Music Business Worldwide
The RIAA, music publishers and independent artists are all fighting AI companies in court over whether training a model on copyrighted work without permission is 'fair use'. Google, which builds its own AI music tools, has argued in a new policy paper that training AI models on publicly available web data should remain protected by fair use in the US.
Bruce Ramos
Those blue dots on Ticketmaster's maps aren't a demand crisis, Bruce Ramos argues, leaning on Luminate's June 2026 report: tickets got cheaper, perceived value rose, and Gen Z price resistance fell. The panic is a geography problem. Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter residency and Tyler, the Creator's LA overindex prove the fix is booking where you already stream, which Ramos reads as an untapped Regional Mexican play.
Hypebot
English-language streaming's share of the U.S. market keeps slipping, down to 86% in Q1 2026 per Luminate, while Spanish hits 9.5% and Korean holds steady. Hypebot reads the numbers as a booking mandate: with Bad Bunny at #2 overall and casual fans everywhere, global acts belong in prime main-stage slots and secondary-market routing, not the 2 PM side stage.
Money 4 Nothing
When we say "streaming," we usually mean Spotify and a handful of Western majors. Money 4 Nothing talks with Northeastern's Ryan Blakeley about the ecosystem beyond that: state-affiliated services in Greenland, Chinese-backed African startups, the Middle East. The sharper thread is infrastructural, tracing the intermediary firms that connect local platforms to global rights-holders and quietly fold them into the same structural logic.
Ted Gioia
The anti-AI backlash has turned tactical and occasionally absurd, and The Honest Broker catalogs the range: Benn Jordan encoding tracks to poison generative training data, banner-towing planes over a Santa Monica AI conference, Deezer's bot detector, and YouTube's biggest music voices (Fantano, Beato, Neely) turning openly hostile. The sharp irony sits with Alphabet, funding AI while depending on the indie creators now fighting it.
Hypebot
Success in the modern scene requires sacrificing track selection for high-energy visual loops to delight short-form video algorithms
Zinstrel
TIDAL will stop paying royalties on fully AI-generated tracks, Zinstrel reports, drawing a line most DSPs have dodged. The piece is sharper on the litigation gathering behind it: the Tony Justice suit now counts nearly 1,300 creators, including Anthony Fantano and Benn Jordan, and leans on a stream-ripping claim a federal court already refused to dismiss against Udio. Hagens Berman brings the firepower.
Hypebot
A firsthand account of Berklee's inaugural AI Music Summit which explored the music industry's increasingly nuanced debate over artificial intelligence.
Hypebot
Most artists treat finishing the work as the win. Weezer's drummer argues that the real return is in the rights management over the next 20 years.
Leveling Up from Alderbrook
Where the money's actually moving in early 2026: Jimmy's quarterly Alderbrook slides show catalog M&A holding its record pace and private growth capital hitting recent highs, with late-stage funding concentrated in Artist & Label Services and AI Music Creation startups. Public raises stayed quiet under macro pressure.
