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Our Culture Is Filled With Music With No Place for Musicians…Is Supply and Demand Upside Down?
QUESTION: Can a culture be filled with music while musicians become economically disposable? The answer seems to be an overwhelming “yes”.  In fact, that may be the defining contradiction of the modern music business. We are way past the demand of music, folks.  Music is everywhere. It plays in stores, restaurants, gyms, offices, films, television shows, video games, podcasts, social posts, waiting rooms and elevators. It wakes us up, helps us work, sells us products, regulates our moods and fills every uncomfortable silence. We consume more music in more places, for more hours of the day, than any previous generation could have imagined.  Yet the people making that music are increasingly treated as though they are incidental to the process. The modern economy wants music constantly, but it does not necessarily want musicians. Music files have no such demands. They can be stored, copied, streamed, licensed, repackaged and placed into playlists without ever asking who benefits.  The business has learned to separate the value of music from the value of the person who created it. Music remains culturally essential, but musicians are told they are replaceable. (THANK YOU AI!) That separation is not accidental. It is the business model. This is what happens when your product is scalable but your workforce is not. (HELLO..McFLY!!) Streaming platforms need an endless supply of recordings. Social platforms need sounds that keep users watching. Advertisers need music to create emotion around products. Venues need performers to attract customers. Technology companies need creative work to train systems that will generate more creative work. Everyone needs music, but each part of the system is designed to minimize what it pays the musician. The (virtual) shelves are full. The playlists never end. The soundtrack plays everywhere. But the people who create the music, sweat the details and hope for the best have been priced out of their own industry — maybe forever…let's hope not!

 

The Best Way to Get a Publishing Deal
Over the years, thousands of aspiring songwriters have attended my workshops, and almost all of them have one thing in common: They hope to make a living doing what they love—writing songs.
Some publishers, primarily smaller independent companies, acquire songs one at a time. In those cases, the songwriter signs a single-song agreement. But most songwriters who build sustainable careers eventually sign an exclusive publishing agreement, sometimes referred to as a staff-writing deal.  
The term staff-writing is actually a misnomer. A songwriter who enters into this type of contract is neither a staff member nor an employee of the publishing company. They don’t report to an office, keep regular hours, or typically receive employee benefits such as health insurance. And in most cases, the money a songwriter receives under an exclusive agreement isn’t a salary. It is an advance against future royalties.
The amount of the advance depends largely on the writer’s track record and bargaining power. An advance might cover the cost of home-studio equipment, demo musicians and vocalists, or recording-studio time. It might also provide enough income to make it possible to quit a day job and write full-time.  There is no such thing as a “standard” publishing contract. Nearly every provision can be negotiated, depending on the writer’s leverage.  The contract will specify which sources of income the publisher can use to recoup the advance. If the advance hasn’t been fully recouped when the agreement expires, the songwriter typically isn’t required to write a check to the publisher for the outstanding balance. Instead, the songs generally remain with the publisher, and royalties earned later are applied toward the unrecouped advance.  Now that we’ve established what an exclusive publishing agreement is, let’s address the bigger question: How do you land one? Click here to read more.

 

YouTube is doubling the amount of viewing a new creator must generate before they can start earning a share of the platform’s advertising and subscription money.  

From February 1, 2027, new applicants to the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) will need 8,000 qualified watch hours over the previous 365 days, or 20 million qualified Shorts views over the previous 90 days.
Both figures are double the current entry requirements of 4,000 watch hours and 10 million Shorts views. The 1,000-subscriber requirement is unchanged.  The changes were announced by YouTube in a blog post on Monday (August 10). YouTube does not say that, and its post does not address what the expansion means for payments to music rightsholders.  Nor are rightsholders shut out of the tier: the ads that keep running against music content on Premium Lite generate revenue that is shared with them.  But the version of YouTube Premium now reaching every Premium market is the cheap one, and the one in which music sits largely outside the subscription. The new terms, which creators can review and sign in YouTube Studio, take effect on February 1, 2027.

 

Review Your Songs Today To See if You’re Eligible for Royalties From The MLC
There’s good news for self-published songwriters and composers whose music is streamed and/or downloaded on digital platforms in the US. The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC), a nonprofit organization designated by the US Copyright Office, is encouraging music creators to connect with them to find out if they’re eligible to receive unclaimed mechanical royalties. With the first phase of market share distributions planned for 2027, songwriters, composers and publishers still have time to review their catalogs, make sure ownership information is up to date and take any necessary action. In the interim, The MLC is working to match mechanical royalties and connect them with the right copyright owners. Mechanical royalties from The MLC are entirely separate from the performance royalties you receive from BMI. From information provided by streaming and download services on a monthly basis, The MLC matches sound recordings to corresponding works in their database and distributes royalties to the appropriate copyright owners and self-published songwriters.  The MLC distributes royalties each month and has distributed more than $4 billion in total royalties since 2021. Royalties associated with usage from sound recordings that cannot be paired to a musical work are considered unmatched. If one or more of the ownerships shares for a musical work are missing, the royalties for that usage are considered unclaimed. For songs that are not yet registered in The MLC’s database, The MLC provides tools that allow rightsholders to easily register their songs, along with a Claiming Tool that allows rightsholders to claim their shares of songs already registered with The MLC. Additionally, The MLC’s Matching Tool allows rightsholders to identify unmatched sound recordings and suggest matches between those recordings and songs in their catalogs.  There are a few simple steps you can take today to help ensure your songs are ready.

 

Music Streaming Has Increased Traffic Deaths In the US, Study Finds — With New Album Release Days Causing the Biggest Spikes In Fatalities
A new Harvard study on distracted driving has found a 15% increase in traffic fatalities in the US on days that major albums are released on streaming platforms.  Major album releases can lead to a major surge in traffic deaths, according to a new Harvard study by Dr. Vishal Patel. Published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, Dr. Patel’s study examined smartphone use and distracted driving and focused on the 10 albums with the most first-day Spotify streams between 2017 and 2022. The study found that traffic fatalities increased by as much as 15% when significant album releases go live on streaming services.  The albums covered in the study included Taylor Swift’s Midnights, Drake’s Certified Lover Boy, and Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti, as well as other releases by Swift and Drake, and those by Harry Styles, Kanye West, and Kendrick Lamar. The study was based on 233,809 U.S. traffic deaths between 2017 and 2022 and measured the 10-day window before and after the release of these albums.On average, there were about 139 deaths from car crashes on release dates compared to an average of 120.9 deaths on surrounding days—a difference of 18.2 average fatalities, or a 15.1% increase on album release days. Distraction is believed to play a significant role in traffic collisions; in 2022, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that 8% of fatal crashes and 11% of all police-reported crashes were classified as “distraction affected.” Moreover, smartphone telematics data suggests that mobile device use occurs in as many as 52% of car trips that result in a collision.  Ultimately, it’s advisable to prioritize safety: come to a complete stop before pulling up music on your phone or use voice commands instead of looking at your screen while driving.

 

Spotify Announces ‘AI Persona’ Label for Artist Pages That Don’t ‘Represent a Real Person’ — Complete With Manual Profile Reviews, an Appeal Process, and More
Millions of machine-generated tracks – and more than a few listener complaints – later, Spotify is officially set to begin labeling AI artist profiles.  The DSP formally revealed the incoming labels and the policy particulars thereof today. At present, one can self-disclose that an artist page “does not represent a real person.” And starting on mobile in mid-September, Spotify will then identify the appropriate profiles with an “AI Persona” badge.  Interestingly, however, there’s more to the system than voluntary disclosures. In its own words, Spotify intends to “review artist profiles and identify those whose public identity—the identity an artist presents on their profile, including name and imagery—appears to represent photorealistic AI-generated identities.” On the “appears” front, the standard badge – meaning that resulting from self-disclosure – will simply read “AI Persona.” But the profiles Spotify identifies as AI-powered will be slapped with a “Likely AI Persona” label, with both expected to be displayed “in the banner and About section,” search results, “and on track rows across playlists.”  “Spotify reviews artists with a large audience. Based on that review, we believe this artist’s public identity may be AI-generated,” the Likely AI Persona description reads. Speaking of slop, the streaming service in its announcement acknowledged listeners’ frequently indicating “that they don’t like seeing an artist profile that seems human, only to find out that the persona is AI-generated.” 

 

The Metadata Debt Problem: How Independent Labels Lose Control of Their Catalogs
Bad metadata rarely breaks a release on day one. It causes problems months (or years) later, when nobody remembers where the info came from. Most metadata mistakes look harmless when they happen.  A producer is credited under a nickname on one release and a legal name on the next. A songwriter’s suffix is missing. A featured artist’s name is styled differently across platforms. The copyright line on the packaging does not match the information delivered to the distributor.  The song still comes out, though. There is no emergency meeting. No one delays the campaign. The team moves on to the next release, and the inconsistency quietly becomes part of the catalog. That is how "metadata debt" begins. Metadata debt is the backlog of incomplete, conflicting, or unverified information attached to a label’s releases. One error is usually manageable. The problem appears when small errors accumulate across dozens (or hundreds) of tracks.  Eventually, someone needs a clear answer. That is when a two-minute confirmation turns into an afternoon of searching through old emails, spreadsheets, agreements, and messages. A growing independent label can quickly accumulate hundreds of contributor names, roles, identifiers, publishing details, copyright lines, approvals, and ownership records. Even a small percentage of inconsistencies creates a large cleanup project.  The label may own the recordings while still lacking a reliable record of what is attached to them. Eventually, the catalog needs an answer immediately — and “probably” is no longer enough. Independent labels do not need perfect metadata from their first release. They need a process that keeps unanswered questions from becoming permanent catalog problems.  The best time to confirm the information is while the project is still active. After that, the label starts paying interest.

 

Social Media in the Age of AI: The Internet’s Next Luxury Is Proof You’re Human
As AI floods social feeds with more content than audiences can meaningfully process, the creator economy is entering a new phase: proof. The internet has a trust shortage. Content is everywhere, but trust and connection are scarce.  Here's why.  Generative AI has made it possible to produce captions, videos, images, comments, scripts, ads, and entire content calendars at a speed no human team could match (or would want to). For brands, marketers, and creators, efficiency can feel seductive. AI can help brainstorm, edit, translate, repurpose, and scale. But the same force that makes content easier to create is making it easier to ignore. Social media has always been built on a simple human exchange: people follow people, not marketing systems. They follow taste, humor, vulnerability, expertise, timing, identity, and point of view. They follow because there is a person on the other side who sees something the way they do, or sees it in a way they never could. In an AI-saturated internet, that human signal becomes more valuable, not less. AI can make the work faster, but it cannot manufacture cultural intuition or human emotion. It cannot know which behind-the-scenes post will make fans feel closer. It cannot replace the moment a creator responds honestly to their community. It cannot fake the long-term trust that comes from showing up consistently with a recognizable point of view. It cannot even pronounce many words correctly. AI now floods the feed and real connection is scarce. But scarcity is where value lives.

 

Being a Musician in 2026 Is a Full-Time (Platform) Job
Digital platforms lowered the barriers to releasing music, but their growing demand for content, tech management, and adaptive upkeep take a toll.   Five years ago, releasing music digitally meant distributing a track, writing a bio, maybe pitching a playlist.  That was kind of it. The platform was a delivery channel.  Now? On Spotify alone there's Canvas, Clips, full-length video and more. Apple Music has its own editorial criteria, analytics dashboards, custom artist pages. YouTube wants Shorts and long-form. TikTok is a whole separate game. And then there's whatever distributor dashboard you're logging into this week. Every platform keeps shipping new features, each one promising better engagement, more discovery, higher conversion. That's great in theory. In practice, every single one of those features takes time away from actually making music. That's just how tech works. To stay competitive, platforms roll out new stuff fast. Some of it lands. Some gets quietly killed off. For most listeners, a streaming profile is just a page with songs on it. For an artist, it's their storefront, their brand, their main touchpoint with their audience. When something goes wrong there, it's not a minor thing. It can directly mess with how people find and hear their music. What most people don't realize is that behind that clean interface there's a pretty gnarly technical stack. Metadata pipelines, distribution systems, content matching algorithms, multiple databases updating on different schedules. A release showing up under the wrong name, analytics not reflecting right, a new track just not appearing on time. An artist's career increasingly depends on digital platforms they don't own or control, making them vulnerable to technical issues, algorithm changes, and platform decisions. Platforms are not going to simplify. They're competing by building more.  The real question is: What happens to the artists who can't keep up, and whether the democratization that digital distribution once promised is slowly being undone by the very tools that were supposed to make it possible?

 

90,000 AI tracks flood uploads daily – passing 50% of all new music uploads for the first time
The volume of fully AI-generated music being uploaded to streaming services has surged yet again.
According to eye-opening new stats revealed by Paris-headquartered streaming service Deezer today (July 21), fully AI-generated music accounted for more than half of all new tracks uploaded to its platform for the first time in June.  Deezer says it was receiving nearly 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks every day in June.  On peak days, that content made up more than 50% of all new music delivered to the service. The 90,000-a-day peak marks an escalation from the 75,000 AI tracks a day, or 44% of daily deliveries. The trend has prompted a  record-industry push for transparency, with the RIAA and IFPI campaigning to label AI tracks as either “AI-generated” or “AI-assisted” across the world’s streaming services. Deezer says it detected and tagged more than 13.4 million AI tracks across 2025, and that its tool can identify fully AI-generated music from generative models including Suno and Udio.

 

Why are people buying so many CDs?
CD sales are apparently going up, reportedly thanks to fans realizing they’re an affordable way to support their favorite artists. According to a new report from research firm Luminate, 16.3 million CDs were sold in the first half of 2026 in the US, a 16 percent increase year-over-year. The growth in CD sales was driven by “collection building and price accessibility. The data suggests that “the CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible,” Luminate says. “This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself.” Physical album sales — vinyls, CDs, and cassettes — were up overall as well, increasing 7.8 percent year-over-year. Vinyl sales were at 21.8 million units and cassette sales hit around 205,000 units, Luminate’s Denise Schenasi tells The Verge. The higher vinyl sales continues a trend of the format outselling CDs that has been going for a few years now.

 

NMPA Releases Latest Per-Stream US Publisher Payouts from Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and Amazon
NMPA president and CEO David Israelite unveils the latest per-stream songwriter and publisher payout across Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and Amazon.  In a post on LinkedIn, National Music Publishers’ Association President and CEO David Israelite unveiled the latest per-stream songwriter and publisher payout. These numbers represent both mechanical and publishing sub-licenses across Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. Notably, YouTube is not at the bottom of that barrel.  “How much is 1 million streams worth to the songwriters who make these businesses possible? And remember—most songs are written by 4-5 songwriters, so this amount is split among all of the writers and publishers,” Israelite wrote, noting in an email to Digital Music News that this data from the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) is only inclusive of the U.S., across both mechanical and performance payouts. Specifically, Spotify’s free, ad-supported tier saw a payout of $800, (.0008 per stream for publisher and writers combined) while individual paid Spotify accounts raked in $1,346 (.001346 per stream) Individual YouTube accounts led to a payout of $2,159 (.00216 per stream); individual Apple accounts amounted to $2,367 .00237 per stream), while individual Amazon accounts led to a payout of $3,743 (00374 per stream). Already, A&R representatives and others across the industry are speaking out about those numbers, noting that they represent broader issues across the royalty payout structure.

 

AI Could Use as Much Water as 1.3 Billion People by 2030, U.N. Report Warns
The water used by artificial intelligence is expected to equal the needs of 1.3 billion people by 2030—threatening natural resources for billions around the world. That’s according to a new report from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) which quantifies the carbon, water, and land footprints of AI's electricity use around the globe. The report finds that AI’s environmental cost is often mismeasured—focusing solely on carbon emissions. However, cooling and generating power for data centers comes with a “water footprint,” while the energy infrastructure and supply chains to build the data centers have a “land footprint.” These are important factors to consider, the report says, when analyzing the stressors a region might be facing due to data centers. By 2030, the report finds, global data centers powering artificial intelligence are projected to consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity. This is nearly triple the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria—countries that together are home to more than 650 million people. The water footprint of data centers is projected to equal the basic domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa for a year, while their land footprint could exceed 5,590 square miles.But switching to cleaner sources of energy isn’t as simple as it sounds. Minimizing one footprint could come at the expense of magnifying another, researchers say. For example, switching from coal to bioenergy cuts electricity’s carbon footprint by 70%—but increases its water footprint more than 30-fold and its land footprint 100-fold. For a number of communities around the globe, AI is already using up significant energy resources. In 2025 alone, data centers consumed an estimated 448 terawatt-hours of electricity, the report found—more than the country of Saudi Arabia. In many cases, this excessive energy use comes at a cost to those who reside near them.