What you need to know in the music business this week. 1. LEGAL WATCH The Copyright Office Drew the AI Line After two years of study, the U.S. Copyright Office landed where a lot of this conversation has been heading: work created entirely by AI without meaningful human creative control is not copyrightable. Work made with AI as a tool can be. There’s no magic percentage. It will be decided case by case based on what the human actually contributed. For artists, that makes doc

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. SYNC ALERT Music Supervisors Are Using AI to Screen Out Your Song. Here's Why. A quiet but consequential shift is happening in sync licensing, and most artists pursuing placements have no idea it's occurring. Music supervisors are now routinely using AI tools to identify what the industry is calling "sonically safe" tracks, recordings that won't trigger copyright claims because they don't sound too much like any existin

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. LEGAL WATCH Artists Are Asking Where Their AI Money Is. Labels Still Haven't Answered. A Los Angeles Times investigation this week put a specific shape on something the music industry has been dancing around since the first major AI licensing deals were announced. Warner, BMG, Believe, Universal, and others have struck AI licensing agreements that could eventually generate significant revenue. The financial mechanics fo

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. LEGAL WATCH UMG Just Sued DistroKid. Distribution Is Becoming a Verification Business. Universal Music Group filed suit against DistroKid in Delaware federal court this week, accusing the distributor of copyright infringement and of flooding streaming platforms with unauthorized and AI-generated recordings that siphon royalties and discoverability from legitimate artists. The complaint involves at least 1,000 copyrighte

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. NEW ECONOMICS Warner Just Described a New Way to Pay Artists: At the Moment a Fan Creates, Not When Someone Listens Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl did something unusual this week. He didn't just announce a deal. He described a new economic concept for the music business, and it deserves to be understood on its own terms before the industry reflexively accepts or rejects it. Kyncl calls it creation-based revenue. Pa

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. LEGAL WATCH Jason Isbell Just Opened a New Legal Front Against Suno. This One Isn't About Copyright. Jason Isbell has filed a class action lawsuit against Suno alongside David Lowery, Guy Forsyth, and Ed Calle. But the legal theory is distinct from every AI copyright case we've tracked this year and deserves to be understood on its own terms. This isn't a training data lawsuit. It's a right of publicity case. The plaint

What you need to know in the music business this week We will always love you, Dolly. 1. DATA INFRASTRUCTURE Luminate Is Building AI Detection Into the Foundation of Billboard's Charts Step back and look at what's been built this year, piece by piece. Spotify badges AI personas and keeps them out of recommendations. Apple Music is adding Made With AI labels. Tidal refuses to pay royalties on AI music. Deezer removes synthetic content from recommendations. Beatport bans AI-gen

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. LEGAL WATCH Round Hill Music Refuses to Settle. It Wants a Jury to Decide. While BMG and Warner have been converting their AI lawsuits into licensing deals, Round Hill Music is taking a fundamentally different position, and the music industry should be paying close attention to why. Round Hill has sued both Suno and Anthropic over the alleged unauthorized use of more than 500 copyrighted songs. Founder Josh Gruss says h

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. POLICY WATCH Stevie Wonder Tells the Copyright Royalty Board That Songwriting Has Been Undervalued Stevie Wonder has apparently submitted a comment to the Copyright Royalty Board opposing the proposed Phonorecords V settlement, which would freeze mechanical royalty rates for physical formats and permanent downloads through 2032, with only inflation adjustments. His argument is pretty simple: “The extraordinary gift of s

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. LEGAL WATCH Anthropic Seeks Partial Dismissal in $3 Billion Music Publisher Lawsuit Anthropic has moved to partially dismiss the music publishers’ copyright lawsuit and has separately asked the court to drop the direct infringement claim against CEO Dario Amodei personally. The $3 billion figure attached to this case is the clearest dollar amount we’ve seen on the music publisher litigation yet, and it reframes the scal

What you need to know in the music business this week Before this week's nine: Glen Hansard, the Irish musician and songwriter behind "Falling Slowly" from the film Once, died this week at 56. His Oscar acceptance speech remains one of the most genuine moments in the history of that ceremony. He will be missed by everyone who believes music can change a room. 1. PLATFORM POWER StubHub's CEO Has Been Running a Secret Hedge Fund That Buys and Resells Tickets on His Own Platform

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. LEGAL WATCH Music Publishers File Amended Lawsuit Against Anthropic. The Claude Case Is Escalating. Three of the most significant names in music publishing, Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group, and ABKCO, filed a second amended complaint against Anthropic this week over the alleged copying of copyrighted song lyrics by Claude. The expanded complaint covers approximately 500 songs and represents the fir

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. AI & RIGHTS Hacked Suno Code Reveals 2 Million+ Songs Scraped From YouTube Alone For months, the AI music training debate has been fought largely on principle: did companies have the right to train on copyrighted material, and was doing so fair use? This week the debate got evidence. A hacker broke into Suno and handed its source code to 404 Media. What that code contained is the clearest documented look yet at how an A

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. PLATFORM POLICY Tidal Just Drew the Hardest Line on AI Music Royalties Effective immediately, Tidal will not pay royalties on AI-generated music. The platform will continue to accept AI tracks, and starting mid-July will tag content it detects as 100% AI-generated so listeners know what they’re hearing. But the monetization door is closed. This is a meaningful policy departure. Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon have all

What you need to know in the music business this week Quick note: I’ve added a new section at the end called What We Read so you can see some of the sources I often use to compile 9 Signals. Enjoy - LP. 1. DATA POINT Spotify Is Gaslighting Artists on Royalties. Here’s the Proof. Spotify’s director of global music policy recently wrote a letter to the Economist citing percentage growth rates as evidence that the platform helps artists at every level of the royalty pyramid. It’

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. AI & RIGHTS Suno Will Pay You. Just Don't Ever Criticize Suno. Read the fine print on this one before you get excited about free money. Suno's new "Spark" incubator program offers independent artists cash grants ranging from $1,000 to $10,000. On the surface, that sounds like genuine support for unsigned musicians struggling to break through. Underneath, the terms tell a different story. Recipients must publicly disclos

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. POLICY WATCH The NO FAKES Act Just Cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee For the first time, real bipartisan momentum is building behind federal legislation that would protect every American's voice and likeness from unauthorized AI deepfakes and clones, not just celebrities and public figures. The NO FAKES Act (formally the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act) passed the Senate Judiciary Com

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. PLATFORM MOVES Spotify Is Coming for Live Concert Video Spotify is in talks to license live concert and festival video as part of a broader push into live music content. Read that alongside everything else Spotify has done in the last six months: the UMG AI deal, the Reserved ticketing feature, the narrated articles push, the multi-format Investor Day reframe. None of these moves are random. They are sequential steps to

1. DATA POINT The Streaming Economy Is Actually Working for Independents Spotify’s Loud & Clear Report dropped this week and the number that matters most isn’t the headline one. The 100,000th-highest-earning artist on Spotify made $7,300 in royalties in 2025. In 2015, that same tier of artist was earning $350. That’s a twentyfold increase in a decade, and it happened quietly while everyone was arguing about whether streaming was killing the music business. The second number i

What you need to know in the music business this week 1. PLATFORM MOVES Spotify + UMG: The Toll Booth Is Open This stopped being a future story this week. Spotify's forthcoming AI tool will let fans legally reinterpret existing tracks while rights holders get compensated. The Spotify/UMG licensing framework is live, the infrastructure is being assembled, and the business model is taking shape whether you're paying attention or not. Independent artists need to answer one quest