At the Atlantic Music Expo held this month in Cape Verde (a small Atlantic island nation off West Africa known as a hub for Afro-Atlantic music), artists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers debated how artificial intelligence can serve the music industry without eroding cultural identity. Delegates broadly agreed that AI tools for mixing, mastering, and marketing offer independent artists with limited budgets a pathway to global reach, but warned against homogenisation — a risk seen as acute across African markets where intellectual property frameworks remain comparatively weak. Cape Verde's culture minister Augusto Veiga captured the prevailing mood, telling the Guardian: "AI will never cover what's authentic … you have to work with it, not to be eaten by it."