Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Michael Huppe, President and CEO of SoundExchange, to discuss what happens to a very human business when a machine can make the whole song, and who gets paid when it does.

AI-generated tracks are now charting on Billboard and topping streaming charts, and 97% of listeners couldn't tell them from human music. Jason and Michael unpack where "AI-assisted" ends and "AI-generated" begins, why Sweden pulled a number one song off its official chart, and how an AI artist landed a $3 million record deal. They also get into what you own when you make a song with a tool like Suno, why US copyright law requires a human author, and how SoundExchange decides who gets a royalty check. From there, they look at the licensing deals and lawsuits between AI music companies, labels, and artists, and what the industry might look like in the years ahead.

Podcast Notes & Links:

• "Rubberz" by Fenix Flexin
• "Jag vet, du är inte min" by Jacub
• "How Was I Supposed to Know?" by Xania Monet.
• SoundExchange's RoyalTeas series, hosted by Shawn Stockman of Boyz II Men
• Michael Huppe's music law casebook (Georgetown)
• SoundExchange — Who We Are
• Music Business Worldwide — AI track blocked from Sweden's charts
• Suno — Rights & Ownership
• Forbes — Launch, Train, Settle
• Thoughts on Tech & Things: AI and IP with Justin Pierce episode
• PerryLabs - Start with an AI Assessment

Sponsors

This episode is brought to you by:

PerryLabs: Invested in AI but not seeing results? You're not alone. PerryLabs helps organizations find what's working and build what's next. Start with our AI Assessment at PerryLabs.io

HoopDee: Are you a new parent, or do you have one on the way? Get HoopDee so you never waste a drop of breast milk or baby formula. HoopDee's smart system does all the milk math for you, and the whole family knows which bottle to use next. Enjoy 20% off with code: thoughts. Visit gethoopdee.com.

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Subscribe to the Thoughts on Tech & Things newsletter: jasonmperry.com/newsletter

Send feedback, questions, or guest suggestions: jasonmperry.com/contact or leave a message in the WYPR app or call 410-735-1616.

Credits

Thanks to the team at WYPR, our producer Sam Bermas-Dawes, and Myrna Martinez, Head of Operations and Marketing at PerryLabs.

Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Justin Pierce, co-chair of the Intellectual Property Division at Venable LLP, to talk about who actually owns your ideas once AI is involved, and why the answer changes depending on where you typed them.

Anthropic just paid over a billion dollars to settle the largest copyright case in U.S. history, over digital books used to train Claude. The twist: the same judge ruled that scanning physical books the company had legally purchased counted as fair use. Jason and Justin unpack where that line actually sits, why a dozen similar lawsuits against AI companies are still unresolved, and what it means when the companies fighting over stolen training data built their own models the same way.

They also get into who owns the knowledge in your head once you write it down for an AI to use, why your ChatGPT history might be more discoverable than your email, and what Justin tells CEOs about what never to type into a chatbot.

Podcast Notes & Links

• Anthropic settlement + the Alsup fair use ruling
• Apple v. OpenAI (trade secrets)
• The New York Times v. OpenAI
• Meta's Model Capability Initiative
• Google v. SerpApi dismissal
• Learn more about Venable LLP
• PerryLabs - Start with an AI Assessment

Sponsors

This episode is brought to you by:

PerryLabs: Invested in AI but not seeing results? You're not alone. PerryLabs helps organizations find what's working and build what's next. Start with our AI Assessment at PerryLabs.io.

HoopDee
Are you a new parent, or do you have one on the way? Get HoopDee so you never waste a drop of breast milk or baby formula. HoopDee's smart system does all the milk math for you, and the whole family will know which bottle to use next.

Enjoy 20% off with code: thoughts.
Visit gethoopdee.com.

Subscribe & Contact

Subscribe to the Thoughts on Tech & Things newsletter: jasonmperry.com/newsletter
Send feedback, questions, or guest suggestions: jasonmperry.com/contact or leave a message in the WYPR app or call 410-735-1616.

Credits

Thanks to the team at WYPR, our producer Sam Bermas-Dawes, and Myrna Martinez, Head of Operations and Marketing at PerryLabs.

Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Greg Morton, data editor at The Baltimore Banner, to talk about what AI is actually doing inside a newsroom — and why admitting you used it can cost you a reader.

Long before anybody called it AI, machines were writing sports recaps, earnings reports, and election results. What changed isn't that machines write, it's that now they can write about anything and you can't tell. Greg and Jason get into the Banner's published AI rules and what they mean on deadline, what happens to what people believe when the good reporting is behind a wall and the junk is wide open, and how newsrooms are using these tools to get through document dumps no human could read in a lifetime. Greg was part of the team named a 2026 Pulitzer finalist for an investigation that tracked every city bus in Baltimore, every five seconds, for four months, to show why thousands of kids can't get to school on time.

Podcast Notes & Links

• The Baltimore Banner
• Greg Morton's work – The Baltimore Banner
• Missing the Bus: the Banner's school transit investigation
• 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist citation, Local Reporting
• Ars Technica retracts an article containing AI-fabricated quotes – Nieman Lab
• How newsrooms used AI to work through the Epstein files – Reuters Institute
• Newswriter guilds on The Baltimore Sun's AI-written analyses – WYPR Midday
• BannerX 2026 – September 30 in Columbia, Maryland

Subscribe & Contact

Subscribe to the Thoughts on Tech & Things newsletter: jasonmperry.com/newsletter
Send feedback, questions, or guest suggestions: jasonmperry.com/contact
Leave a message in the WYPR app or call 410-735-1616

Credits

Thanks to the team at WYPR, our producer Sam Bermas-Dawes, and Myrna Martinez, Head of Operations and Marketing at PerryLabs.

Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Chris Brandt, CEO of UpSurge Baltimore — the innovation arm of the Greater Baltimore Committee — and Managing Director at Audacious Capital, to unpack a growing fight over who controls the intelligence businesses increasingly rely on.

They discuss the tradeoffs between open and closed AI models, from guardrails and censorship to security, trust, and control. The conversation also explores AI distillation, the economics of building versus buying, and why companies may need to think beyond token costs when deciding how much of their intelligence they want to own.

They close by bringing the global debate over AI sovereignty home to Maryland and what it could mean for the region's businesses, investors, and entrepreneurs.

Podcast Notes & Links:
- Who Owns Your Company's Intelligence? — Chris Brandt, UpSurge Baltimore newsletter
- WTCI AGILE Global Innovation Series, Sept 23
- Meta introduces Muse Glimmer
- Anthropic to watermark Claude output under EU rules — The Register
- Anthropic restores Fable 5 with new jailbreak filter — The Hacker News
- Censorship in Chinese AI models can be undone — Semafor
- Kimi vs DeepSeek censorship comparison — ellamind
- OpenAI's gpt-oss open-weight models (Aug 2025) — MIT Technology Review
- PerryLabs - Start with an AI Assessment

Sponsors
This episode is brought to you by:

PerryLabs: Invested in AI but not seeing results? You're not alone. PerryLabs helps organizations find what's working and build what's next. Start with our AI Assessment at PerryLabs.io.

WTCI
The path to growth shouldn't stop at the border. The World Trade Center Institute provides the connections, knowledge, and global network Maryland's most ambitious leaders need to scale. From executive development to international trade, we help our region's businesses thrive on the world stage. Start your global journey at wtci.org.

Host Jason Michael Perry moderated a live panel for the World Trade Center Institute's AGILE Global Innovation Series, exploring the constraint quietly shaping Maryland's future: energy capacity.

As Maryland positions itself as a hub for emerging technologies, demand from data centers, electric vehicles, and an increasingly digital economy is rising faster than in-state power generation can keep up. This session explores what the state's future energy mix must look like to support growth, reliability, and competitiveness, examining the role of renewables, the current limits of the Maryland grid, PJM's regional challenges, and the power needs of next-generation infrastructure, including data centers and quantum computing.

Jason is joined by three leaders shaping how Maryland meets that challenge: Lindsay North, Director of Clean Energy Strategy at Exelon; Jason Stanek, Executive Director of Governmental Services at PJM Interconnection; and Adam Ortiz, Deputy Secretary of the Maryland Department of the Environment.

They break down where Maryland's power actually comes from, why the state imports a significant share of its electricity from the regional grid, and what's driving the sharp rise in demand. The conversation covers the tension between clean energy goals and grid reliability, the real cost pressures showing up on ratepayers' bills, and what infrastructure, new generation, and new transmission need to get built — and how fast.

The result: a grounded look at one of the most consequential and least understood questions facing the state right now.

Podcast Notes & Links

• WTCI AGILE Global Innovation Series
• Lindsay North, Director of Clean Energy Strategy at Exelon
• Jason Stanek, Executive Director of Governmental Services at PJM Interconnection
• Adam Ortiz, Deputy Secretary of the Maryland Department of the Environment

Sponsors

This episode is brought to you by:

PerryLabs: Invested in AI but not seeing results? You're not alone. PerryLabs helps organizations find what's working and build what's next. Start with our AI Assessment at PerryLabs.io.

HoopDee
Are you a new parent, or do you have one on the way? Get HoopDee so you never waste a drop of breast milk or baby formula. HoopDee's smart system does all the milk math for you, and the whole family will know which bottle to use next.

Enjoy 20% off with code: thoughts.
Visit gethoopdee.com.

Subscribe & Contact

Subscribe to the Thoughts on Tech & Things newsletter: jasonmperry.com/newsletter
Send feedback, questions, or guest suggestions: jasonmperry.com/contact

Credits

Special thanks to the team at the World Trade Center Institute. Thanks to the team at WYPR, producer Sam Bermas-Dawes, and Myrna Martinez, Head of Operations and Marketing at PerryLabs.

Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with psychotherapist Jessica Daniel, founder of Peace in Perspective, to ask what happens when you're grieving something that never had a funeral.

Jess widens grief past death — a career, an identity, the life you were promised. Maryland has lost more than 31,000 federal jobs in about a year, and she describes what that grief looks like when it walks into her office. Then the harder part: why so many people hand their inner lives to something free, awake at 2am, and impossible to disappoint.

If You Need Support

• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. 24/7.
• Maryland Department of Health — 988 in Maryland
• 211 Maryland — Maryland's Helpline — dial 211 or text your zip code to 898-211.

Subscribe & Contact

Subscribe to the Thoughts on Tech & Things newsletter: jasonmperry.com/newsletter
Send feedback, questions, or guest suggestions: jasonmperry.com/contact

Credits

Thanks to the team at WYPR, our producers Sam Bermas-Dawes and Shania Mapson, and Myrna Martinez, Head of Operations and Marketing at PerryLabs.

Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Brad Thompson, Senior Vice President of Technology at Target, to talk about what happens to shopping when AI starts doing the finding — and what it would take before you'd let it do the buying.

In this episode, they get into Target's bet on agentic commerce: the Target app inside ChatGPT, the open Universal Commerce Protocol Target helped shape with Google, and what it means to meet shoppers inside Gemini or AI Mode instead of on Target.com. Brad explains why Target is a "build shop" that increasingly "rents" software rather than buying it, how a tool called Store Companion answers team members' questions on the store floor, and how AI quietly fixes the "unknown out-of-stock" problem before you ever notice the shelf is empty. They close on the near future Brad imagines — telling your app, "I'm hosting Taco Tuesday: send the ingredients, skip the guacamole" — and what it takes to earn that kind of trust.

Podcast Notes & Links

• Target — Conversational, curated shopping comes to ChatGPT
• Target — Frictionless checkout in Google's AI Mode and Gemini
• Universal Commerce Protocol — The open standard for AI shopping
• Target — Store Companion, generative AI for store team members
• Target Tech — Solving for product availability with AI

Sponsors

This episode is brought to you by:

PerryLabs: Invested in AI but not seeing results? You're not alone. PerryLabs helps organizations find what's working and build what's next. Start with our AI Assessment at PerryLabs.io

HoopDee
Are you a new parent, or do you have one on the way? Get HoopDee so you never waste a drop of breast milk or baby formula. HoopDee’s smart system does all the milk math for you, and the whole family will know which bottle to use next.

Enjoy 20% off with code: thoughts.
Visit gethoopdee.com.

Subscribe & Contact

Subscribe to the Thoughts on Tech & Things newsletter: jasonmperry.com/newsletter
Send feedback, questions, or guest suggestions: jasonmperry.com/contact

Credits

Thanks to the team at WYPR, our producers Sam Bermas-Dawes and Shania Mapson, and Myrna Martinez, Head of Operations and Marketing at PerryLabs.