Now, Warner Music Group has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against US shoe retailer DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse and parent company Designer Brands Inc, accusing DSW of having “misappropriated over two hundred” of Warner’s recordings and compositions in TikTok and Instagram posts and via paid partnerships with social media influencers.

Warner is seeking statutory damages up to the maximum amount of $150,000 per infringed musical work. With DSW alleged to have infringed over 200 tracks, the damages sought could exceed $30 million.

– Murray Stassen, Music Business Worldwide

On Friday (May 2), a reprieve from the bad news arrived in the form of a better-than-expected jobs report. And judging from comments during this week’s earnings calls, many music companies remain confident that their businesses will weather whatever storms develop in 2025.

“We haven’t felt [a pullback] at all yet,” Rapino said. Whether it’s a festival on-sale, a new tour or a standalone concert, Live Nation has seen “complete sell-through” and “strong demand” that surpasses 2024’s record numbers, he added: “So, we haven’t seen a consumer pullback in any genre, club, theater, stadium [or] amphitheater.”

– Glen Peoples, Billboard

The music industry is focusing on the wrong layer of the problem. The central debate around generative AI is framed in terms of outputs, who owns a song, who gets credited if a melody sounds similar. But generative AI doesn’t work like human inspiration. These systems are not inspired by individual songs; they’re trained on massive datasets, ingesting thousands or millions of tracks to learn musical patterns, structures, and styles.

This means that every output is a reflection of everything the model has been trained on, not a direct copy of one input, but a statistical remix of all prior ingestion. Licensing one song here and there after the model is built misses the point entirely. The damage happens during training, not when an output is published.

– Virginie Berger, Guest Post for Music Ally

Five years ago, fitness companies looked like the next big thing for music rights owners as the onset of the COVID-19 lockdown turned Peloton, the maker of high-tech stationary bicycles and treadmills, into a household name and the leader in a suddenly hot connected fitness market.

Peloton’s founder, John Foley, had created an online version of music-driven, brick-and-mortar studios such as SoulCycle. Unlike the staid strength and cardio products of earlier years, the new breed of bikes and treadmills manufactured by the company were internet-ready and could stream live or pre-recorded workouts. Other startups took notice, with competitors like Tonal and Hydrow vying for market share.

– Glenn Peoples, Billboard

The US Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have jointly launched a public inquiry to identify “unfair and anticompetitive practices and conduct in the live concert and entertainment industry”.

The two government agencies are inviting members of the public to submit comments and information on “harmful practices and on potential regulation or legislation to protect consumers in the industry”.

– Murray Stassen, Music Business Worldwide

Streaming may be maturing from a revenue perspective but with two-tier (‘artist centric’) licensing and supremium, 2025 is set to be a year of transformative change in both product and business terms. While each of these initiatives were designed with clear objectives, it is not so much the immediate consequences but the second order consequences that warrant most attention. As is so often the case, it is the unintended knock-on effects of actions that will likely prove to be most impactful, for both the business and culture of music.

– Mark Mulligan, MIDIA