Benn Jordan

Benn Jordan is an American electronic musician who has released music since the early 2000s, best known under the alias The Flashbulb, and who runs a popular YouTube channel about music technology, audio science, and the business of being an independent artist. His videos pair hands-on engineering with a pointed skepticism of the platforms and companies that sit between musicians and their audiences.

Poisoning the scrapers

In 2025 Jordan turned that skepticism into code. Alarmed that generative-music startups were training on copyrighted recordings without permission — and then flooding streaming services with cheap imitations that siphon royalties from working musicians — he developed “poison pill” techniques, including a tool he calls Poisonify, that embed imperceptible adversarial noise into audio. To a human it sounds unchanged; to a model trying to learn from it, an instrument classifier might hear a piano as a flute, degrading anything trained on it. He has pledged to encode his own discography this way.

Jordan is explicit that his objection is not to the underlying math but to consent and compensation: he has met with US legislators about requiring AI companies to log training data and obtain permission from rights holders, and he built a licensed, artist-paid vocal model to show that consensual data can outperform scraped data. He argues copyright and IP law have failed artists, so technology has to fill the gap.