Our clients Angry Mob Music, LyricFind, SourceAudio, and Symphonic Distribution have put together incredibly insightful and timely panels to vote on for SXSW and you can view all of them in one place on our website. Don’t forget to vote by visiting the link below each panel and clicking the heart next to the title to let the organizers know you want to see it!

Planas emphasised WIN’s determination to continue fighting its corner. “Independents must have full market access and the best terms available; our copyrights must be respected and fairly remunerated,” she wrote. “We will always speak out against anything that undermines these principles.”

– Stuart Dredge, Music Ally

The FTC has sued a ticket touting company that uses dubious tactics to access tickets, including using 49 Ticketmaster accounts to buy 273 tickets for one Taylor Swift show that had a six-tickets-per-person limit. However, the accused business says its tactics are authorised by Ticketmaster

– Chris Cooke, Complete Music Update

According to court filings, the new deal will see rates paid by radio stations jump from 1.78 percent of revenue under the old agreement to 2.14 percent, then slowly increase to 2.20 percent by the end of the term. The deal is retroactive to January 2022 and will run until January 2029.

– Bill Donahue, Billboard

Hours after rival BMI announced it had reached such a deal with RMLC, ASCAP said that it, too, had settled its own parallel lawsuit against the radio group. Like BMI’s statement, the announcement from ASCAP said the deal had secured substantially higher rates for songwriters and publishers.

– Bill Donahue, Billboard

The only way a new recording outputted by the Suno AI “can infringe the rights in a pre-existing one”, it writes, “is if it borrows the actual sounds of the original”. And that, it insists, “is not how Suno’s tool works at all”, adding that Justice already knows this.
In other words, Suno’s claim is that it doesn’t generate new music by sampling and stitching together elements of songs or recordings in its training dataset. Instead, its AI analyses the music it has been trained on, and learns how to compose and produce new works.

– Chris Cooke, Complete Music Update

With streaming revenues now representing close to three quarters of the recorded music market (excluding expanded rights), there is clearly an overriding incentive to fix the problem. Simply throwing in the towel and waiting for whatever comes next would hurt both creators and rightsholders. The challenges come from all directions and with different causes (major rightsholders feeling investor pressure; artists struggling to cut through the clutter; royalties not adding up for too many professional artists; music becoming commodified). But the problem is that the people underpinning the entire edifice – consumers – do not have a problem. And that is what needs most attention.

– Mark Mulligan, MiDIA Research

The only sure thing in this earnings season is unpredictability. While the global economy remains resilient in the face of U.S. tariffs, and U.S. gross domestic product grew 3% in Q2, stocks took a hit from a weak U.S. jobs report on Aug. 1, and some experts believe a constant drip, drip, drip of negative developments will cause “death by a thousand cuts.”
Music companies’ early results also offered mixed signals.

– Daniel Tencer, Music Business Worldwide