On Thursday, Spotify announced the beta rollout of its new AI-powered Prompted Playlist feature for Premium subscribers in the United States and Canada. The company first tested the feature in New Zealand last month, building on an earlier AI playlist feature launched in 2024. Now, users can request what they want to hear in much more detail compared to the earlier version.
Source: Spotify Releases ‘Prompted Playlists’ in the US and Canada
The industry-first, seminanual benchmark polls artist managers, lawyers and indie executives for their expectations for catalog investment trends. The Index is intentionally centered on the perceptions of music industry stakeholders, rather than buyout funds and financial institutions that can be a few steps removed from the “action” in the space.
Source: Introducing: Duetti and Billboard’s Music Finance Index
The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday released its December Consumer Price Index, showing modest inflation of 0.3 percent on a monthly basis and 2.7 percent for the year. But a deeper dive into the data tables also shows an outlier that is relevant to Hollywood: Subscription video services. According to the BLS data, “Subscription and rental of video and video games” saw inflation of 19.5 percent in December.
Source: “Streamflation” Is Real: U.S. Inflation Data Shows Soaring Price of Streaming Video Services
Google search traffic was down globally by a third in the year to November, according to new Chartbeat data. In addition, referrals to more than 2,500 publisher websites from Google Discover, a feed served to users on Google’s native mobile apps and within its Android operating system, were down 21% year on year. Since May 2023, Google search referrals were down 21% globally, with Google Discover down 18% and all external referrals down 24%.
Source: Global publisher Google traffic dropped by a third in 2025
Anna’s Archive, the shadow library best known for making pirated ebooks and academic papers searchable, announced this weekend what might be the largest music piracy operation in history: “We backed up Spotify.” The group claims it scraped 86 million audio files from Spotify, representing 99.6% of everything people actually listen to on the platform. Total size: just under 300 terabytes, distributed through bulk torrents.
Source: Shadow ‘Archive’ Says It Copied Virtually All of Spotify’s Music – Decrypt
Google Search has reached a staggering new DMCA takedown milestone, processing over five billion copyright removal requests in 2025. Driven by a massive automated reporting spike, mostly from Link-Busters, the total all-time count has now eclipsed 15.8 billion. Not all reported URLs are actually removed, however. In fact, many were not even indexed by Google to begin with, which is another side effect of the ‘bot war’.
Source: A DMCA “Bot War”: Google Search Processed 5 Billion Takedown Requests in 2025 * TorrentFreak
The free lunch will come to an end for artificial intelligence in 2026. Over the past decade, developers from Google to Alibaba have largely been helping themselves to the internet buffet, devouring copyrighted material without permission or payment. Make no mistake, however: the bill is coming soon. Consider it AI’s Napster moment.
IP acquisition is only the first step – one quickly followed by potentially overwhelming blocking and tackling. A typical catalog requires ingesting data from hundreds of platforms and sources spanning DSPs, sub-publishers, CMOs, and social media platforms, often in conflicting formats. And that’s just a working list of initial considerations to properly collect associated IP revenues, with downstream payouts and revenue splits another major area of concern.
Source: Billions Are Flowing Into Music IP — Can Financial Systems Handle It?
WhoSampled offers an extensive database of songs, samples, covers, remixes, artists, and more. According to its website, it’s now tracking more than 1.2 million songs and nearly 622,000 samples. That data is powering Spotify’s latest features, like its upcoming music discovery tool SongDNA. However, WhoSampled was known to Spotify for some time, as it had partnered with the streamer back in 2016 to allow its users to access their Spotify playlists and saved tracks in its app
Source: Spotify acquires music database WhoSampled | TechCrunch
Thus far, Spotify’s song credits included topline performers, songwriters and producers. The new credits expand that to include “all of the contributors who make each song possible,” including background vocalists, musicians, and engineers. “The more fans understand the careful craft that underpins the music they love, the deeper their fandom grows and the more invested they become in the people who create it,” Spotify said in a blog post.