THE INDUSTRY
Copyright rulings, Content ID, label drama, and what the machine age actually means for anyone releasing music. The analysis, minus the panic.
Gender in Music: Why the Live Music Industry Keeps Underselling Its Most Reliable Audience
Here is a question you have probably asked yourself standing at the back of your own room at 9pm on a Friday: when six people show up together on one set of tickets, who actually decided they were…
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Music Licensing in the APAC Market: How the Major Labels Are Actually Buying In
A label executive told me last year that "winning APAC" meant signing the next BTS. That is the loud version of the story, and it is mostly wrong.
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Before You Sign: The OnlyFans Management Trap Emerging Musicians Keep Walking Into
The message usually shows up the week your numbers move. A track gets picked up on a playlist, a clip clears a few hundred thousand views, and a stranger slides into your inbox calling himself a…
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When Music Biopic Box Office Records Move Catalog Value: What a Theatrical Release Really Buys
A music biopic can clear nine figures at the global box office and still hand most of its lasting value to a company whose name never appears on the poster.
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What Spotify International Expansion Means for Your Royalties (and Your AI Tracks)
A producer I know shipped an instrumental hip-hop loop pack last year, nothing fancy, a detuned Rhodes over a broken 808 at 84 BPM. His top earning region wasn't Los Angeles or London.
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AI Music Re-Recording Could Hand Catalogue Power Back to Artists — Or Just Move the Money Around
Boy George, by most accounts, should hate this. He is the frontman of an act whose biggest songs are decades old, the kind of artist you would expect to treat a machine singing his catalogue as theft…
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The Brexit Impact on the Music Industry Was Never About One Big Wall — It's About Forty Small Ones
The damage was never a wall. A wall you can see, cost, and campaign against. What landed on touring musicians after Brexit is harder to photograph: not one barrier but a few dozen small ones, stacked…
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Voice Trademark Protection: What the New Filings Actually Buy an Artist
Last week I spent an afternoon trying to clone a voice you'd recognize in two syllables. I won't name the singer, but the source was four minutes of clean a cappella, 48kHz, no reverb tail to confuse…
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Celebrity Philanthropy and the Grassroots Promise: Where the Conventional Wisdom Holds Up and Where It Cracks
There is a sentence that shows up in nearly every celebrity foundation story, usually in the second paragraph, usually unchallenged: the money goes to grassroots organizations.
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The Napster Fraud Case and the $3 Billion That Wasn't There
A number ran through every headline about Napster's reinvention: $3 billion. That was the figure attached to the investor backing Infinite Reality, the company that bought the Napster brand in 2025…
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Gen Z Consumer Behavior Isn't One Audience — Here's What That Means for Your Playlist Strategy
A label marketing lead I know spent most of a quarter building a single "Gen Z" playlist partnership.
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Where AI Music Generation Gets Its Sound: A Short History of a Borrowed Library
A figure-skating routine goes viral. The music underneath sounds like a song you half-remember — the hook lands where you expect, the vocal grain is familiar, the chord turn at the bridge is the one…
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