Is Spotify spreading its royalty pool across too many artists?
One music industry strategist thinks so, arguing in a provocative new essay that the streaming giant should implement a 250,000 monthly listener threshold to concentrate payments among professional musicians who can earn a sustainable living.
The proposal comes as Spotify moves in the opposite direction for podcasters, slashing its Partner Program eligibility requirements by half this week to make it easier for video creators to start earning money.

– Murray Stassen, Music Business Worldwide

A year ago in this same column, I made some good calls, including predicting that the U.S. TikTok deal timeline would go into overtime and concert ticket prices would continue to rise. I also whiffed on a few things, including a prediction that the Trump administration would settle the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Live Nation. So: A little. In fairness, though, Trump doesn’t do predictable. As recently as late-2025 — it feels like last week because it is! — he hadn’t even said anything about running Venezuela.
By next year, AI might be writing this column. For now, though, here are 10 predictions for the music business in 2026.

– Robert Levine, Billboard

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.

– Olivia Shalhoup, Forbes

With the Christmas break now well and truly over and forgotten, here are five key developments in the music business since the last CMU Daily of 2025, including X suing the music publishers, a judge dismissing Salt N Pepa’s UMG lawsuit, Lucian Grainge’s memo, and TikTok and Spotify developments

– Chris Cooke, Complete Music Update

Even the youngest music publishing catalogs are landing valuations of up to 9.8 times net revenue, with Latin music catalogs expected to be among the most in-demand, according to a new survey of independent sell-side parties released Monday by the catalog investment firm Duetti.
Called the Music Finance Index, the report is a semiannual study polling independent artists, managers, lawyers and their teams about their impressions of the current market for music catalog valuations and investor interest. The study was the result of a collaboration with Billboard, which contributed to shaping the survey questions and sourcing contributors for the nearly 60-person panel. The report can be viewed in full on Duetti’s website.

– Elizabeth Dilts Marshall, Billboard

A federal appeals court issued a first-of-its-kind ruling that says musicians can enforce U.S. copyright termination rules across the globe, adopting a novel legal theory that record labels and publishers have warned will disrupt “a half-century of settled industry norms.”
Upholding a lower court decision last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled Monday (Jan. 12) that songwriter Cyril Vetter could win back full global copyright ownership of the 1963 rock classic “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” from publisher Resnik Music Group.
What makes the ruling notable is the overseas reach. Termination, a crucial copyright provision that allows authors to recapture their rights decades after they sold them away, has only ever applied to American copyrights and had no effect on foreign countries. But the appeals court said that was not how Congress intended termination to work.

– Bill Donahue, Billboard

Bandcamp has built its entire brand around serving artists. And, with the artist furor over AI growing every day, it’s no surprise that the company has decided to take a stand against it. In a Reddit post, Bandcamp announced that AI-generated content would not be permitted on the platform and would be subject to removal.
The guidelines leave little room for interpretation. In the post, the company says that “Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.” It also prohibits using AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles, similar to a rule implemented by Spotify in September. The support team also encourages people to use the site’s reporting tool to flag any music that “appears to be made entirely or with heavy reliance on generative AI.”

– Terrence O’Brien, The Verge