Of the top 100 search keywords driving traffic to dailymail.co.uk (which redirects to a .com URL in certain countries), 32 triggered AI Overviews in May 2025. In 68.8% of searches for these keywords where an AI Overview was present in May, no click was made by the user to go to the site (compared with 54.9% of searches not driving a click overall when looking at the site’s top-100 search terms).
Source: How Google AI Overviews is fuelling zero-click searches for top publishers
The AI band The Velvet Sundown, who currently have over 900,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, have officially admitted — in a new revision to their Spotify bio — what was obvious to experts and non-experts alike: their music is, in fact, AI-generated. “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence,” the band bio now reads.
Source: AI ‘Band’ the Velvet Sundown Officially Confirm They’re AI — and a ‘Provocation’
Those using the platform can now indicate their interest in AI training licensing deals by marking songs as “Open to AI licensing.” The company explains that this selection registers rightsholders in a dedicated database, “creating a simple process for AI companies to seek authorization and legally license compositions and recordings from artists, labels, and publishers”.
Source: BandLab now allows artists and rightsholders to signal interest in AI licensing
Outlaw country artist Aventhis is verified on Spotify – where just over a million (1.072M) listeners absorb his work each month. He’s even popular enough to have one of those official Spotify-generated ‘THIS IS… Aventhis’ playlists under his name. And his music? It’s gaining traction, with the blues-soaked, 2025-released Mercy On My Graver racking up more than 2 million plays. Aventhis isn’t real. Neither is his voice. He, and it, are both AI-generated.
Source: The AI music problem on Spotify (and other streaming platforms) is worse than you think
On Thursday, the tech giant officially launched Offerwall, a new tool that allows publishers to generate revenue beyond the more traffic-dependent options, like ads. Offerwall lets publishers give their sites’ readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micropayments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more.
Source: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue | TechCrunch
Suno announced the acquisition a day after its rival Udio released a visual editing workstation for AI-generated music. Suno’s acquisition of WavTool integrates the latter’s browser-based DAW technology into Suno’s existing AI music generation platform. In a press release Suno described WavTool as “the first browser-based DAW to combine professional-grade music production features” like VST plugin compatibility, sample-accurate editing, and live recording.
Source: AI music platform Suno acquires WavTool, moving into DAW market
The use of copyrighted works to train models is at the heart of a bitter battle between tech companies and content creators. That battle is playing out in technical arguments about what does and doesn’t count as fair use of a copyrighted work. But it is ultimately about carving out a space in which human and machine creativity can continue to coexist.
It may help that ‘local’ for SFGATE is California (the world’s fourth largest economy). But with a focus on longer reads and in-depth reporting, it is proof that quality journalism can still thrive on the open web. In April, it was the 37th most popular news site in America, per Press Gazette’s top-50 ranking, with 27 million visits making it the most popular purely local news website in the US.
Source: How SFGATE is making local news pay and filling California’s news gaps
The latest salvo came in early April, when user nyuuzyou scraped 12.6 million fanfics from the online repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) and uploaded the dataset to Hugging Face, a company that hosts open-source AI models and software. Nyuuzyou’s upload was quickly discovered by the Reddit community r/AO3, where hundreds of users posted furious reactionsFanfic writers flooded the comment section of the dataset on Hugging Face, getting into arguments with AI defenders.
In its newly released Industry Insights 2024 report, the United Kingdom’s Publishers Association has announced that, “Audiobooks and fiction drove publishing growth in 2024. “Audiobook revenue was £268 million (US$361.2 million)—a record high that’s 31 percent above the same figure in 2023.” In fact, digital formats are reported to have been “a key driver of growth with increased revenue across all three sectors—academic, educational, and consumer.”
Source: UK Publishers Association: 2024 Audiobooks Up 31 Percent