This week, Adobe confirmed a slate of partnerships tying its generative AI platform — Firefly and the Firefly Foundry initiative — directly into entertainment and advertising workflows, including collaborations with major talent agencies and production entities. The message was subtle but unmistakable: Adobe doesn’t want to disrupt Hollywood. It wants to supply it.
Source: Adobe’s Hollywood Strategy Comes Into Focus — AI In Hollywood
Apple Music identified and demonetised up to 2bn fraudulent streams last year according to longtime exec Oliver Schusser. “Streaming manipulation on our platform is already incredibly low. We literally have systems where we check and validate every single play on Apple Music,” claimed Schusser. “When we find fraud we remove the stream counts, we remove from the charts, and we take the money and put it back into the pool so that it goes to honourable artists.
Source: Apple says it demonetised 2bn fraudulent music streams in 2025
Meta, which runs social media sites Facebook, Instagram and Threads, is not only allowing people to post AI generated content – it’s launched products to enable more of it to be made. “Soon we’ll see an explosion of new media formats that are more immersive and interactive, and only possible because of advances in AI,” Zuckerberg said.
Source: AI ‘slop’ is transforming social media – and there’s a backlash
Media companies expect web traffic to their sites from online searches to plummet over the next three years, as AI summaries and chatbots change the way consumers use the internet. An overwhelming majority are also planning to encourage their journalists to behave more like YouTube and TikTok content creators this year, as short-form video and audio content continues to boom.
Source: Publishers fear AI search summaries and chatbots mean ‘end of traffic era’
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
Explainer journalism brand Vox is using creator platform Patreon to help build a “two-way relationship” with its audience. US-based Vox expanded its existing paid memberships onto Patreon in November, providing subscribers with additional video content, ad-free video and podcast libraries, livestreams and chats with Vox journalists, and unlimited access to the main Vox website.
Source: How Vox is using Patreon to grow reader revenue and interaction
Deezer, the France-based music streaming service which developed tools last year to tackle AI-generated music, said in a statement to the BBC that “many of her albums and songs on the platform are detected and flagged” as being computer-generated. Moreover, as the BBC points out, Rose “has no social media presence, has never played a gig, has no videos, and has released an improbable number of songs in a short space of time.” All are signs that indicate that the artist isn’t real.
Source: The Plot Thickens on Suspected AI Singer Sienna Rose
Global news media revenue was steady overall in 2025 according to a new estimate published by WAN-IFRA, with ‘other’ revenues growing. The report stated: “Considering the continuing structural decline of traditional revenue sources on the print side, it is clear that news publishers are innovating and investing on the digital side of the business, and increasingly in diversification.”
Source: Global news industry revenue level in 2025 as publishers diversify beyond print
A song that topped Spotify‘s Swedish charts has been banned from the country’s official rankings after an investigation revealed that it was created using artificial intelligence by a Danish music publisher. Jag vet, du är inte min by an artist called Jacub reached No. 1 on Spotify‘s Swedish Top 50 before music industry body IFPI blocked it from Sverigetopplistan. It also landed at No. 14 on Spotify’s Top 50 chart in Norway.
In a note sent last week to client publishers, Ingram Content Group warned of the “growing trend” of AI companies purchasing and scanning print books train their large language models, and said publishers could opt out of selling to these companies. Ingram acknowledged that it may not always be able to identify if the buyer is an AI company, but said it “will make reasonable efforts” to honor the wishes of publishers who don’t wish to sell to them.
Source: Ingram Lets Publishers Opt Out of Book Sales to Tech Firms