For the last decade, Leidig has been building NewsX, a Community Interest Company. “In the agency world, if you do the editorial work and someone uses it, you get paid. It’s that simple. Social media platforms broke that when they started monetising what they don’t produce.” NewsX is designed to reconnect that chain by documenting editorial labour, validating it, tracking and charging for usage.
Source: AI has helped break news ecosystem, but could also fix it – says agency boss
For most artists, getting paid is still stuck in the dial-up era. A song might blow up overnight, but the royalty check might not land for months. Money bounces through labels, publishers, distributors, and collecting societies, creating a maze of delays and obscure accounting. Record Financial wants to flip that model. Its platform pulls in royalty data as it’s generated, normalizes it, and distributes payouts instantly via stablecoins like USDC using Avalanche.
Source: Record Financial Pushes Real-Time Royalties on Avalanche to Modernize Music Payments – Decrypt
Warner Music Group and AI music platform Udio have struck what they call “a landmark agreement” that resolves the companies’ copyright infringement litigation. The companies have also entered into a licensing deal for a “next-generation” AI–powered music creation, listening, and discovery platform. The news arrived just an hour after WMG announced a new partnership with Stability AI on Wednesday, which the companies say will “advance the use of responsible AI in music creation”.
The Circuit Group, which owns management firms Ayita and Seven20, has announced the launch of a new nine-figure investment fund focused on the acquisition of music assets and other cultural IP. Dubbed Circuit Capital, the new fund is backed by $500 million from Los Angeles-based Create Music Group (CMG), which was valued last year at $1 billion following a $165 million investment round.
Source: The Circuit Group launches $500m+ music investment fund backed by Create Music Group
Music streaming faces a dual crisis, according to SoundCloud CEO Eliah Seton – and it’s creating what he calls “a very ripe dynamic” for his platform. “Streaming is not enough for artists,” Seton says. “The vast majority of artists don’t earn a living wage. 80 million tracks making less than five bucks, 46 million tracks making nothing. Those numbers have only grown in a generative AI world.” But the problem extends beyond artist economics.
A six-month audit published by Fair Play, a new independent initiative aiming for transparency and accountability in electronic music royalties, provides some much-needed insight into how UK royalties are collected and distributed, and how effectively so. The answer? Not very. It turns out that only 36% of club performance royalties reach the correct creators, with an estimated £5.7 million ($7.4 million) misallocated every year.
Source: Only 36% of UK Club Royalties Reach the Right Creators—Study
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia, issued a call to artificial intelligence (AI) developers and companies to stop scraping information from the Wikipedia site and instead use its paid, opt-in API platform, Wikimedia Enterprise, to “responsibly” access its content. A Monday (Nov. 10) blog post explained that making Wikimedia Enterprise a paid service sustains Wikipedia’s global volunteer editor base and nonprofit funding model.
Source: Wikipedia Urges AI Companies to Stop Website Scraping | PYMNTS.com
Goldstuck has been convening exclusive thought-leadership meetings for decades in his many roles. He’s the founder of The Sanctuary at Albany, a state-of-the-art recording studio and music academy in the Bahamas; the executive chairman of TouchTunes Interactive Networks. But the South African philanthropist said that this year’s event marked his first event of such scale and urgency, reflecting the speed at which industry dynamics are changing.
Source: Why Music Investors Flocked to South Florida for GoldState’s ‘Conversations in Music’
Spotify and the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) have joined forces to create a new opt-in license for NMPA members to enter into a direct license agreement for “expanded audiovisual rights” in the U.S., according to a press release about the deal. NMPA members can sign up using a portal, and the deal is said to increase the royalty-earning potential of participating publishers and writers by offering them a new audiovisual royalty stream.
Source: Spotify and NMPA Partner to Launch New Audiovisual Revenue Stream for Music Creators
It’s been a big, big year for the music industry, with roughly $4 billion plowed into catalogs and white-hot startups in the last quarter alone. But who’s gonna thread the disparate pieces of this industry together and unlock all that value? Among those looking to supercharge the industry’s future growth is Songtradr, a company rooted in sync that now touches diverse disciplines like superfandom, catalog licensing, indie music development, and music strategies for major brands.
Source: In-Depth: Songtradr Chief Revenue Officer Paul Langworthy