The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC), the entity that collects mechanical royalties in the US, has announced it has distributed nearly $2.5 billion in royalties since it began operations three-and-a-half years ago. That’s up by roughly $1 billion in just the past year (The MLC reported in October 2023 that it had distributed $1.5bn in royalties) and up by almost $500 million since March,
Source: The MLC nears $2.5bn in royalty distributions to songwriters and publishers since 2021
With the growth of Netflix and other streamers, top creators are starting to feel the loss of the long-tail income from syndication runs and international licensing, which is now limited to streamers with global scope such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Max and Disney+. Despite eye-popping upfront fees paid to top creative talent, the loss of annuity-like income from successful TV shows and movies has hit Hollywood hard in the pocketbook.
Source: Netflix Chief Doubles Down on Streamer’s Dealmaking Terms and Limited Theatrical Release Strategy
As streamers evolve their acquisition strategy in Europe, producers and broadcasters are finding new opportunities as well as challenges. “Back in 2020, 60% of the top 10 shows on Netflix were originals, and now, 60% of the top 10 shows are acquisitions, licensed in from AMC and others,” says Guy Bisson, executive director and co-founder of Ampere Analysis. The change reflects the “fundamental shift in attitudes towards licensing.”
Spotify’s increased attention on video is no secret, but the company’s willingness to invest heavily in content creators whose primary focus is not audio does shed light on the company’s larger ambitions. By investing in video creators, Spotify is no longer just trying to bring audio listeners onto the platform. The company is now trying to bring video watchers onto the platform, suggesting Spotify’s video ambitions go beyond using video as an audio accessory.
Source: Beyond video podcasts: Spotify’s investment in video creators reveals its format agnosticism
OpenAI’s head of media partnerships has said it does not currently intend to share SearchGPT ad revenue with publishers. But he added that the matter was “an evolving space for us right now” and that it was in OpenAI’s interests to provide enough value to stop publishers opting out of appearing in SearchGPT results.
Source: OpenAI exec rules out sharing revenue from SearchGPT with publishers, for now
The current crop of generative AI systems needs high quality data, and lots of it. To source this data, big tech companies continually scour the internet, scooping up terabytes of content to feed the machines. But since the advent of widely available and useful generative AI systems in 2022, people are increasingly uploading and sharing content that is made, in part or whole, by AI.
Source: Is generative AI doomed? An expert’s take on the “model collapse” theory
Journalists and newsrooms are being called on to submit proposals for AI tools that could be used to tackle critical issues facing news publishing, including making news pay. Publishing technology experts Atex have laid down a challenge to the news industry with the launch of its AI Accelerator Program, which it hopes will be a “starting point” for changing the way journalism and artificial intelligence interact with each other.
Source: AI challenge asks journalists to pitch for help to solve industry challenges
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, a type of recurrent neural network, are adept at analyzing sequential data, making them ideal for detecting temporal manipulations in audio. Even transformer models, the technology behind advanced language AI like ChatGPT, are being applied to audio analysis, processing long sequences of audio data to identify complex patterns and relationships that might escape other systems.
Source: AI vs. audio pirates: catching sophisticated copyright evasion with AI
According to TME: “We believe AI should be a supportive tool rather than a substitute for musicians creating original works. We implement compliance assessments and continuous monitoring of AI products and operations to ensure that AI-generated musical content is properly licensed and musicians’ creative works are fully protected.”
As the engine powering the world’s digital artists, Adobe has a big responsibility to mitigate the rise of AI-driven deepfakes, misinformation, and content theft. In the first quarter of 2025, Adobe is launching its Content Authenticity web app in beta, allowing creators to apply content credentials to their work, certifying it as their own.
Source: Adobe has a new tool to protect artists’ work from AI