Shawn Reynaldo of First Floor, who's spent years tracking the business of electronic music, notices something damning: Juan Atkins died Saturday, and the New York Times hasn't run a word. Meanwhile it managed an obituary for Barbra Streisand's longtime manager. Reynaldo uses the silence to make a sharper point: America built a multibillion-dollar industry on techno's Detroit origin myth while treating its originator as a historical curio. The Guardian covered it. Le Monde covered it.
Luminate maps Country's crossover beyond the Shaboozey-and-Cowboy-Carter story most of us have been tracking stateside. Global on-demand streams hit 185 billion in 2026, up 54% from 2021, with the U.K. posting 40%+ YoY jumps and Canada now the genre's second-biggest market. The mechanism should sound familiar: the same glocalization loop that broke K-pop and Latin now has a Norwegian named Tobias Sten topping Norway's Country charts with Nashville-style songs.
Dusty Henry's Times piece catches up with "Hey Arnold!" creator Craig Bartlett and composer Jim Lang, now touring a 26-date live performance of the Nickelodeon show's jazz score. The real story is how that sound happened: Lang wrote the theme by asking how Monk would play a Dunkin' Donuts jingle he'd been too shy to record in the '70s. For a generation of millennials, those 10-to-20-second cues were a first jazz education. One fan at an LA show now runs a school jazz program.
01Music & SceneWriting about music and the culture around it. Criticism, profiles, interviews, and scene reporting, selected for insight rather than news value.
The busking subculture (train-hopping, squatting, playing loud enough to carry down the street) is the engine behind Twisted Teens' fast rise, per The New York Times. The New Orleans duo of Caspian Hollywell and R.J. Santos cut three lo-fi twang-punk albums in 2026 alone, landed a Pitchfork Best New Album, and signed to Sub Pop. Jeff Tweedy praises Hollywell's refusal of the disaffected indie pose: he sings at full rock-band volume because he has had to scream his whole life.
Pitchfork marks Atkins' death at 63 by arguing his status as techno's catalyst actually eclipsed his catalog: the patient hand that guided Saunderson's first production and taught May to mix. Tracing six records from Cybotron's "Cosmic Cars" to 2013's Borderland, it reframes Gratiot Avenue as techno's Hitsville and insists Atkins stayed in Detroit while Europe got rich off his invention.
A viaduct expansion could demolish seven Digbeth clubs, including XOYO Birmingham, by 2030, and The Guardian uses the fight to save them to map a bigger squeeze: 26% of UK late-night venues gone since 2020, Birmingham hit hardest. The throughline is centralisation, with operators like Broadwick Live scaling up as small rooms close and Live Nation resisting a grassroots ticket levy.
A profile of Nigerian DJ Aniko exploring her approach to DJing, her philosophy on house music as an inclusive genre, and her rave series Group Therapy which operates without VIP sections or tables. The piece examines how she uses hospitality and accessibility as core principles in building Lagos's electronic music community.
The Guardian tracks what advocacy cost Deena Lynch. After becoming a face of Australian music's #MeToo reckoning, a mistrial and years of public trauma coincided with seizures, lupus and a functional neurological disorder that left her bedridden. Rebuilding in Bali, she's made Beastmaster, a dance-pop record she can't physically tour, and handed off her Instagram. Survival over visibility.
NME profiles @, the Philadelphia duo of Stone Filipczak and Victoria Rose whose new 4AD album 'Autosmile' trades modern indie-folk's hushed intimacy for the extravagant arrangements of Fleetwood Mac and Fairport Convention. Their slipperiness is the point: melodies introduced and yanked away, time signatures messed with. Now bordering on indie-darling status, they're releasing it with a secret-address house show in Philly.
The standard story of post-punk's European turn credits "Bowie damage" and Kraftwerk while missing the pivotal influence: Cluster. This Quietus piece argues that Sowiesoso, 50 years on, reconfigured synthesizers from robotic to organic and deconstructed rock's ensemble into isolated parts, a lateral approach echoed by PiL, Cocteau Twins and OMD.
Two paths out of TikTok virality, side by side. Looze Cannon, the Detroit creator who battles fans in a Michael Jackson face filter, has parlayed Live freestyles into DSP singles and co-signs from Kai Cenat and Yung Miami, while food reviewer Sober Facts rode abrasive anti-gentrification shtick into trouble. The open question: whether the solo artist can ever outrun the impression.
A review of the Metropolitan Opera's production of Lincoln in the Bardo, based on George Saunders' novel, examining the work as both a political provocation and aesthetic achievement. The piece discusses how the opera literalizes key moments from the source material while engaging with contemporary cultural concerns.
An interview with rapper Radamiz and actor Ali about their collaborative project Bottom of Heaven, which emerged from a six-year friendship. The conversation explores their artistic journeys, the creative process behind the project, and how they balance personal responsibilities with their artistic work.
02Music Industry AnalysisAnalysis of the music business. Deals, streaming economics, rights, and the power dynamics that shape what gets made and who gets paid.
Wixen Music lays out its case against Meta in this Billboard guest column: after seven years of licensing Reels music, Meta slashed payments, kept using the songs anyway, then blamed songwriters for pulling them. The judge didn't toss the suit, he asked for song-by-song ownership details.
Australian music now makes up just 8.5% of audio streamed at home, down 37.5% in five years, with APRA AMCOS warning of a 5% floor by 2030. Billboard covers the second year of Ausify, Music Australia's campaign reframing the crisis as discovery, not demand: 66% of listeners want more local music, but only 27% streamed an Australian act last year.
Suno's dismissal motion reframes the Isbell likeness lawsuit as an attack on how humans have always talked about music: using artist names as genre shorthand. Its argument is that encoding 'Jason Isbell vibe' into a prompt isn't commercial exploitation of identity, it's speech.
Japan's streaming market is growing faster than the UK and the global average, yet its real upside sits abroad. This recap of Luminate's Tokyo conference lays out the playbook: anime as discovery engine (over half of Mexican J-pop fans find music through it), domestic catalog loyalty funding export, and METI's plan to grow music's overseas sales sevenfold to 0.7 trillion yen by 2033.
AI-trained bots have turned onsales into an arms race: RAYE got 1.8 million registrations for a 5,000-seat Royal Albert Hall show, and Ticketmaster UK now fends off 200 million bot attempts daily. Billboard tracks how artists are hand-checking registrations while the UK's promised face-value resale cap sits in draft limbo until 2027, leaving ID verification as the only fix anyone can name.
03Music RecommendationsNew and recent music worth hearing. A featured pick plus additional recommendations, each with brief context and a link to listen.
The Barcelona musician has invented a musical language singular enough to defy description: a fusion of post-Romantic tonalities (Satie, Debussy, Scriabin) shot through with piercing vocalizations descended from Meredith Monk, konakkol vocal percussion, and acoustic instruments in shards. A little bit Disney, a little bit Raymond Scott, a world of bracing dissonance and zig-zagging lines.
REC 01
Kali Malone
Burning Song
♪ drone / contemporary classical
Recorded at Leipzig's St. Thomas Church on the 'Bach organ,' a replica of the 1696 instrument Bach's uncle designed, this draws out the organ's unequal temperament and variable frequency graduations. With Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley on guitar and Lucy Railton on cello, captured across 20 microphones close and far. Laura Snapes called it, in drone world, 'Kali Malone's pop record.'
A project Boyd has been dreaming about since he was 13, released on his own Exodus label. Fairly called a gospel album, it balances postmillennial UK jazz, soundsystem culture, deep spirituals and R&B, and features a group of vocalists from the extended Boyd family he calls 'the kitchen choir.' The video for 'Say Yeah' incorporates footage of Boyd working with kids at the Woolwich Creative Club.
Brian Leeds, whose Huerco S. work specialized in sticky, charcoal-hued textures, moves into sleeker territory as Loidis: brushed stainless steel, graphite against paper. A direct extension of 2024's One Day but crisper and more hypnotic, with a lot of Luomo in its chordal flicker and percussion that's an expression of clicky bliss. The dozen tracks run eight to twelve minutes with no drops, no climaxes, no hooks, just crosshatched expanses of overlapping rhythms. Out on Anthony Naples' Incienso label.
Flow State picks the title track from Samantha Poulter's new album as part of the mix's quickening pace, slotted alongside Loidis and Charanjit Singh as the energy picks up.
Tuttle is a banjo and guitar-wielding ambient folk producer out of Brisbane who's kept company with Steve Gunn, SUSS and Luke Schneider; Cross brings guitar, synth and a hard drive of field recordings from Sydney. Trading files across distance with a few shared parameters, their mutual love of drones opens the portal: 'Athletic, Eup' starts with nature sounds and pastoral picking before 'pink Skyyy Sixth Prize' prods the boundaries of cosmic country, and 'Afternoon Sunrise (I Saw Galadriel at 711)' drifts into weightless, star-spotting ambience.
Shatter the Standards frames Dawn Richard's latest as the next chapter in a career spent singing through characters, from the Danity Kane manga superhero she drew for Diddy to D∴WN, the triangle-spelled solo persona staking a claim to revolutionary R&B. creole culture centers on a New Orleans monarch bearing her likeness, reckoning with the city she fled for Baltimore after Katrina.
A Songs in the Key of Life outtake that sat on a shelf for half a century, released on the album's 50th anniversary and mixed by two original engineers. Soulpolitan has rotated it the most of the four-track EP: Stevie planting a woman in his garden of love to turn her into a flower, a twisted conceit sung over bossa, with lyrics by Susaye Greene of The Supremes, who co-wrote "I Can't Help It" for Michael Jackson.
Beat Connection found this scrambled its head on a second listen: unpredictable even after already hearing it. The powerful lift-offs resolve efficiently rather than feeling glib, the subs get a cleansing workout, and the momentum is giddy, varied, and ravey without everything sounding early-nineties. "How to Build a Bassline" lands as the funniest track encountered in an age.
One of the first jazz big band records from Egypt, Dinner Music frames it as a response to the American jazz scene of the 60s and 70s, drawing influences from Mongo Santamaria to Randy Weston to Sun Ra while asserting Arab musicians' own history within the Western tradition.
Le Veau d'Or, the Upper East Side French institution that reopened in 2024 to two NYT stars, gets a full convert here: a self-described angry downtowner who'd been dodging prix fixe and crosstown trains. The case is built in specifics: a 5-to-1 sherry-vermouth martini, pate en croute with a sweet-crunchy shell, pommes soufflees with caviar. The duck, apparently, did not disappoint.
Originally published in Pitchfork in 2014 and reprinted here, this essay argues that analog isn't a relic but a spatial technology we depend on for orientation. Headphone stereo severs directional hearing; digital voice processing strips proximity and affect from the human voice. The analog fuzz we've spent a decade engineering out is precisely what tells us where we are and how close someone is.
Embedded's sharp personal reckoning with what it costs to not double down on a viral moment. The writer coined "millennial pause" in a piece that outperformed the Atlantic's eventual Pulitzer winner for a month, then retreated from the backlash instead of capitalizing. The question underneath: whether refusing to become Just One Thing is freedom or self-sabotage.
05Sound on Sight Video ArchiveOne music video from the archive in each issue, ranging from a few months to sixty years old, with a short note on why it holds up.
▶
Jim WIlson — "Center Core Never More"
Early 90s · instrumental rock
Jim Wilson plays guitar the way you'd expect from someone who spent years alongside Harvey Mandel and Rcollins: dense, exploratory, allergic to the tidy hook. "Center Core Never More" is the kind of early-90s instrumental that got buried under grunge, worth pulling back up for the way the tone keeps mutating under your ear.
SOS 01
The Stripes
Ecstasy (Plattenküche)
♪ 1980
The singer is Gabriele Kerner, three years short of '99 Luftballons.' The Stripes were her first band, formed in Hagen in 1979 and finished by 1982. The show is Plattenküche, a WDR variety hour with fountains, a filing cabinet that toppled every week, and a working kitchen where the co-host cooked dinner on air.
Nick Uff, a gardener by trade, drew it frame by frame on 16mm without a storyboard, letting the film go where it took itself. That scratchy hand-made animation sits over an arpeggio Adrian Utley couldn't get a sequencer to play, so he recorded the notes one at a time and edited them into the loop.
Before Tom Rubnitz became downtown New York's patron saint of camp, he helped make this: a performer named Frieda rapping backed by a chorus line of dolls, production values scraping the floor on purpose. 'Plastic Rap' is Lower Manhattan circa 1980 deciding that cheap and ridiculous could be an aesthetic, not a limitation.
Spike Jonze gives Ludacris a pair of prosthetic Popeye arms and aims them at a man who won't observe bathroom etiquette. Interestingly enough, the man is Fatlip, the Pharcyde rapper whom Jonze had filmed four years earlier narrating the worst day of his life. In 2004, he is still the one getting hit.
Zürich, 1981. Mother's Ruin had been going since 1978, early enough that Swiss punk barely existed, and director Paul Grau shot 'Lost in Town' for the 'Want More' LP while the scene was still inventing itself. Snarl from a country nobody files under snarl.
Out of Los Angeles, Dorothy Fuzz stack sweet vocal harmonies over trippy psych and title the album 'Mad Art For A Mad Age,' which about covers it. '1 2 3 Understand Me' keeps reaching for connection and dissolving into haze before it can close the gap. Sunshine on top, something woozier underneath.
Jonathan Glazer sends a man stumbling through a tunnel, getting hit by cars over and over, muttering Thom Yorke's looped prayer. Each impact lands harder than the last until the final one doesn't. UNKLE and DJ Shadow built the track from dread and strings; Glazer turned it into a parable that earns its resurrection.
Spike Jonze films it like a pratfall in slow motion: Fat Lip narrating his own worst day, every small humiliation landing square on the beat. It's tragi-comedy played dead straight, an itemized series of humiliations played with a stand-up's timing. The Pharcyde's sharpest tongue turns self-loathing into the funniest, saddest three minutes the West Coast underground ever produced.
A Romanian pop grande dame, who'd spent five decades exploring the outer boundaries of samba, soul, and disco-pop, takes Pulp’s 'Common People' and sings it in her own language. The pairing is the pleasure: a voice raised on the state airwaves wrapping itself around a Britpop anthem about class.
Our world is much larger these days, and we've struggled to find common words for things. In music, this expresses itself in the awkward ways that western audiences (and their platform/label gatekeepers) talk about genre. The articles below explore how terms such as "Afrobeats" or "Asian pop" create distance more than they describe specific things. As you'll see, this isn't a new phenomenon, and speaks to a broader power dynamic that influences who gets to name a sound.
When Tyla won best Afrobeats at the 2024 MTV VMAs, she used part of her speech to push back on the label. "There's a tendency to group all African music as Afrobeats," she told the audience, before naming her own sound, South Africa's amapiano. The term dates to the early 2010s, when London DJ Abrantee added an "s" to Fela Kuti's Afrobeat to market West African dance music. Chibuzo Emmanuel argues in The Guardian that the catch-all treats new West African sounds as fodder for the Afrobeats machine, hyped and then discarded. Mr Eazi's banku music, a blend of Nigerian pop and Ghanaian highlife with its own four-stroke kick-drum pattern, faded because no one marketed it to the west or framed it locally as a distinct sound. Azonto, zanku, cruise and afropiano went the same way.
When their 1927 record was categorized as a race record, the Allen Brothers, a white duo from Chattanooga, sued Columbia Records for $250,000. "It would have hurt us in getting dates if people who didn't know us thought we were black," one of the brothers later explained. Jack Denton recounts the case in an April 2019 Pacific Standard piece, written after Billboard pulled Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" from its country chart. From the 1920s, the record business sorted music by who was buying it, marking race records Black and hillbilly music white and leaving pop white but unmarked. Billboard even shelved its R&B chart for 14 months in the mid-1960s because it looked too much like the pop chart. "The answer was not that the music all sounded the same," UCLA musicologist Robert Fink says. "It was that everybody seemed to be listening to the same stuff."
In The National, Saeed Saeed traces "urban music" back to the 1920s, writing days after Republic Records dropped the term in June 2020 as anti-racism protests swept the globe. The label behind Drake and Ariana Grande cut it from its marketing, its divisions and its job descriptions. Before "urban" came the race record, the official term until 1949, when Billboard renamed its chart Rhythm and Blues. "Urban" arrived in 1974, largely credited to Black New York DJ Frankie Crocker, who used it at WBLS for the disco, funk, R&B and early rap on his playlists. Labels took it up to sell Black artists, and it soon read as shorthand for "ghetto." For four decades, Saeed writes, those artists stayed locked in the category while white pop acts from George Michael to Ed Sheeran adopted their music.
In 1987, London DJs, musicians and record people met in an Islington pub to put all the foreign music they wanted to sell under one name. fRoots editor Ian Anderson, who was there, listed the losers, among them "Worldbeat" (left out anything without drums) and "Tropical" (bye-bye Bulgarians). "World music" won on a show of hands. Howard Male once felt the label did more good than harm, but by 2011, in a column for The Arts Desk, Male had decided it had had its day. The West splits its own pop into dozens of genres, in Male's account, while the rest of the planet's sounds "have to just make do with this one essentially meaningless signpost." Would you, Male asks, "be drawn to a restaurant that just called itself World Food?"
Ryan Blakeley, asking in PopMatters whether streaming has killed genre, finds the platforms making new ones out of listening data, with playlist curators and recommendation algorithms partly replacing the old gatekeepers and tastemakers. Glenn McDonald, once Spotify's "Data Alchemist," mapped more than 6,000 genres on Every Noise at Once and named a few of them himself. McDonald told Billboard Canada that listening data can show "patterns that exist before they have come up with names for themselves in the world."
Until late 2022, "Latin" ranked among Spotify's top 10 genres. Then Spotify dropped it from its genre list entirely. The Pudding's 2023 chart essay, by Matt Daniels and Michelle Pera-McGhee, calls the old tag "a vestige of the record store days," a bin for anything in Spanish from Juan Gabriel to Bad Bunny, and notes that Spotify then added the narrower Urbano Latino. The top of the list moved too. As Spotify spread into countries like India and South Korea, more of its most-streamed genres were sung in Spanish, Korean or Hindi, with K-pop the biggest gainer. "Artists rarely have control over how their music is categorized," the essay observes. Yacht rock was Spotify's 154th most-streamed genre, and John Oates, of Hall & Oates, had never heard the term.
The VMAs' Best Afrobeats award lasted three years. Selena Gomez and Rema won the first in 2023 for "Calm Down," and Tyla took the next two, for "Water" and "PUSH 2 START." When the 2026 nominations came out, it was gone, one of several categories dropped quietly. The Needle Drop reports that MTV hasn't explained the cut and suggests it may be part of a restructuring. The removal landed as Burna Boy's collaboration "Dai Dai" reached No. 1 on the Global Spotify Chart and No. 28 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Hong Kong-born XTIE built her song "Star Potential" from Cantonese folk melodies, and she still can't enter it for the Grammys' Best Asian Pop Music Performance award, because she sings in English. Hong Kong's biggest awards show sidelines her too, because its top prizes go to Cantonese music. In How Music Charts, Harry Levin sets her case beside BTS, who declined to submit for the 2027 Grammys at all over the category, hoping their music could be "heard and loved for what it is." Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. insists the award exists "to expand who is recognized," and it is staying. XTIE is submitting for Best Dance Pop Recording. "Dance pop is a genre," she says. "It doesn't represent a geographical location."
Miist, a Chinese-born, US-based singer-songwriter, began her music career in 2022, at 34, as a bookkeeper who had never written a song, and has since recorded in Mandarin, English, Spanish, Italian and more. That makes the language requirement in the Grammys' Best Asian Pop Music Performance category personal for her. "An artist can be Asian and create music that does not prominently use an Asian language," she writes in a Billboard guest column. "Does that make the music less Asian?" She respects artists who refuse to take part, but she is entering, because the category could bring independent Asian-language artists "the attention of thousands of music professionals who might otherwise never press play."
JeriQ, an Onitsha-born rapper whose Igbo-inflected street music built its following on Audiomack, still lives in Enugu, and he keeps that quiet when doing business. "I would just tell them I'm in Lagos. Then I would book flights and pull up," he tells Joey Akan of Afrobeats Intelligence. Akan reads the habit as a sign of the industry's bias toward geography. A major distributor JeriQ declines to name liked Billion Dollar Dreams, the album he'd recorded in Enugu, but kept telling him to "do some Lagos" and add "some Afrobeats features." He walked away. "This is not who I am," JeriQ says. "If I did it, it would be fake to me."
Tems described her music to Hot 97's Ebro in October 2023 as Alternative, Afrosoul and R&B, and pointed to the media's habit of labeling everything out of Nigeria as Afrobeats. The clip resurfaced on August 31, 2026, and the argument started again. Culture Custodian took it to Nigerian culture journalists. Chibuzo Emmanuel, who argues in The Guardian that the tag holds African music back, answers that it still opens foreign markets, where many artists "would get lost if they were marketed purely as the genre that best represents them." Afrocritik managing editor Emmanuel 'Waziri' Okoro wants the mainstream to "stop treating African music and Afrobeats as synonyms." One critic closes on a split. "Afrobeats as a culture, agreed. Afrobeats as a genre, we have to rethink."
Egertton, a rapper from the southern Nigerian city of Benin, calls his style "incantation music." Luwa.Mp4 builds his Cyber-Phunk from punk, hyperpop and trap. Both are in Wale Oloworekende's FADER guide to ten acts from Nigeria's underground, a scene that went quiet after Alté's rise in the late 2010s and has come back folding punk, hip-hop and R&B into a wider idea of what African music can sound like. Kobilou, who has a scene-stealing verse on "GLACIER GIRL," The FADER's pick for the scene's definitive song of 2026, is a final-year dentistry student.
For Sheldon Pearce, the record Wizkid's "Essence," with Tems, set in 2022 shows both the song's American reach and its limits. "Essence" became the first song to spend a full year in the Top 10 of the R&B/Hip-Hop airplay chart, though it was neither hip-hop nor R&B. It had been "shoehorned into established 'urban' formats." The crossover push has cooled, Pearce reports for NPR, and never took hold the way K-pop's did, partly because "the space of that 'K' represents a nation, while Afro-pop has to speak for several." Pearce measures progress by creative benchmarks ahead of commercial ones, so Ayra Starr's Starr Girl missing the Billboard 200 "feels more like the chart's problem than the artist's."
Luminate's first-quarter numbers for 2026 put Spanish-language music at a record 9.5 percent of US on-demand audio streams, with English down to 86 percent. Much of the growth rides on Bad Bunny, whose Super Bowl performance pushed weekly US streams of Latin music to an all-time high, and Luminate's consumer research shows more than half of US listeners counting Latin as a genre they listen to casually. Historically, Luminate notes, the US acted as a gatekeeper, "requiring international artists to adapt to Western styles or sing in English to find commercial success."
Spanish artist Rosalía, whose album Lux moves between languages, became the first person to win the BRIT for Best International Artist with an album sung mostly in a language other than English. Music Week's Andre Paine reports it alongside Spotify's Loud & Clear figures for 2025, in which songs in 16 languages reached the Global Top 50, more than double the 2020 count. Brazilian funk and K-pop led the growth among genres earning over $100 million on Spotify. Music Week frames it all as music in other languages rising "as English language music declines."
Aoi Narita heard CKay's "Love Nwantiti" while working in Kenya and moved to Nigeria in 2022, partly for the music. She told Rest of World that "because I only listen to Afrobeats/Amapiano, Spotify doesn't recommend other types of music." By Spotify's own data, Afrobeats streams on the platform rose 550 percent between 2017 and 2022, and the company backed the genre with Nigerian hires, playlists, local events and a website called Afrobeats: Journey of a Billion Streams. Former Chocolate City CEO Jude Abaga calls Spotify "the largest metric for communicating the success and growth of Afrobeats." Lawyer and entertainment executive Oyinkansola Fawehinmi gives it less credit, saying "the only thing they've done is catch up and latch on to amplify."
Over five years, US and UK artists' combined share of top performers in global music fell from 55.7 percent to 40.7 percent, a drop of "nearly 30%," according to the Global Music Pulse report from Chartmetric, an industry intelligence platform. In that time, artists from India, Nigeria, Mexico, Japan and Brazil grew fast around the world. IQ Magazine, covering the report in October 2026, describes the shift as a weakening of "Anglo-American hegemony in the global music landscape."
07StorylinesStandalone features that follow one story in full. Each gathers the coverage as it appeared, annotated and in sequence, with a written introduction.
Watching the Watchmen: On AI Composition and Detection
21 articles · story collection
After AI slop overwhelmed their services, the platforms struck back, with Substack releasing an AI detection tool and LinkedIn adding a button that lets users report slop. Whether this was good stewardship or evidence of a witch hunt is an open question, and we dive into the debate with 21 articles that wrestle with how we value AI (and human) writing.
Me and the Devil: Fenix Flexin's AI Authorship Fight
11 articles · story collection
Maybe Fenix Flexin won't be remembered as the Elvis Presley of AI music, but his track "Rubberz", which delivers street-rap verses over '80s synth-pop, reached the Hot 100, drew months of accusations, and ballooned into one of the biggest stories of 2026. We track the story's twists and turns, and consider where we're going (and where we've been).
Between a billion dollar Michael Jackson biopic, a blockbuster Madonna album, and the return of "Wonderwall" and "Mr. Brightside" to the charts, 2026 could be defined not so much by what we created, but by what we remembered. We survey the landscape, and consider what it means when culture turns into a hall of mirrors.
For years, the labels sued to stop fans from generating AI covers of licensed content, and then Universal and Spotify signed the deal for a tool that does just that. Beneath the product announcement lies the story of how billion dollar catalog acquisitions have created incentives for the industry to recycle the catalog rather than invest in new music.
Miles was the avatar of cool who kept detonating his own styles, a privileged Black artist who declined every story offered to him about privilege or suffering, and both an undeniable genius and a man who hurt others, particularly women. And a hundred years on, he remains a mystery and a contradiction, which is probably what he would've wanted.
It seems that this is the era of both corporate profit and corporate downsizing, and the music industry is no exception. Universal cut its executive class, and Warner has cut nearly a quarter of its staff since 2023. AI is the convenient culprit, but there’s an important question that sits beneath all this: what’s a record label for exactly these days? The pieces below report the facts and work towards an answer to that question.
A week after Barclays upgraded Universal Music Group's stock on the expectation that it would cut costs, UMG announced its next round of exits. On Oct. 14, 2026, it told staff that Def Jam chairman/CEO Tunji Balogun, Polydor's president and two Interscope Geffen A&M A&R heads would leave. Billboard reports the departures as the last phase of a 2024 plan Lucian Grainge called "cut to grow," meant to save 250 million euros a year by the end of 2026. With UMG's stock down nearly 33% in 2026, analysts say the company is likely limiting expenses to protect cash flow and margins. David Schulhof, an investor who runs the music industry ETF MUSQ, puts it bluntly: "Why are there cuts? Clearly because they're spending too much."
An executive who helps develop a hit generally earns salary and bonuses, and the label may own the resulting asset for decades after that executive is gone. After UMG's shake-up of Oct. 14, 2026, Flashlight asks what an executive is worth once a corporation starts rethinking the cost of employing one, and predicts the next generation will "arrive at the negotiating table owning companies of their own." The case runs through Hollywood, where the studio majors ended up financing independent films, and through Ronald Coase's 1937 "The Nature of the Firm," which holds that companies bring work in-house when that costs less than buying it on the market. A label used to gather skills an artist couldn't easily find alone. Now an executive can run a release through outside firms.
As of January 2026, Warner Music Group had no dedicated recorded music head in the UK or Germany, the third and fourth largest recorded music markets in the world, and its Canadian operation was run from New York. Those gaps sprang from the three-part restructuring launched after Robert Kyncl became CEO in January 2023, which Tim Ingham of Music Business Worldwide estimates will take Warner from 6,200 employees to closer to 4,700 by the end of 2026. Universal has its own program, but Ingham argues Warner's cuts are the most visible in the business and the largest as a share of the workforce. Kyncl did put some of the savings back into A&R, and the adjusted OIBDA margin rose from 19% of revenue in FY 2022 to 22% in FY 2025. Next on investors' wish list, Ingham writes, is a margin in the mid-twenties.
Universal spent less on A&R in the third quarter of 2026, and its recorded music margin went up. Billboard's report on the results, released Oct. 29, puts that margin at 26.2% excluding the newly acquired Downtown Music Group, helped by lower A&R spending and tighter cost controls, while revenue rose 11.7% and beat analyst estimates. The numbers followed another raft of UMG layoffs. CFO Matt Ellis said there was more work ahead. "That work is underway."
Of the 1.2 million job cuts U.S. companies announced in 2025, AI was mentioned as a reason for 4.5%, by the count of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Outside music, Fortune's Claire Zillman finds mostly healthy companies trimming layers, sometimes with AI as cover (Forrester calls that "AI-washing"). ASML, a standout winner of the AI race, described its 1,700 job cuts as coming at "a moment of strength." Glassdoor's Chris Martin has a name for layoffs that "come in never ending waves instead of a tsunami," the "forever layoff," and his example is Amazon, with one round in October 2025 and another in January 2026.
In 1982, CBS closed 10 of Columbia's branch offices and laid off 300 people, 15 percent of its staff. Robert Christgau wrote this long Village Voice column in February 1984, as the record business climbed out of the slump that set in after the "Great Disco Disaster of 1979" and bottomed out in 1982. The official culprit was home taping, but Christgau points at price. When album list prices went to $8.98, buyers resisted, and a late-1982 Dallas test that cut record prices two dollars for a week lifted volume 42 percent. Nor does the 1983 recovery reassure Christgau. Four blockbusters, Thriller among them, probably made up most of the year's gain, which "commits venture capital to a blockbuster mentality" and makes it "even harder for marginal artists with zero-plus platinum potential to find backing."
Years ago, a CFO whose company had just hit the wall told Ted Gioia he'd had calls from 15 private equity firms in three days, all wanting to take the company private. Gioia reports that Universal Music has been talking with private equity firms about going private, its shares down about 29% in 2026 and under the price of its 2021 IPO, per Bloomberg. Gioia blames the labels themselves, calling them "IP management firms." They lost the ability (or desire) to develop new talent, let lawyers and accountants make the key decisions, and paid huge sums for songs from the last century, which Gioia sees as depleting assets.
EMI had a bad few weeks before Matthew Lynn wrote this MoneyWeek column in March 2010. It was selling Abbey Road studios, it replaced its CEO, and it lost a legal battle with Pink Floyd over selling single tracks as downloads. Lynn blames the private-equity buyout of 2007, when Guy Hands bought EMI for £2.4bn for his fund, Terra Firma. The new owners loaded the label with debt and put people who knew nothing about the industry in charge. Before that, the City had kept pressing EMI for mergers that would strip out costs, and "cutting costs is rarely the way to keep the artists happy." The core business still worked. Coldplay's Viva La Vida was the world's biggest-selling album of the previous two years.
News that Universal was considering a return to private ownership sent Network Notes back to the company's fight with Bill Ackman, who wanted published capital allocation plans and more debt to fund growth. Universal resisted. Going private with sympathetic investors would let it stay on its current path, but the writer doubts private equity will see things much differently from Ackman. In an earlier post on Network Notes' sister site, Every Spoil Is A Style, the writer had called Universal's talk of efficiency hollow, because as the writer saw it the people being let go were senior executives, and technology "tends to take the lower-paid roles first." Meanwhile the artists and labels using Universal's systems absorb the cuts. "If your marketing arm now has half the staff in it (as could be conceivable, if not true already) then how much can you reasonably expect from it?"
On day one, most of the money goes to the company; once the artist recoups and the company hits its return targets, the split swings to 80% for the artist. That is how Merck Mercuriadis, who popularized music as an asset class with his Hipgnosis catalog companies, says Hipgnosis Artist Partnerships will work. He is building it by rolling up eight "very significant management companies," with the artist as majority owner of what the partnership creates. Mercuriadis calls it a "value shift" away from record companies, Billboard reports. The majors would still handle publishing administration and label services, while Hipgnosis Artist Partnerships decides how the money is spent.
Home from a friend's wedding, Joel Gouveia tried to explain a record deal to a housemate, a construction project manager, in real estate terms. A bank lends you a million dollars to build a house, takes 80% of the rent as its fee and puts 20% toward the loan, so the house has to earn five million to clear the debt. Then the bank keeps the house, forever. Gouveia gives the labels' defense a fair hearing (advances are non-recourse, so the hits pay for the flops), then shows how the cuts undo it. With A&R staff being cut, the majors wait for artists to blow up online before signing them, and the risk premium artists still pay "has nothing left to pay for." The fix Gouveia proposes is an "anti-label financing vehicle," venture-style money with no recoupment that lets the artist keep the house.
