Independent music licensing group Merlin and Spotify have renewed their global, multi-year licensing partnership. According to the companies, the agreement, announced on Tuesday (September 30), “reinforces the vital role of independent music on Spotify and provides Merlin members continued access to a platform that reaches fans worldwide”.
Source: Spotify and Merlin ink multi-year global licensing deal



Microsoft is in talks with select U.S. publishers about a pilot program to help launch a two-sided marketplace that would compensate publishers for their content used by AI products, starting with its Copilot assistant. Microsoft would become the first major tech company to build an AI marketplace for publishers, a milestone in building a sustainable business model for content companies in the AI era.

Neil Vogel, CEO of People, Inc. (formerly Dotdash Meredith), a publisher that operates over 40 brands, including People, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Better Homes & Gardens, Real Simple, Southern Living, Allrecipes, and others, said that Google is not playing fair because it uses the same bot to crawl websites to index them for the Google search engine as it does to support its AI features.