technology works and is evaluating an appeal, so it isn't settled yet. This is the answer to the hearing I flagged here last month, and per the report it's the first time a European court has said that training on a songwriter's work without a licence comes with a bill.
Empire Of The Sun's Luke Steele on using AI: "just another tool. It's like a really smart guitar pedal"
MusicRadar reports Luke Steele saying that of course he uses AI, calling it "just another tool. It's like a really smart guitar pedal", and warning that artists who set themselves against it risk getting swallowed by it. I half agree with him, because a pedal has never decided what a song was about and neither has a chatbot, and the part that matters is still whether you've got something worth saying. The bit I'd be careful with is that a guitar pedal has never had a court case about where its sound came from, so bounce your ideas off it if it helps and keep your name on the words you actually wrote.
Squarespace has put its annual plans up by as much as 26%, and told people by email
PetaPixel reports that Squarespace raised its annual plan prices in mid-July, with Core going from $23 to $29 a month and Plus from $39 to $49, and no public announcement to go with it, so most people found out when the email landed. If your gig dates and your contact form live over there, it's worth working out what your renewal actually comes to now, because on annual billing it doesn't bite until the day it renews. My site is a list of dates and a way to book me, and that's the sort of thing I'd rather wasn't quietly costing more every year.
Spotify has rebuilt how a track gets shared to WhatsApp, TikTok and Threads — and Facebook's going full-screen vertical
Hypebot reports that Spotify has rolled out ten updated sharing integrations covering WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn and Facebook, now with visual cards and audio previews instead of a bare link, and that Snapchat's new Now Playing shows what someone's listening to on the map with a one-tap save. If you're automating your promo, the useful bit is that more of the sharing is happening on your fans' phones rather than yours, so the thing they land on has to be right — the track, the gig dates, all of it. Hypebot also says Meta is testing a full-screen vertical feed on Facebook, which is another reason the one vertical clip you make should be going out everywhere.
OpenAI is switching Sora off — the video API dies 24 September, so don't build your music video on it
OpenAI's own help centre says the Sora app went dark back in April and the Sora API shuts down for good on 24 September 2026 — after that the endpoints stop and account data gets deleted. It's a useful nudge for anyone making a music video this way: the tool you lean on can just vanish, so keep your source images and your final export off the platform, not only in it. It's also why I keep pointing at Kling and Veo, the ones actually being invested in, rather than chasing whatever's newest.
The Suno case in Germany finally has a date — 31 July, in Munich
MLex reports that the Munich Regional Court has pushed its ruling in GEMA v Suno back to 31 July, having first pencilled it in for June. GEMA is Germany's equivalent of PRS, and it says Suno trained on and reproduces songwriters' work without a licence or a payment to the people who wrote it. If the court sides with GEMA it would be the first proper European answer on whether an AI music platform has to license the music it learns from, which is worth watching if you're one of the people whose songs it learned from.
Spotify is building an AI-credits standard — and says owning up to AI won't get your track down-ranked
Spotify says it's backing a new industry standard (through DDEX) that lets you declare where AI actually helped on a track — AI-generated vocals, instrumentation or post-production — with those credits now showing in the app since the April beta. The bit worth holding onto is Spotify's own line that this “is not about punishing artists who use AI responsibly or down-ranking tracks for disclosing.” So if you're bouncing ideas off a tool but writing the song yourself, nothing really changes — do the work, then declare it honestly.
Post records or merch to EU fans? A new €3-per-item duty lands on 1 July
Bandcamp says that from 1 July the EU is scrapping the duty-free threshold on small parcels coming from outside the bloc, so a flat €3 now lands on each item type — a vinyl and a CD in the same order is €6, though digital downloads aren't touched. It's a Bandcamp post, but the change hits anyone shipping physical stuff to Europe, including from your own storefront. The bit worth doing is prepay the duty (DDP) or get the right IOSS/VAT details on the customs form, so your fan in Berlin isn't ambushed by a surprise charge on the doorstep.
Instagram is now counting a share as worth 4x a like — so make the ONE thing worth forwarding
Hypebot reports that Instagram's 2026 ranking treats a share as roughly four times the value of a like, and that it's watching how fast people fire a Reel into their DMs — what they call share-to-DM velocity — to decide how far it travels. That quietly changes the automation game: it's not about pumping out more posts, it's about making the one thing a mate actually wants to forward. When you're auto-announcing a gig or a new cover, that's the question to ask before it goes out — would anyone actually send this to someone else?
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