There’s an important type of royalty owed to songwriters in the United States that operates differently than any other, and the music industry’s latest battle over it began on Monday (Oct. 5). Don’t expect the fight to be a short one.

The royalty, called a “mechanical,” is owed to musicmakers when their songs are reproduced into a different medium. The term dates back to the days before recorded music existed, when songs were reproduced onto a cylindrical roll for a player piano to deliver music on demand.

– Kristin Robinson, Billboard

A US federal appeals court has rejected a fair use defense over the use of copyrighted material to train an artificial intelligence model.

The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled for Thomson Reuters and against AI legal research company ROSS Intelligence on September 29, in an opinion filed under seal and made public the following day.

The case turned on Westlaw headnotes: the short editorial summaries of the points of law in a court ruling, written by Thomson Reuters attorney-editors and printed above the opinion itself. ROSS used them to build the training data for a rival legal search engine.

– Murray Stassen, Music Business Worldwide

It’s a tough time to be a publicly traded music company.

Often the bellwether for the music industry, Universal Music Group’s (UMG) stock is down nearly 35% so far in 2026, trading at 14.27 euros ($16.20). Though an entirely different kind of music company, Spotify’s stock is also down — 15% to $487.38 per share — while another publicly traded major, Warner Music Group, has seen its share price decline by around 9% to $27.61, all as of Sept. 30.

Music companies are not the only publicly traded media and entertainment outfits experiencing a down year: Disney’s stock is down 6%, Comcast is down 21% and Netflix is down 23.5%. But UMG’s sharp 25% one-day share price decline on July 31 following its first-half earnings results shows investors’ broad unease with music stocks, financial analysts say.

– Elizabeth Dilts Marshall, Billboard

The music industry has welcomed the imprisonment of Michael Smith, the streaming fraudster who made millions by uploading AI-generated tracks to digital music platforms and then artificially boosting streams of that music.
It’s the first conviction of a streaming fraudster in the US and one of the first worldwide. He was yesterday sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Although prosecutors were pushing for a custodial sentence closer to four years, it’s still significant that Smith will serve jail time.

Music industry groups, including the Music Fights Fraud Alliance, backed the prosecution in arguing that a custodial sentence was necessary in this high profile case. In a submission to the court, MFFA stressed that there is currently a “perceived lack of a legal risk” when it comes to stream manipulation, making people more likely to pursue this kind of fraud.

– Chris Cooke, CMU

The US Copyright Office (USCO) has launched a public inquiry into music streaming fraud.

The Office published a notice of inquiry in the Federal Register on Wednesday (October 7), seeking information on how streaming fraud is carried out, its economic impact, and its relationship to AI-generated music.

Written comments are due by November 23, with reply comments due by December 21.

The inquiry follows a request from Scott Fitzgerald, the Republican US Representative for Wisconsin’s 5th District, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee.

His letter to the USCO, dated May 21, opens by asking it to “examine the contributory effects of artificial intelligence (AI) in music streaming fraud, and the resulting effect on the music industry.”

-Murray Stassen, Music Business Worldwide