A coalition of record-label and artist groups is pushing streaming giants to label music generated with artificial intelligence, as the industry grapples with how AI is changing the business. The group said it plans to work with streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music to add labels on tracks indicating when AI was used to produce them. AI usage is flagged voluntarily by artists, record labels and distributors.
Source: Record Companies Push to Label AI Songs on Streaming Platforms
The New York Times, The New York Daily News and 15 other media organizations said in a federal court filing on Thursday that OpenAI was withholding evidence that could play a key role in high-profile lawsuits the companies filed against the artificial intelligence start-up. With their filing, the publishers called for legal sanctions against OpenAI, accusing the company of violating court rules and acting in bad faith during the litigation’s fact discovery phase.
Source: New York Times and Other Publishers Ask Court to Penalize OpenAI
US Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaiʻi introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at increasing transparency around artificial intelligence-generated content, requiring clear labels when people are viewing AI-made material or interacting with an AI chatbot. The AI Labeling Act comes amid growing concern in Hawaiʻi and nationally about the effects of unlabeled AI content, including reports that AI platforms are being used to create deep fake photos and generate scam calls using an AI-generated voice of a loved one.
Source: Schatz introduces AI-generated content transparency bill
Cloudflare has just issued the AI industry a new deadline to separate the web crawlers used for traditional search purposes, like Google Search, from those used for AI agents and training. Starting on September 15, 2026, Cloudflare’s default settings will block “mixed-use” crawlers from any pages that host ads, the company announced on Wednesday. That means that the crawlers that blend search, agent use, and training will be blocked from crawling these sites by default, unless the site owner adjusts the settings otherwise.
Source: Cloudflare’s new policy pushes AI companies to pay for publishers’ content
AI is changing the way music is created, licensed, and discovered. Viberate thinks it is about to change how the industry uses its data, too. The music data company has a prediction: within a couple of years, it says, more people will use its numbers inside an AI assistant than on Viberate’s own platform. To that end, the analytics company has launched an official MCP server that lets users of AI services tap its data by asking questions in plain language.
Source: Viberate opens music data to ChatGPT, Claude and other AI bots via official MCP server launch
In 2023, concerns over the rise of generative AI animated the writers’ and actors’ strikes, with many rank-and-file workers fearful that it could put wide swaths of the entertainment industry out of work. Three years later, with those concerns still alive and well, some Hollywood workers have been moonlighting in AI training, working to help improve the tech, anyway. As the traditional film and television job market narrows, this kind of gig work is on the rise and current and former entertainment workers are taking part.
Source: Hollywood Workers Are Training AI Models as Job Prospects Grow Slim
A US federal judge has dismissed a proposed class action that accused Spotify of allowing billions of bot-generated fake streams to inflate the play counts of Drake and other artists. Judge Josephine Staton, of the US District Court for the Central District of California, granted Spotify‘s motion to dismiss on Monday (June 22). The case was brought by Eric Dwayne Collins, the rapper known as RBX, who claimed Spotify‘s failure to curb “mass-scale fraudulent streaming” had stripped royalties from other rights holders.
Source: Spotify wins dismissal of lawsuit claiming it allowed ‘billions’ of fraudulent Drake streams
Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over 100,000 songs each. According to Reisner, the sets have been downloaded thousands of times.
Source: The Atlantic created a searchable database of the music used to train AI
Four datasets of music are circulating among artificial intelligence developers, and together they hold more than 21 million recordings, according to a report by The Atlantic. They are filled with copyrighted music, spanning household names and tens of thousands of lesser-known independent artists, according to the report. Two of the datasets each contain more than 100,000 recordings, according to The Atlantic, while the other two are far larger, at roughly 9 million and 12 million tracks.
Source: Four music datasets holding millions of tracks are being shared among AI developers: Report
Publisher AI standards coalition SPUR has shared details of a proposed “common language” for tracking content usage by AI companies. SPUR aims to come up with a standard technical foundation for how AI platforms report on use of the content they scrape. This could be used by publishers when agreeing licensing deals. SPUR was launched at the start of the year by The Guardian, the Financial Times, BBC, Sky News and The Telegraph and has since added more than 20 other publisher members.
Source: SPUR publishes ‘common language’ for tracking AI use of publisher content