Doesn't the author know, when he sold a copy and may need to reprint for the next buyers?

Genuinely curious: Why do you switch between transformative use and fair use? Do you consider the first a subset of the second?

The question is if you depend on it being copyrighted. If you have fun creating music, go for it. If you mind someone copying (and possibly changing it) you need to think about how much it must be post-processed to have copyright. If you aren't a big studio who wants absolute control you can also not care and sell music even though people may be allowed to copy it. Many bands would have fans buying their music when it would be free to copy on their homepage ... once you got fans you don't depend on artificial scarcity.

Worse: They were trained on reddit.

The big AI companies seem to be pretty sure their reasoning will hold. And up to know the worst they learned was that just downloading books from illegal sites is ... illegal. If anyone refutes their transformative use argument they probably out of business. If everyone who wasn't asked for a license can sue for damages all the huge investments are not enough to cover that.

You don't violate copyright when your use is covered by an exception.

Think of it as checklist:
- The content is public domain? -> fine
- You own it? -> fine
- Your use is covered by fair use? -> fine
- Your use is covered by tranformative use? -> fine
- You got a license for it -> fine
- If nothing applied -> You're violating the author's copyright

If some of the points in copyright law that do not require a license apply, then you've got permission without discussing licenses at all.

And there is little music that is really new. Every catchy tune belongs to multiple songs. Not only because people got inspired by others songs, but also because people come up with the same tune. The music people like is strongly liked to patterns that the brain likes. That may be disappointing for musicians who think they created something that is great because of their idea of it, but both the idea and the reception of the work come from human minds working a certain way with auditory stimuli.

The companies know how to make money ...
https://www.techpowerup.com/35...

I am not sure what you're trying to say.

Was Agent Smith the first well known AI agent?

Did Linux recently reach 10% market share?

If the storefront is there, more developers think about releasing Linux builds.

Username checks out.

Does your spellcheck has a "replace" option or do you retype each word that's wrong? Do you retype the phrases Grammarly (which is also backed by LLM in recent versions) found to be wrong manually? Why are you opposed to tools correcting you? Do you think a text has more soul when you retype the correct spelling after the LLM found the wrong one?

You can't embed a watermark in one word. In particular not when you introduce a correct word replacing a wrong one.