Spotify’s next big step into ticketing is rolling out. ‘Reserved’ was announced last month at Spotify’s investor day in New York, and is now live for its premium subscribers in the US. As we explained then, it will see Spotify reserving two tickets for partner artists’ “most dedicated fans” then send emails and push-notifications inviting them to complete the purchase.

US-based non-profit The Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) has published a report titled ‘Profiting from Hate Music: The Role of YouTube, Meta, Spotify and Apple Music in Hosting and Monetizing India’s Hate Music Industry’. The report has been co-written by Kunal Purohit, the author of the book ‘H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars’, which was published in 2023 and documented the rapid growth of the genre in India.

If you’re looking at how major labels are reshaping themselves for the next era, Rebecca Allen is one of the best primary sources.

Having built one of YouTube’s largest music-channel network, Andre Benz sold it to Create Music Group in 2022 then launched Broke Records.

Despite the best efforts of industry bodies like the IFPI – and its efforts have been strenuous – there are still many dodgy companies and websites offering ways to buy likes, followers and streams for artists. They’re all best avoided. SoundCloud wants to help its community of artists plot an ethical path through the promotional waters. It has just named…

The Music Climate Pact (MCP) has released an annual report detailing actions taken by participating labels towards reducing carbon emissions.

Spotify is rolling out the ability for artists to upload full-length videos to its service – enhancing its competition with YouTube.

Instagram’s Threads app raced to 100 million users in its first month after launch in July 2023. Now it has 500 million.

Music marketing-tech company Ctrl+Reach has published a report analysing wider trends in the music industry's advertising spending.

Swsh is the latest superfan-focused music startup, but its focus is on a specific aspect of fandom: live experiences.

There isn’t an official emoji for vinyl, despite the format being nearly two decades into its sales revival. But that could change...

By the end of this year, it’s quite possible that there will be more than one billion music subscribers globally.

It’s very clear that some AI-music services have trained their models on huge datasets of commercial music. But which songs exactly? That’s the question at the heart of lawsuits against Suno and Udio, and it’s also the subject of a fascinating investigation by The Atlantic’s ‘AI Watchdog’ project.

Universal Music Group’s global expansion of its Def Jam label continues, following previous launches in South-East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, India, Sweden and China. Where to next? Of all the markets, in all the towns, in all the world, it’s launched in Casablanca with Def Jam Recordings North Africa. Its focus will be on the wider Maghreb region – the western part of North Africa that includes Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and Mauritania.

By Con Raso, CEO and founder of music cloud platform Tuned Global.Streaming executives from SoundCloud, Audiomack, and Tuned Global say the future of music platforms lies in community, local scenes – and giving fans meaningful ways to participate, create, and shape what comes next. Streaming has been the dominant format for music consumption for more than a decade, and in that time, the focus of many conversations in the industry has largely centered on catalogue size, subscriber growth, and personalisation algorithms.

Suno is preparing to launch its first model based on music licensed from rightsholders: something its CEO Mikey Shulman trailed in his recent announcement of the company’s $400m funding round.

Thus far, AI giant Anthropic’s main interaction with the music industry has been a legal battle with publishers, who are suing it for copyright infringement of their lyrics. More positively, Anthropic has worked with streaming services Spotify and Melon to integrate them into its Claude chatbot. But now, a surprise: it has quietly got into the ‘lo-fi music on YouTube’ space too.

Label and live music company Jazz Is Dead is up to something interesting: and it’s all about trying to protect the human musicians who make jazz (and other genres) in the face of AI. It has launched an initiative called ‘Played By Humans’ that “verifies human artistry in an AI age with an authentication stamp delivered through our detection tool”.

Muse Group is the parent firm of brands and companies including Ultimate Guitar, Hal Leonard, MuseScore and Audacity among others: a key company in the music-education and tech space. Its acquisition of Hal Leonard in December 2023 was backed by funding from private-equity firm Francisco Partners. Two and a half years later, the latter is exiting the investment – although it’s all on friendly terms.

Deezer continues to lean in hard to its technology for detecting AI-generated music – and then generating headlines about its scale. The latest example being an ‘AI music detector’ for people’s playlists, even if they use rival streaming services. Pitched with the question “how much AI music is there in your playlists?” it encourages people to use its existing TuneMyMusic-powered playlist-transfer feature to import playlists from a range of other services, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music and SoundCloud.

We’ve seen a growing slate of deals between major labels and AI-music companies that include the former’s publishing arms. Now US music-publishers body the NMPA has announced two of its own agreements: with Udio and Klay. The deals were revealed by CEO David Israelite at the NMPA’s annual meeting yesterday (10 June) – and the Udio deal has one notable term.

Delhi-headquartered music distribution, publishing and marketing company Madverse Music Group has closed its first institutional funding round, led by Ahdritz Capital, the investment vehicle of entrepreneur and the founder-chairman of the Kobalt Music Group Willard Ahdritz. The round—through which Madverse has raised an undisclosed amount—also saw participation from Mohnish Sani and Suraj Sani from US-based SumoSan Ventures; Ashish Jain and Sidharth Kohli from Indian consulting firm 10X Global; and Vijay Sajjanhar from UAE-based investment company Marigold Capital.

What if you could use your knowledge of upcoming release schedules, quiet insider chats with artist teams, your skill at reading Chartmetric data – or anything else in the music business that you were pretty certain about – to place bets? For instance, if you were very sure that Taylor Swift will get the most streams on Spotify in June…

Warp is looking for a social-first creative to join our team in London, helping bring our Artists’ stories to life across digital platforms. You’ll be a creative all rounder and skilled in visual storytelling, bringing solid experience creating short form video, graphic design, motion graphics and imagery. Based within the Digital Communications team, you’ll work fluidly with other departments, including A&R, Streaming, Marketing and E-Commerce, delivering creative for social media, mailers, websites and beyond.

UK-based startup Cantilever has raised £250k of pre-seed funding from a group of 20 independent labels and individuals from those companies.

US-based musicians’ union the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) has launched a lawsuit against UMG and WMG over their AI deals.

Last week, Abbey Road REDD Labs presented its latest showcase of music-tech startups at SXSW London, in a ‘Studio Four’ event.

Acting in games – voice but also motion-capture and likeness – is a growing opportunity for actors. Tupac Shakur included, despite being dead.

Universal Music Group agreed to divest (sell) Downtown Music subsidiary Curve Royalty Systems. Now we know the buyers.

Two of the companies working on the infrastructure of digital music-marketing have announced a partnership: Feature·fm and SonoSuite.

The British music industry is mourning one of its most important pillars. Kanya King CBE, founder and CEO of the MOBO awards, died last week.

Universal Music Group has been making a number of moves in south-east Asia recently. The latest is a partnership with S1 in Thailand.

Tidal’s latest D2C move is a feature enabling artists to sell albums or individual tracks to their fans via its Tidal Upload offering.

Music-rights tech firm Chordal continues to build momentum for its ‘InstantClear’ pre-clearance licensing system.

It can be tough out there touring in 2026, but two new tools from Bandsintown and Laylo are aiming to help artists fill venues.

Collecting-societies body Cisac has been taking a prominent role in the AI policy debates. Its latest contribution is a declaration.

Universal Music Group rejected hedge-fund Pershing Square’s €55bn acquisition offer last week. But with the latter owning a 4.7% stake in the major label, what happens next? Well, what appears to be happening next is that Pershing Square is selling that stake. Bloomberg reported that the company plans to sell roughly 80.6m UMG shares for up to €18.62 each in an overnight placing.

Speculation about a monster funding round for AI-music firm Suno has been running rife in recent months, but yesterday the official announcement came: a $400m Series D round which Suno said valued the company at $5.4bn. This means Suno has more than doubled its valuation in little over six months, as in November 2025 it raised $250m at a valuation of $2.45bn.

Back in October 2024, veteran rap group 2 Live Crew won a legal battle over the termination rights for their recordings catalogue. They had faced off in court against label Lil Joe Records, which had acquired the catalogue in the mid-1990s. As we noted in our reporting at the time, the case hinged on whether termination rights – which in the US enable artists to regain ownership of their catalogue – still applied if a catalogue had been sold on.

Scott Farquhar became one of Australia’s first tech billionaires in 2015 when his company Atlassian went public, although he stepped down in 2024 to focus on his family, philanthropy and to “help further the technology industry globally”. He may not be a name that trips off the tongue of people who aren’t either Australian or keen followers of the project-management and software-development tolls industry.

Startup SonicEdge focuses on 'micro-sized speakers' for headphones, earbuds and hearing aids – small speakers with big audio quality.

Linear Festivals has been rethinking music festivals in India by booking artists to play concerts along public-transportation lines.

Berlin-based startup Neural Frames has built a platform for creating music videos using AI, and its annual run rate (ARR – a projection of annual earnings from its current performance) has just crossed $5m. The milestone comes as Neural Frames adds a significant name to its team. Musiio founder-turned-investor Hazel Savage has been appointed as a strategic advisor to the company, tasked with helping its expansion plans.

Eight years after it launched in India, Amazon Music is changing the way it does business in the country. The audio-streaming service, which was only available to subscribers of Amazon’s Prime loyalty programme, is now being sold as the stand-alone product Amazon Music Unlimited. Priced at Rs119 (approx. $1.25) per month for non-Prime members—and Rs99 (approx. $1.05) for Prime members—Amazon Music Unlimited will give subscribers access to ad-free listening and the ability to download tracks to hear offline.

Independent music-streaming service Nina Protocol is shutting down after five years after struggling to find "a path to sustainability".