The CD is up fifty-nine per cent
American recorded music grew 6.9% in the first half. The fastest-growing format was the one the industry spent twenty years writing off.
SEPTEMBER 20, 2026
TopicStreaming
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
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
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
Paramount's defence: the market was invented
The studio's filing argues the states drew the markets to fit the case, and points out that the cinema chains the suit claims to protect are publicly in favour of the deal.
SEPTEMBER 13, 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
Producers ask governments to make streamers pay for local stories
A coalition of 23 industry groups used Toronto to argue that the reach of global platforms is displacing the commissions that domestic storytelling depends on.
SEPTEMBER 11, 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
The growth is somewhere else
Global recorded music grew again, and the fastest-growing markets are ones the industry's infrastructure was not built around.
SEPTEMBER 7, 2026
Half the uploads are machines
Generated tracks now arrive faster than human ones. The platforms' problem is not taste, it is that a share of the plays are fraudulent.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2026
Streaming learns to weight a play
For fifteen years every stream paid the same. The platforms are now deciding that some plays should count for more, and the arguments are about who loses.
SEPTEMBER 4, 2026
The window reopens, slowly
Studios spent years arguing that exclusivity was dead weight. They are now lengthening it, having found the downstream numbers disagreed.
AUGUST 16, 2026
Old songs are winning streaming, and it's not nostalgia alone
Catalog music dominates listening because the platforms, the playlists, and the economics all bend toward the proven.
JULY 20, 2026