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What Does It Mean to Run an Independent Music Label in the Age of AI?
I started EBMosaic in 2005, the year I released my first soundtrack album - the score for Rx, a thriller directed by Ariel Vromen. Back then, a film composer had two mountains to climb: getting the budget for a live orchestra, or convincing the best solo performers in their fields to play on your score. And if you ran an independent label on top of that, the challenge doubled - you pressed physical media, fought for shelf space, and hoped a music supervisor stumbled onto your catalog at the right moment.
Twenty years later, we're still championing some of the best composers and performers in their fields - and alongside them, I'm doing something I couldn't have imagined when I pressed that first CD: incorporating AI into traditional music production, and using that same music knowledge I've spent a lifetime building to create entirely new artist identities, launch them into the real world, and build genuine careers for them. Both are working.
Let me explain what I mean by that, and why I think it matters for anyone thinking about where independent music is headed.
The old model was built for scarcity
The traditional independent label existed to solve distribution problems. You needed the infrastructure to get music into stores, onto radio, onto licensing databases. The label aggregated that infrastructure and took a cut in exchange for providing access.
Streaming eliminated most of that. Any artist can now distribute globally for a few dollars a year. So if the label's core value proposition was distribution, the label should be dead.
It isn't. But the ones that are surviving have had to become something different.
What EBMosaic actually is in 2026
EBMosaic started as a film score label - a home for my own work and eventually for composers I believed in. That's still true. We've released nineteen albums, including five seasons of Fauda (Netflix) and scores for productions from Lionsgate, Warner Brothers, Netflix India, Apple TV+, and more.
But alongside the film-scoring catalog, we've been quietly building something new: Mosaic Beats - EBMosaic's music imprint for everything that lives outside the cinema. Mosaic Beats does two things. First, it releases music across genres - electronic, dance, pop, folk, country, art music - made by real artists working purely from their own craft, or by collaborating with AI as a creative tool. Second, and this is where it gets genuinely new: it creates fully realized AI artist identities and launches real music careers for them. Not as a novelty or an experiment - but as a serious, long-term creative endeavor. Jane Xellai is not a real person. She has a sound, visual aesthetic, social media presence, and release history - built from deep music knowledge and AI, and released into the world like any other artist.
Where I Belong - EBM020, out in 2026 — is a good example of how these worlds collide. It's a collaboration between Jibax, a real artist and producer, and Xellai - one of EBMosaic's AI artist identities. It sounds nothing like a film score. It sounds like a record. That's the point.
The question nobody is asking clearly enough
Everyone in the music industry is asking "will AI replace musicians?" That's the wrong question. The right question is: what happens when the creative work and the distribution work and the identity work all collapse into one person - or one small team - with AI as infrastructure?
What I've found is that it creates something genuinely new: the ability to run multiple creative identities simultaneously, each with its own voice, audience, and release cadence, without the overhead that used to make that impossible.
As an independent label, that's extraordinary. It means EBMosaic can release a jazz-percussion film score by Yuval Semo for a festival film, and in the same quarter release an electronic AI-assisted dance track by Jibax. Different audience, different aesthetic, same curatorial intention.
What we're building toward
I don't think AI replaces the human artist. I think it expands what one human artist - or one small label - can do. The curation, the taste, the relationships, the storytelling: those are still human. The production throughput, the visual generation, the distribution mechanics: those can be augmented.
EBMosaic's bet is that the labels that survive the next decade will be the ones that figured out how to be both: rigorous in their artistic standards, and radically efficient in how they bring work into the world.
We're still figuring it out. But after twenty years of film scores and one year of building artists from scratch with AI as my instrument, I can tell you: the most interesting music we've ever made is being made right now.
- Gilad Benamram, Founder, EBMosaic / EverBliss Music