You open up TikTok or Instagram. The first video is a creator dancing to “Lush Life” by Zara Larsson. The next one is an influencer promoting a startup mattress brand, set to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” After that, it’s Kylie Jenner lip-syncing to “Pretty Little Baby” by Connie Francis. Then it’s your favorite NCAA team, using AC/DC’s “Back in Black” in a hype video.

The creators of each of those videos pulled their music from TikTok or Instagram’s vast song libraries, which make it easy for modern social media users to add fully-licensed tracks to their posts. But only some of them were actually allowed to do so.

– Bill Donahue, Billboard

In the wake of yesterday’s news that the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation will proceed to trial next month, the company has announced a record-setting year of significant growth, with total revenue of $25.2 billion, operating income of $1.3 billion and adjusted operating income of $2.37 billion.

According to the company’s year-end report, overall revenue for 2025 topped $25.2 billion, following a surge in Q4 revenue to $6.3 billion, up 11 percent from 2024’s Q4 revenue of $5.7 billion. Overall revenue saw a nine percent increase over 2024’s $23.2 billion — a sizable boost that signals post-pandemic growth hasn’t slowed to a crawl, even though it’s a far cry from the recent unicorn years.

– Steven J. Horowitz, Variety

Virgin Music Group, the independent-distribution and artist-services division of Universal Music Group, has announced the completion of its $775 million acquisition of Downtown Music Holdings LLC, one of the largest artist-services companies in the world.

– Jem Aswad, Variety

Ever since musicians and artists have been online it’s been a hope and dream to have a song go viral. Yeah, it sounds great to blow up overnight, but the problem is, it hardly ever happens. That’s now been quantified at about a 1.1% chance, according to a new report by Duetti.

For its Music Economics Report, the company looked at over 6 million tracks over the course of 2025 and found that not only was it difficult to go viral, but it was even harder to sustain any long-term success.

Indeed only 0.11% of tracks sustained any streams past 6 months. And this was with artists that were actually making money from streaming (anywhere from $100 to $350k annually).

– Bobby Owsinski

Every year, Billboard‘s Women in Music Awards celebrate women in the industry who made some of the biggest strides of the past 12 months — and that’s exactly why in 2026, Teyana Taylor, Tate McRae, Ella Langley, Kehlani, Laufey and Zara Larsson have all made the latest honorees list.

This year’s Visionary Award will go to singer/songwriter and One Battle After Another actress Teyana Taylor, while Gen-Z Canadian pop star Tate McRae will receive the Hitmaker Award and Alabama country singer Ella Langley will take home the Powerhouse Award. All three ladies are in the midst of major career years, with Taylor earning a Grammy nod in November for her album Escape Room before winning a Golden Globe and earning an Oscar nomination this past January, and McRae and Langley scoring their first-ever Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hits in the past year (for “What I Want” with Morgan Wallen and “Choosin’ Texas,” respectively).

-Hannah Dailey, Billboard

A coalition of artist representatives has published an open letter calling on the music community to reject AI music generator Suno.

In an open letter titled ‘Say No to Suno’, the artist reps described the company as a “brazen smash and grab” platform, accusing it of using “unauthorized AI platform machinery trained on human artists’ work”.

Published Monday (February 23) on the Music Technology Policy blog, the letter was signed by figures including Ron Gubitz, Executive Director of the Music Artist Coalition; Helienne Lindvall, songwriter and President of the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance; and Chris Castle of the Artist Rights Institute.

– Murray Stassen, Music Business Worldwide

No more TED talks, daddy! Ex-Merlin CEO Jeremy Sirota has moved to the dark side and joined one of the very companies he railed against. Having defended Merlin members against the predations of big tech, Sirota has signed up as big cheese of all things commercial at music scraping slop factory Suno.

Jeremy Sirota – who spent six years as CEO of Merlin, the organisation representing 30,000 independent labels, a core purpose of which is to protect the rights and revenues of indie labels and artists – has been announced as Chief Commercial Officer of Suno, the generative AI music company currently valued at $2.45 billion.

That valuation, it should be noted, was largely achieved by Suno training its generative AI model on tens of millions of copyright protected recordings scraped from the internet without permission – a dataset that almost certainly included the music of Merlin’s members.

– Sam Taylor, Complete Music Update