News Streaming fraud leads to prison sentence for Danish man in case called ‘historic’ by artists’ groups Streaming fraud and manipulated audio are two of the biggest headaches in music today, and a criminal case shows how the two go hand in hand
News Non-profit Fairly Trained certifies an AI large language model as free of copyright infringement, in a blow to a key claim of AI firms "There is no fundamental reason that large language model developers can’t work in a way that respects creators’ rights"
News Indie artists shift to artist-centric payments on Deezer, as streaming service signs new deal with Merlin Merlin joins a growing list of music companies to sign up for Deezer's innovative new royalty payment model
News Universal and instrument maker Roland publish ‘Principles for Music Creation with AI’ as part of new partnership The companies' joint manifesto is "a series of clarifying statements relating to the responsible use of AI"
News Major labels and Cox Communications denied new appeal in $1 billion copyright infringement case Both Cox and the major record companies had asked for a rehearing of an appeals court's decision to vacate a $1 billion judgment against Cox
Analysis News Over half of the artists who generated at least $10,000 on Spotify last year are from countries where English is not the first language "The music industry today is a more diverse and accurate reflection of the world we live in"
News Tencent Music’s subscription revenues soared 45.3% in Q4 as paying subscribers hit 106.7m Both the number of subscribers and revenue per paying subscriber are growing rapidly at TME
News Universal, Republic launch Boombox music player on Roblox Boombox will roll out first in TWICE Square, the Roblox experience inspired by K-pop girl group TWICE
News AI vocal cloning app Voicify offers 3,000 deepfake models to replicate artists’ voices. Now it faces legal action from the UK’s music industry BPI has sent a letter to Voicify, now known as Jammable, threatening legal action if the app doesn't stop enabling users to create unauthorized music deepfakes
News Barcelona appeals court rules that Spanish authors’ society SGAE ‘abused its position’ in the market, in victory for rival UNISON SGAE's all-or-nothing rights contracts with its members prevented the liberalization of the rights market in Spain, competitor UNISON says
Analysis News From Universal’s TikTok takedowns to Deezer’s 26m deleted tracks… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-Up The five biggest stories to hit our headlines over the past seven days…
Analysis News Record companies are better placed than streaming platforms to monetize superfans… and 3 other things Robert Kyncl said in his new Q&A Warner Music Group’s CEO has some “radical” ideas on how to change how streaming services pay music rights holders
News Deezer has deleted 26m ‘useless’ tracks since it launched artist-centric model with Universal Music Group The idea is to "declutter the platform" and "focus on tracks that are valuable to our users" according to CEO Jeronimo Folgueira
News Neil Young’s music to return to Spotify Legendary rocker suggested his boycott makes little sense now that the Joe Rogan podcast is available on other streaming services as well
News Bill forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok or face ban passes US House The bill is facing opposition from civil liberties groups, tech industry groups, and Donald Trump