The impact of artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, on the media and entertainment industries was a topic of debate at the Media & Telecoms 2025 & Beyond Conference in London on Tuesday. And some industry executives suggested that an alliance of media players could be the best strategy to protect copyright and open up opportunities for media companies in the AI age.
Source: “NATO for News”: Is a Joint Effort by Media Companies the Way to Go in the Age of AI?
Audiobook sales returned to a double-digit growth rate in 2024, increasing 13% over 2023, according to the just-released Audio Publishers Association Sales Survey. After a number of years of sales growing at a rate of at least 10% annually, sales rose 9% in 2023. Last year, total sales from the APA members who supply data increased to $2.22 billion; the bump was driven, unsurprisingly, by digital audio.
For decades, Hollywood directors, including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron and Alex Garland, have cast artificial intelligence as a villain that can turn into a killing machine. Now Google—a leading developer in AI technology —wants to move the cultural conversations away from technology as seen in “The Terminator,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Ex Machina.”
Source: Inside Google’s plan to have Hollywood make AI look less doomsday
Google and OpenAI want to reposition chatbots as virtual assistants. If high switching costs are successfully introduced into the AI market, that will cement the position of a small number of dominant businesses. Today’s general-purpose AI market is highly concentrated: four applications account for around 95% of the market. This combination of concentration and lock-in is hugely troubling for the media.
Source: Publishers will lose out if generative AI becomes another duopoly
The revolution of artificial intelligence in digital entertainment content is a once in a life time opportunity, said Cheng Lu, president and CEO of Chinese artificial intelligence technology company CreateAI, adding that AI will reshape the industry landscape of video games and anime. “In Hollywood and Japan, top-tier studios are drowning from rising production costs, labor shortage and long development cycles,” Lu said.
Source: CreateAI CEO: AI revolutionizing digital entertainment industry
AI startup Stability AI has released Stable Audio Open Small, a “stereo” audio-generating AI model that the company claims is the fastest on the market — and efficient enough to run on smartphones. Stable Audio Open Small is the fruit of a collaboration between Stability AI and Arm, the chipmaker that produces many of the processors inside tablets, phones, and other mobile devices.
Source: Stability AI releases an audio-generating model that can run on smartphones | TechCrunch
German firm AIxchange is the latest startup building bridges between the music industry and GenAI companies through licensing deals for the music data used by the latter to train their models. “Our mission is to empower the GenAI music revolution by offering legal, high-quality music training data, ensuring ethical and compliant licensing for AI music generation,” explains operations manager Peer-Uli May.
Feedback examined the logos of OpenAI, Apple Intelligence, Claude and others, and we can confirm that, yes, they do bear more than a passing resemblance to a sphincter, and once you see it you can’t unsee it. DeepSeek and Midjourney are about the only exceptions: their logos look like a whale and a sailboat on the sea. But maybe they will soon get sucked into the circular logo maelstrom.
Source: Why do so many AI company logos look like buttholes?
It was unclear how the levies, which were announced over the weekend on social media, would be enforced and which productions are most vulnerable to the tariffs. Yet, there are widespread concerns that if they are enacted, Trump’s latest moves have the potential to upend and potentially decimate a global film business that relies on a network of international incentives and foreign locations to make movies.
MusicAnswers has spent two years conducting a survey of college student music creators to better understand their experience with song registration agencies—specifically the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC). The results are pretty grim, with a majority of college students being unaware of the MLC’s purpose or what they do in the industry.
Source: Only 17% of Music Creator College Students Familiar With MLC