What you need to know in the music business this week 1. PLATFORM MOVES Spotify + UMG Flip the Script on AI Music The two biggest names in streaming just struck a deal letting fans legally create AI covers and remixes of signed artists' work. Read that again slowly. Labels spent the last three years in courtrooms and congressional hearings fighting AI music. Now Universal is partnering with Spotify to monetize it. That's not a contradiction. That's a business decision. The la

For years, artists have been told to focus on visibility. Get your music up. Build your profile. Feed the platforms. Keep releasing. Keep posting. Keep growing. That advice is not wrong. But it is incomplete. Because in 2026, artists do not just have a promotion problem. They have a protection problem. The latest example is the wave of AI-generated tracks and fake releases showing up under real artists’ names on Spotify. Recent reporting has highlighted cases involving jazz m

Spotify’s payout narrative, TikTok fatigue, and why artists should stop confusing attention with momentum. There is no shortage of music industry news. Every week, there is a fresh pile of headlines, platform claims, panic over AI, hot takes about TikTok, and another round of people trying to decide whether streaming is saving artists or screwing them. Most of that noise is not useful. So here’s a simpler filter: what actually matters, what does not, and what artists and team

Amplifying Talent People ask me a simple question fairly often. “What exactly do you do for artists?” There are a lot of ways to answer that question. The music business has no shortage of titles: consultant, strategist, promoter, advisor, manager. Each one describes a piece of the work. But the simplest answer is the most accurate. I amplify talent. The simplest answer is the most accurate. Talent isn’t the rare part Despite what people often assume, talent is not the rarest