Episode notes
A sneak peek at what's coming this season on Light Box , the new show from PRX's Radiotopia. Launching September 15. Host and creator Mark Henry Phillips is a professional composer who accidentally opened Pandora's box by experimenting with an AI music generator. In this teaser, he shows his wife what he's gotten himself into. The first two episodes drop next Tuesday (September 15) and then a new episode comes every week. Subscribe now! Questions / thoughts / comments — write us: Mark@LightBoxPodcast.com
Light Box
by Mark Henry Phillips & Radiotopia · English · Music
Mark Henry Phillips has spent twenty years making music for a living. Then one night he typed a few words into an AI music generator and it did his job better than he ever could. In ten seconds. Basically for free. Light Box is what happened next: a season-long investigation into what AI is doin
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S1 · E3 · 22 Sep 2026 · 42 min
3. The Hit Factory (Part II: Steal From Everyone)
A producer with 13 billion streams posts on Reddit about how much he loves making music with AI and... gets banned. We have the conversation that wasn't allowed there. In Part II of our hitmaking story, Mickey Shiloh and David Phelan say the quiet parts out loud: everyone's using it, nobody's admitting it, and if it's happening anyway, you might as well get on the trolley. Also, Mark plays his own AI experiments for his old mentor Jad Abumrad (Radiolab, Dolly Parton's America), who does not react the way either of them expected. Along the way: a $3 million record deal for an "AI music…
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S1 · E2 · 15 Sep 2026 · 52 min
2. The Hit Factory (Part I: No Songs Left Behind)
There's already a #1 hit made with AI. You just don't know which one. In this episode, we go inside the world of professional songwriting camps -- where hits for the biggest artists are assembled by rooms of strangers. And we meet two hitmakers with billions of streams -- Mickey Shiloh (Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, Iggy Azalea) and David Phelan (ZAYN, Charli XCX, Jason Derulo) -- who are starting to use AI in their process. The question is... why? Why would successful songwriters need AI? The answer has as much to do with the songwriting industry as it does with AI. For more info go to…
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S1 · E1 · 15 Sep 2026 · 49 min
1. Inside the Black Box
Composer Mark Henry Phillips logs onto an AI music generator expecting slop. Instead... he has an existential crisis. What it made wasn't slop -- it was good. Really good. This plunges him into a year-and-a-half long rabbit hole. He discovers -- with help from Sonarworks ' Helmuts Bēms -- that professional musicians are secretly adopting AI like performance-enhancing drugs. Mark also digs into how these tools actually work with AI researcher Maya Ackerman . And he confronts an uncomfortable question: if a machine can replicate your creative instincts, were they ever really yours to begin…
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S1 · 1 Sep 2026 · 1 min
Trailer
Listen to LIGHT BOX , the new show from PRX's Radiotopia. Out now! Mark Henry Phillips spent twenty years composing music for a living. Then one night he typed a few words into an AI music generator and it did his job better, he thought, than he ever could. In ten seconds. Basically for free. Light Box is what happened next: a composer and audio journalist investigates what AI is doing to music and the people who make it. It's a 10 episode season, with new episodes coming out every Tuesday. Listen now!
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S1 · E5 · 6 Oct 2026 · 56 minNew
5. Slop (Who Is This For?)
A year ago, I was driving my daughter home from preschool when Spotify autoplayed a song that cut out mid-note. It was AI, and whoever made it hadn't bothered to fix the ending. So I tracked down the 19-year-old behind it. That was just the start of a trip down the rabbit hole. It turns out there's a lot of slop out there. Is it going to ruin everything? Or am I looking at it all wrong? Write us: Mark@LightBoxPodcast.com In this episode Cherie Hu, founder of Water & Music Kristin Robinson, Billboard reporter and host of Billboard On the Record Romain Hennequin, head of research at Deezer…
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S1 · E4 · 29 Sep 2026 · 42 min
4. The Critic (Marc Ribot)
Marc Ribot has played guitar for Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Norah Jones, Robert Plant, and about a thousand other people. He's also one of the most outspoken critics of AI music. He calls Suno and Udio plagiarism machines. And for him, the whole thing comes down to consent: nobody asked the musicians. I caught him on the phone somewhere between Milwaukee and Minneapolis, driving to a gig. Of all the conversations I've had about AI music, his might be the one I keep coming back to the most. Sign Marc's "We Need a Union" petition . Music in this episode: Marc Ribot, Map of a Blue City Marc…
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