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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?

 

Court declines to dismiss independent artists’ copyright class action against Udio – but moves the case from Illinois to New York
A federal judge has declined to dismiss the copyright class action brought against AI music generator Udio by a group of independent artists. Udio is free to renew its motion to dismiss once the case arrives there.  The lawsuit was filed on October 15, 2025 by ten independent musicians and songwriters, suing Udi Eight of the plaintiffs are based in Illinois, one in Georgia and one in California.  Their First Amended Complaint, filed on January 7, 2026, brings 14 counts.  These include seven counts of copyright infringement, three under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, plus claims under Illinois‘ Biometric Information Privacy Act and Right of Publicity Act, a deceptive trade practices count, and a claim of unjust enrichment. The complaint challenges what it calls Udio‘s practice of “systematically copying and storing works by independent artists to fuel a commercial, mass-market music-generation engine.” Both the major labels and the independent artists are now set to litigate against the company in the Southern District of New York.dividually and on behalf of all others similarly situated.”

 

Anthropic seeks partial dismissal in music publishers’ $3B lyrics suit – as CEO moves to drop the direct-infringement claim against him
Anthropic and its co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei have each filed motions seeking to dismiss parts of the second copyright infringement lawsuit brought against the company by a group of music publishers.  The two filings landed on Monday (August 3) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.  They target the case that Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group and ABKCO are pursuing over more than 20,000 songs. In its own motion, Anthropic asked the court to dismiss the publishers’ claim that its Claude chatbot reproduces their lyrics in its outputs, along with a separate claim brought under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).  Amodei, named as an individual defendant alongside co-founder Benjamin Mann, filed a separate motion (read here) asking the court to dismiss the direct copyright infringement claim against him personally. The wider recorded music business has pursued its own AI fight against Suno and Udio, which the RIAA sued in June 2024 on behalf of the major labels. Those cases, like the Anthropic suits, turn on whether training generative AI models on copyrighted material qualifies as fair use – a question US courts have yet to settle.

 

The Price of Music: streaming fraud – how does it work and who’s doing it? 
This week, the podcast pivots to the popular TRUE CRIME format in order to woo a giant mainstream audience. OK, not quite – but sort-of. Stu and Joe have spoken a lot recently on the show about how AI-generated music accounts for 50% of music uploaded to streaming platforms – and how the reason for it, it seems, is for it to be used for fraud. So in this episode they’re having a good old root around music streaming fraud: how it works, who is doing it, why so much AI music is needed – and how much money can be made. It’s a good primer if you want get up to speed with the topic: how streaming fraud is mainly organised crime flooding platforms with AI tracks, hijacking real user accounts, and siphoning millions out of the artist royalty pool. How up to 7% of global streams might be fake, driven by schemes ranging from bot farms to prediction market gamblers manipulating charts to win wagers. And how in response, streaming services are cracking down by fining distributors, wiping illegitimate streams, and purging dead AI catalogue to protect payouts for real creators. 

 

Suno Loses Copyright Lawsuit To GEMA—AI Music Companies Should Worry
A Munich court ruled on July 31 that AI music platform Suno infringed copyrights represented by GEMA, Germany's music collecting society. Suno already admitted to unlicensed training, and the court rejected its defense that training doesn't require a license. The ruling's widest impact is its assertion of German jurisdiction over U.S.-based AI training, arguing that outputs served to EU users make it subject to EU law, so AI companies with EU users face potential litigation regardless of where models are built. The adjudicated infringement and a compelled disclosure order give GEMA a significantly stronger hand in licensing negotiations. This case underscores the "train first, license later" issue in AI, emphasizing the importance of transparency and licensing before product deployment. 

 

AM/FM Radio  Audience Share Is 10X Larger Than Spotify’s Ad-Supported Tier
Where do fans go when they don’t want to pay for premium audio? AM/FM radio, which, far from dying off, currently boasts a U.S. audience share in excess of 10 times larger than that attributable to Spotify’s ad-supported tier.  This and other significant findings come from Edison’s newly released Q2 2026 “Share of Ear” report, which “surveys 4,000 Americans annually.”  At the top level, following considerable paid streaming growth in established markets including the U.S., Spotify’s ad-supported userbase is smaller, “skews low income,” and “is far less likely to work full-time,” according to the resource. The takeaways are, of course, relative. Regarding the “smaller” descriptor, notwithstanding the DSP’s loosened free tier restrictions, 22% of overall Spotify listening time (for those between the ages of 25 and 54, to be specific) is spent on ad-supported at present, compared to 53% back in 2017, the report shows.  Running with the numbers, despite advertisers’ perception to the contrary, AM/FM radio is said to boast a 62% ad-supported audience share among Americans age 18 and over – against, in keeping with the initially mentioned stat, closer to 6% for Spotify’s “downscale and very small” ad-supported share. (Technically, this pertains to “AM/FM radio’s persons 18+ share of ad-supported audio” on the “audience share” front. However, in-graphic text also describes 62% as the “actual share of ad-supported audio time spent among persons 18+.”

 

AFM files amended lawsuit against Universal and Warner over Suno and Udio AI deals
The American Federation of Musicians has filed an amended complaint in its lawsuit against Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, accusing the majors of breaching their union contract by failing to pay musicians for recordings licensed to AI companies Suno and Udio.  The union alleges that Universal and Warner licensed recordings made by its members to the two AI companies “without compensation or credit.”  The First Amended Complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Friday (July 24), names Warner Records, Inc. and Atlantic Recording Corp. as defendants, alongside Universal Music Group, Inc. The AFM had initially named Warner Music Group Corp., but said it would amend after Warner argued that the parent company was not a proper party to the case.  The union first sued the majors in the same court on June 5.  At the heart of the case is the “new use” provision of the Sound Recording Labor Agreement, the union’s collective bargaining agreement with the major labels. Licensing recordings to train generative AI models is such a new use, the union says, and it claims the SRLA covers thousands of the recordings that Universal and Warner licensed to Suno and Udio. The AFM says the labels have “failed to share in the settlement proceeds and future revenue” with the artists whose recordings were used, despite what it calls their “self-congratulatory claims” of protecting those same artists.

 

How AI is Quietly Automating Music Companies: From A&R to Release Ops
The music industry has been consumed by AI debates – from lawsuits involving Suno and Udio to major-label licensing deals. Now the focus is shifting to a bigger question: how do we work with AI-generated music legally, and what will it mean for the future of artists, labels, and streaming platforms? Almost no one has been watching the back office. And the back office is where the real shift is happening today. Over the past year or so, a quieter class of AI has moved into production inside labels, distributors, publishers, sync agencies, and artist management teams: not generative models making songs, but agents – LLM-driven systems with tools, memory, and the ability to plan and execute multi-step workflows.  They audit incoming delivery packages. They write the morning ops brief. They route what a producer typed in email straight into metadata fields. They watch stream count and flag breakout artists before competitors notice.  Let’s take a closer look at what’s actually shipping, what’s still hype, and what it means for the people whose jobs are quietly being rebuilt around the agent. A useful working definition, borrowed from the broader engineering literature: an agent is a system that takes a goal, decomposes it into steps, calls tools (APIs, databases, browsers, other agents), observes the results, and iterates until it has a defensible answer or a completed action. Inside a music company, the tools an agent reaches for are very specific: a file system, a DDEX feed, a distributor’s API, a Luminate or Chartmetric time series, a publishing administration platform, a Shopify webhook, a Slack channel, a Gmail inbox, a contract PDF. The interesting work in 2026 is not the model, as every serious team is using the same handful of frontier models. It is which tools have been wired up to it, and which workflows have been re-modeled around the assumption that an agent, not a human ops associate, is the first pair of eyes. CAN YOU SAY "JOB REPLACEMENT?"

 

Spotify Won’t Label AI Music—So Third-Parties Are Cropping Up to Categorize It Instead
It’s no secret that Spotify has a big AI music problem. Theirs is arguably worse than its rivals, because the platform hasn’t tracked and labeled AI-generated tracks like other streamers such as Deezer or even YouTube. That’s led to a lot of confusion among listeners and frustration among artists. Now, third-party tracking websites are trying to fill the void created through Spotify’s longtime inaction.  One such tracker, SoullessMusic.com, is a self-described database for “AI artists hiding on Spotify. No bands, no studios, no soul, just machines and melody.” There, such viral sensations as AI-assisted R&B act Slime Dot are identified as “almost certainly AI” based on such analysis as a flood of tracks in a short period. Whether artists choose to use generative AI platforms like Suno or Udio isn’t at issue here—it’s the lack of transparency around it that leads to platforms like Spotify hosting music that has not been properly identified. Listeners deserve to know what they’re listening to, just as artists deserve to not have to worry about an AI-assisted, pitch-shifted version of their song stealing their streaming royalties. As AI-generated music becomes more common, platforms and labels are investing in ways to tell it apart from human-made tracks. The goal here isn’t just “does this track sound synthetic?” but “can we trace how and possibly from what source” generated said track. 

 

Suno faces proposed class action lawsuit over data breach
Suno has been hit with a proposed class action lawsuit over a data breach that reportedly exposed the personal information of 55.3 million users.  The suit was filed on Friday (July 24) in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, where Suno is headquartered. According to the complaint, an unauthorized party accessed Suno‘s network and stole user data including names, physical addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, purchase histories and partial payment card details in or around November 2025.  The breach became public this month, when breach-notification service Have I Been Pwned added the stolen dataset to its database and reported the number of exposed records to be 55.3 million unique email addresses. The complaint alleges that Suno knew about the incident in November 2025 but did not tell affected users, who it says learned of the breach only when it was reported publicly on July 20. “Plaintiff and Class Members were wholly unaware of the Data Breach for nine months until public news sources disclosed the breach,” the complaint against Suno states.  It alleges that Suno “has not provided, and does not appear to have provided, any notice regarding the Data Breach.”

 

The American Federation of Musicians Fires Back Against UMG and WMG Dismissal Arguments as AI Compensation Dispute Turns Ugly
The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) has urged a New York federal court to let its lawsuit against Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group proceed, rejecting the majors’ effort to dismiss the case over their AI licensing deals with Suno and Udio.  The union says the deals triggered the “new use” provision of its collective bargaining agreement with Universal and Warner, which it argues requires the labels to compensate members whose recordings were licensed to the AI companies.  It argues that this “new use” provision is contained within Article 21(a) of the Sound Recording Labor Agreement (SRLA) – something the two major music companies dispute.  At issue is whether the musicians who performed on those recordings are owed a share of the revenue flowing from the majors’ settlements and licenses with Suno and Udio. The three majors first sued Suno and Udio in 2024, in a case coordinated by the RIAA that alleged “mass infringement” of copyright.  The AFM and the labels are negotiating the next SRLA, with AI at the center of the talks.

 

AI music generator Suno breach affects 55M users
A cyberattack at AI music generator Suno last year allowed a hacker to steal the personal information of more than 55.3 million people, according to the data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned, offering the first glimpse into the scale of the data theft. The breach happened in November 2025, but was only recently revealed thanks to reporting by independent news outlet 404 Media.  The data theft also included Suno’s source code, which revealed how the company allegedly scraped millions of songs and lyrics from popular streaming sites, including Deezer, Genius, and YouTube, to train its AI models. Several major record labels are currently suing Suno, claiming that its mass-scraping efforts violate copyright law. Suno has not yet publicly disclosed the cyberattack, or notified individuals that their information was taken. Suno co-founder Mikey Shulman did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment about the incident.  After publication, Suno spokesperson Rachel Racusen did not dispute the number of users affected, and confirmed that the company experienced a security incident in November 2025. It’s not clear why the company has not yet publicly acknowledged the data breach on its website. Nor did the company provide TechCrunch, when asked, with any communication the company may have sent to users informing them of a data breach.

 

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.

 

The ‘AM Radio In Every Vehicle Act’ Just Received a Major Boost In Congress — Though the RIAA, Recording Academy, and SAG-AFTRA Absolutely Hate This Bill
Radio broadcasters from across the US have been gathering in Washington to once again lobby Congress in support of the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act, a proposed bill that would require AM radio in all new passenger vehicles.  The law would apply to both vehicles manufactured in the US and imported vehicles, and would authorize the DOJ to fine or bring a civil action against manufacturers that don’t comply.  Radio broadcasters argue that AM radio is necessary for emergency alerts, especially in rural communities and during power outages. If broadband or satellite connections go down, the argument is that AM radio can continue to broadcast national emergency messages, including weather warnings and AMBER alerts. The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act has been awaiting consideration on the House floor since November 2025, when it was discharged from the House committee on Transportation. The bill was reintroduced in the Senate by Senators Markey (D-MA) and Cruz (R-TX) after a prior 2023 version failed to pass despite bipartisan support. 

 

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.

 

Have We Hit Dystopia Yet? Band Wakes Up to Find AI Has Stolen 94% of Their Spotify Royalties by Duplicating Their Album and Altering the Speed
Musician Owen Lyman-Schmidt found out that his work had been stolen when a longtime fan of his band, Makeshift Hammer, messaged him to let him know an album on Spotify sounded as if someone had taken his music and “distorted it a bit.” They sent a link to an album called Blue Road by an artist named Carey Dupont.  “I had never heard of Carey Dupont. And if you looked closely, the album art didn’t quite make sense,” Lyman-Schmidt wrote. “Dupont had no other releases that I could find and was seemingly otherwise unknown to the internet.” Lyman-Schmidt describes Makeshift Hammer as “Philly’s premier mandolin-bass guitar-junk percussion gutter-folk duo, which is a fancy way to say we know a thing or two about being unknown.” He and his bandmate Bobby have been playing together “for a dozen years,” and music isn’t their day job; in fact, Lyman-Schmidt is a private detective.  “But Carey Dupont seemed even more off the grid than we were. They had no website, no social media, no dead ticket links to past shows, no profile in alt-weeklies,” he explained. “Nothing except Blue Road, the album, on every streaming service.” Makeshift Hammer’s fans and friends alike agreed that there must be some way to address the issue. “The theft is so blatant,” wrote one listener. Soon, the duo learned that another local Philly musician, Katie Feeney, better known as Roberta Faceplant, had experienced a similar problem. By now, the tracks from the Blue Road album had surpassed 650,000 listens, and it seemed near-constant and obviously inflated listens using bots. The fake listener bots havebeen plaguing Spotify and other music streaming platforms well before the birth of today’s AI. The combination of AI music fraud and artificially inflated streams is a symptom of a larger streaming-era problem: platforms have made music far easier to distribute at the cost of authenticity. Distorted streams, royalties, and artist visibility are plaguing smaller artists who already have to fight to be seen and heard. So what are the major industry players willing to do about it?

 

Meta’s Newest AI Tool Is Using Your Instagram Photos Without Permission
Meta has launched a new AI generator, available for free through the Meta AI app, as well as on Instagram Stories and WhatsApp. It’s already a problem.  Worse still, Meta policy states that “people may be able to create content with your Instagram content using AI features at Meta,” and that users “will not be notified about content created using AI features at Meta.” However, Meta claims that users “have control” over this feature, stating that there are settings to disable this kind of use of one’s pictures—but it’s clearly an “opt-out” situation rather than an “opt-in.” Meta is launching a slew of Muse-powered AI effects for Instagram Stories, including customizable filters that can be used to modify existing photos. The company also teased Muse Video, an AI video generator, which is “already in development,” but information on that tool is currently scarce.Meta announced the launch of its new AI image generator, Muse Image, built by its dedicated AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs. The tool is now available for free via the Meta AI app, as well as on Instagram Stories and WhatsApp.  Muse is mostly the same as other AI image generators on the market; it comes with a variety of preset image prompts to help users “spark ideas.” However, as TechCrunch points out, the model is already causing problems.

 

Warner Music Hits Back Hard at the American Federation of Musicians’ AI Lawsuit
Warner Music Group (WMG) is officially looking to toss the breach of contract lawsuit filed against it by the AFM, maintaining, among other things, that the agreement at the case’s center “does not cover AI licenses.” WMG recently shed light on its dismissal arguments when requesting a related pre-motion conference. As first reported by DMN, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) in June accused the major label (and Universal Music) of failing to cut its members in on Suno and Udio licensing revenue.  In the plaintiff’s view, each of those pacts constitutes a “new use” under the relevant Sound Recording Labor Agreement (SRLA) – meaning that the AFM musicians who contributed to the licensed recordings are purportedly entitled to a piece of the gen AI pie. Now, Warner Music has made clear that it’s on a decidedly different page. Ahead of an anticipated motion to dismiss, the major told the court that “Warner Music Group Corp. is not a signatory to the SRLA, does not itself own copyrights, was not a plaintiff in the copyright infringement lawsuits against Suno and Udio, and thus does not have licenses with Suno or Udio.”  “To the extent AFM seeks to assert a breach of contract, it is not against Warner Music Group Corp. That is alone enough to dismiss the complaint as to Warner,” the pre-motion letter reads. Time will tell whether Warner Music’s dismissal push is effective – though even if the defendant wins in the courtroom, a PR victory could prove elusive.

 

This Isn’t Just Copyright—It’s Trade Discrimination Against American Creators
On July 8, an unusually broad coalition representing virtually every corner of the American music industry—including performers, musicians, independent labels, collecting societies, unions, songwriters’ organizations, managers, and the Recording Academy—sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer warning that the European Commission has indicated it may consider legislation that could use this gap in U.S. law as the basis for reducing or denying royalties to American performers and record companies in Europe. According to the coalition, nearly $300 million in annual royalties could be at risk if Europe abandons the longstanding principle of national treatment in favor of what proponents call “material reciprocity,” the latest mercantilist dodge. That makes this story about far more than royalties for broadcasts (“neighboring rights”). It is about whether a longstanding defect in U.S. copyright law is beginning to produce real economic consequences for American creators overseas—and why organizations that rarely agree have united to ask the United States government to respond and protect American creators. The music industry has long viewed copyright disputes primarily through the lens of intellectual property. This coalition letter recognizes that international copyright rules increasingly function as trade rules as well. Decisions made in Brussels can directly affect the income of American creators and the competitiveness of American cultural exports. 

 

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.