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!

Despite overall revenue growth and strong demand in the live music industry in 2025, benefits are not being felt across the board.The aftershock of the pandemic has continued to reverberate, and is likely a significant cause of historically low ticket sales, increasingly restrictive visa regulations (in the US, expenses have almost quadrupled) and mounting touring costs affecting artists.

– Sonia Chien, Music Ally

If you’ll excuse us for borrowing a popular shaving-ads slogan from the 1980s: major labels like independent music so much, they’re buying the companies!
Majors buying independent labels and distributors is not a new trend, but the tensions it sparks within the music industry feel more heightened than ever before in 2025, with Universal Music Group’s planned acquisition of Downtown Music Holdings at the heart of it all.

– Stuart Dredge, Music Ally

There were reports in January that tensions were building between the music industry and Napster over unpaid royalty bills, with a number of record labels and music distributors rumoured to be considering pulling their tracks from the streaming platform. However, it’s possible that Infinite Reality’s purchase of Napster in March initially bought the company a little more time to make those payments.

– Kaya Robertson, Complete Music Update

In a new collaborative effort to help the music industry get a handle on managing vinyl inventory, the Vinyl Alliance and Luminate are partnering on an initiative through which they will collect data on how many vinyl records are being pressed at vinyl plants around the globe.
The move was announced at the Record Store Day Summer Camp held last week in New Orleans, where more than 450 record store owners, label and distribution executives, and other companies involved in physical music convened to discuss the state of the business.

– Ed Christman, Billboard

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.

– Glenn Peoples, Elizabeth Dilts Marshall, Billboard