The verdict is in: Live Nation in the US is an illegal monopoly that has exploited its market dominance to rip off music fans. That’s the conclusion of the jury at the end of the big antitrust trial in which lawyers representing 33 US states accused Live Nation and its Ticketmaster division of anticompetitive conduct.
It’s a “historic and resounding victory for artists, fans and the venues that support them”, according to Rob Bonta, Attorney General of California, one of the states involved in the litigation.
It also means Live Nation will now have to pay significant damages. Quite how significant remains to be seen, though the jury ruled that Live Nation was overcharging certain customers $1.72 per ticket over five years, and that applies to an awful lot of tickets.
But beyond the damages, there are other matters to consider.

– Chris Cooke, Complete Music Update

Last September, Spotify announced a series of measures relating to AI music, spam and deepfakes. They included supporting – and, indeed, revealing for the first time – a new industry standard for music credits to make it clear how and when AI is used in music tracks. Now Spotify has provided an update on the latter plan. “Starting today, we’re launching a beta feature that allows artists to share how they’ve used AI in their music,” the company announced yesterday.

– Stuart Dredge, Music Ally

The volume of fully AI-generated music being uploaded to Deezer has surged again – with the Paris-headquartered streaming service now receiving nearly 75,000 synthetic tracks every day.
That’s over 2 million AI tracks hitting the platform each month, and it means fully AI-generated music now accounts for more than 44% of all new tracks delivered to Deezer daily, according to the company.

– Murray Stassen, Music Business Worldwide

What makes music streaming services distinct from one another? In the early years, the answer was easier. Back then, exclusive releases were common. Jay-Z, for example, made that a core reason to subscribe to Tidal. Apple Music had its own special drops, including Frank Ocean‘s Endless, the visual album he used as a smart tool to quickly fulfill his label contract before dropping the self-released Blonde, also on Apple Music, one day later.

Still, it remains a never-ending challenge for music streamers to find ways to stand out from the pack. On this week’s episode of Billboard’s On the Record podcast, vp of Apple Music, Apple TV+, Sports and Beats Oliver Schusser joins to talk about why he thinks Apple Music is unlike any other service.

– Kristin Robinson, Billboard

Spotify has started testing a feature that shows whether artificial intelligence was used in making a song — but the tags only appear when an artist chooses to add them.
The ‘AI Credits’ feature, currently in beta, was quietly disclosed within Spotify’s updated Support page. It shows AI contributions within the song credits section of Spotify’s mobile app. The move comes in response to growing pressure over AI-generated content on streaming platforms.
Listeners can see whether AI played a role in certain elements of a track, such as lyrics, vocals, instrumentals, or production. Spotify noted that “AI credits show how AI contributed to the song, not that the entire track is AI-generated.”

– Mandy Dalugdug, Music Business Worldwide

Multi-dimensionality in music – that is, engaging in ways beyond simply listening to a song – has existed for decades. In the vinyl era, fans could read liner notes and look at album artwork while listening. Meanwhile, in the CD era, liner notes still existed (albeit in a smaller form) for listeners to engage more deeply with an album, and labels briefly experimented with “enhanced CDs” as a way to provide extra content like videos and photos digitally with a CD purchase.
In the streaming era, however, extramusical content like liner notes was largely retired as music became solely an auditory activity. As a generation of fans who grew up with streaming matures, you’d be forgiven for thinking that music is destined to stay this way – something that listeners turn on and then forget about. However, the popularity of vinyl and other physical music products among younger consumers shows that the desire for multi-dimensionality is not dead.

– Olivia Jones, MIDiA