One hundred and fifty thousand a day
Uploads to streaming services have reached a rate no audience can absorb. A fifth of everything already there was streamed exactly zero times last year.
SEPTEMBER 18, 2026
TopicRights
Universal sues the pipe, not the song
The complaint against DistroKid says it has no quarrel with disclosed AI music. Its target is the distributor that, by one industry count, carried three-quarters of the AI tracks sent to the charts.
SEPTEMBER 16, 2026
The ticket was always underpriced
For forty years the gap between face value and what people would pay went to brokers. Dynamic pricing is an argument about who collects it.
SEPTEMBER 14, 2026
Dynamic pricing puts a toll booth on affection
A price that rises with how much you want the thing is not a market discovering value. It is a meter attached to devotion.
SEPTEMBER 14, 2026
Therapy reaches the tours that cannot afford it
Large tours have carried therapists for years. A £272,000 fund is an attempt to extend that to the smaller tours where the pressure is identical and the budget is not.
SEPTEMBER 14, 2026
At thirty, an independent label sells curation
Stones Throw marks three decades with a festival, two listening bars and a radio show. In a market with more music than anyone can hear, the product is judgement.
SEPTEMBER 14, 2026
A tenth of streams are not real
The recorded music industry is tightening distribution rules as generative tools make fake songs and fake listening cheap. Executives put the fraudulent share of streams at close to one in ten.
SEPTEMBER 14, 2026
The lyric sheet became the engagement surface
A words-on-screen feature that began as a CD booklet is now where streaming services measure whether a listener is paying attention.
SEPTEMBER 13, 2026
Universal stops litigating and starts licensing
A multi-year partnership with ElevenLabs would let listeners remix catalogue music, days after a rival AI company shipped a model trained on major-label material with permission.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2026