With the end of 2025 in sight, Billboard has been publishing roundups of the biggest stories of the year across multiple arenas. Now, in this central hub, you can find all of those stories in one place.
Since January, every sphere of the business has been subject to a whirlwind of major developments. At record labels, the biggest story came with the majors’ lawsuits against AI music platforms Suno and Udio in June — followed by settlements between several of those parties in the fall. In related news, a small handful of AI-assisted artists gained traction, most notably Xania Monet, who signed a multi-million-dollar record deal with Hallwood Media in September while landing on multiple Billboard charts.

– Chris Eggertsen, Billboard

IMPF, the global organisation for independent music publishers, has distributed a set of key principles that it wants songwriter collecting societies to embrace as they enter into licensing negotiations with AI companies. It follows last week’s statement in which the IMPF urged its own members to vow to never enter into any AI licensing deals that do not value song rights and recording rights equally.
The indie publishers are becoming much more vocal about the licensing of AI platforms and models as the majors start to announce licensing deals with companies like Udio and Suno.

– Chris Cooke, Complete Music Update

Merriam-Webster has settled on a word that represents 2025 — and that word is “slop.” The dictionary-maker defines “slop” as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,” something that many people have become familiar with as AI-generated content permeates the internet.

– Emma Roth, The Verge

Music Ally has been writing about the intersection of AI and music for 11 years now: our first story was about early AI-music startup Jukedeck winning a startups prize in December 2014.
For several years it felt like a niche topic, but in 2025 it’s been the big story for the music industry. Except it’s not just one story: it’s a host of interwoven trends, deals, opportunities, anxieties, legal questions and controversies. Not to mention philosophical and often existential anxieties about AI’s impact on human musicians.
What could be more human than to try to make sense of it all using the alphabet? Here’s our look-back at the key talking points around AI and music in 2025, with a view to what might happen next in 2026.

– Stuart Dredge, Music Ally

Music Ally has been writing about the intersection of AI and music for 11 years now: our first story was about early AI-music startup Jukedeck winning a startups prize in December 2014.
For several years it felt like a niche topic, but in 2025 it’s been the big story for the music industry. Except it’s not just one story: it’s a host of interwoven trends, deals, opportunities, anxieties, legal questions and controversies. Not to mention philosophical and often existential anxieties about AI’s impact on human musicians.
What could be more human than to try to make sense of it all using the alphabet? Here’s the second part of our look-back at the key talking points around AI and music in 2025, with a view to what might happen next in 2026.

– Stuart Dredge, Music Ally

2025 is drawing to a close. Looking back through the year’s updates and events, it’s been a busy one. The major highlights: entertainment’s relationship with AI has changed dramatically, and there were a number of major mergers and acquisitions, including Netflix purchasing Warner Bros. and a consortium of financial interests buying EA.
Underpinning this, however, have been some subtler shifts. Culture is both homogenising and fragmenting, with the mainstream looking increasingly uniform, but the proliferation of niche scenes in unexpected places booming. User sentiment has also shifted negatively, from artists quitting Spotify to consumers cutting down screentime. Creativity is being promoted across the board, from Sora 2 to Adobe’s new tools suite, yet still remains a niche activity as social platforms promoting UGC become places to be passively entertained, not to bare the goings-on of ones’ personal life.

– Hanna Kahlert, MIDiA

Independent music publishers generated €2.7 billion globally in 2024, representing a 5.1% increase year-on-year.
The figure comes from the latest edition of IMPF’s Global Market View, which has just been published and is available here. Music publishing figures generally take longer to collate due to time lags in payments, although the IMPF has reported the 2024 figures almost four months earlier than the prior year.
The report also confirms that the collective global market share of the independent music publishing community held firm at 26.3% in 2024, meaning the sector remains larger than any individual major.

– Andre Paine, Music Week

Hypebot’s Future Predictions series is back. Join us as we ask the music industry’s expert analysts what they think might unfold in the world of music in 2026.
We asked Jay if he had any predictions for the music industry in 2026. Here’s what he had to say:

– Jeremy Young, Hypebot

As 2025 comes to a close, it’s time to take stock and reflect, but also to begin turning our collective attention to what comes next. In 2026, a number of long-simmering situations in the music business may finally come to a head, including multiple long-running lawsuits, pending technological changes, major acquisitions and negotiations that have dragged on and are nearing a conclusion.
So, as 2026 approaches, here are 14 questions for the music business that will be addressed and decided in the next year.

– Dan Rys, Kristin Robinson, Elizabeth Dilts Marshall, Ed Christman, Bill Donahue, Rachel Scharf, Melinda Newman, Gail Mitchell, Katie Bain, Steve Knopper, Billboard

The value of global music copyright has nearly doubled over the past decade, reaching an all-time high of $47.2 billion in 2024, according to a study conducted by Pivot Economics founder and former Spotify chief economist Will Page. That’s up from some $25 billion in 2014, and encompasses revenue from record labels, publishing and songwriting around the world, showcasing the value of musical works on a global basis.
Page’s analysis comes with the help of IFPI, CISAC and ICMP, as well as a MiDIA survey of over 250 publishers and direct contributions from rights holders and streamers, according to his paper.

– Dan Rys, Billboard