Rights

In-game virtual concerts on the likes of Epic Games‘ Fortnite, and gaming world Roblox have served to bring the music and games businesses even closer together in recent years. The collision of the games and music worlds has also given rise to new tech players aiming to both improve the music experience for gamers and extract more value for music rightsholders from the global games market, which is forecast to generate annual revenues of $211.2 billion by 2025.

Source: Hipgnosis strikes licensing deal with personalized music-for-gaming firm Reactional Music

Spotify announced Wednesday that its all-time payouts to music-rights holders are approaching $40 billion. These rights holders include record labels, publishers, independent distributors, performance rights organizations and collecting societies, the announcement said. It detailed that it paid out more than $3 billion to publishing rights holders, PROs and collection societies that represent songwriters over the last two years.

Source: Spotify’s Payments to the Music Industry Nearing $40 Billion

ASCAP, the only remaining not-for-profit performing rights organization in the U.S., announced that its 2022 annual revenue surpassed $1.5 billion for the first time, which fueled record royalty distributions to ASCAP’s songwriter, composer and music publisher members. Collections totaled $1.522 billion in 2022, an increase of $187 million or 14% over the previous year.

Source: ASCAP Posts Record $1.5 Billion in Revenue for 2022

In the midst of a fierce copyright dispute last evening, Twitter CEO Elon Musk intervened. He declared that accounts engaging in “repeated, egregious weaponization of DMCA on Twitter” will receive temporary suspensions. The problems began when a popular user tweeted a stunning video owned by a professional photographer, who responded by sending a DMCA takedown notice. That sounds straightforward, but this dispute is a lot more complex than that.

Source: Twitter Suspends Copyright Holder as Musk Outlaws ‘Weaponization’ of DMCA * TorrentFreak

AI assistants can reach behind paywalls. A user trying to find the New York Times’s recipe for macaroni and cheese will be stopped by a demand for payment and subscription. But ask Bing’s AI and it serves up a paraphrased version of the whole recipe, complete with a licking-lips emoji. The chief counsel at one large media company argues that AI-search companies should be made to license the content they regurgitate, just as Spotify has to pay record labels to play their songs.

Source: Artificial intelligence is reaching behind newspaper paywalls

It’s a moment some publishers consider the most disruptive change they’ve seen to their industry since the dawn of the internet. Two publisher sources told Insider they think litigation is likely if not inevitable. Media companies could make the case that bots scraping their content violates their terms of service. Publishers would say it’s derived entirely from their information, and that if the bots destroy their business, the AI won’t have any high-quality news left to learn from.

Source: Big media is gearing up for battle with Google and Microsoft over AI chatbots 

Any day now, the Supreme Court will hand down a decision that could change the future of Western art — and, in a sense, its history, too. Blame the appeals court judgment from 2021 declaring that Andy Warhol had no right to appropriate someone else’s photo of Prince into one of the Pop artist’s classic silk-screened portraits. Artists piled on with a brief slamming the appeals court for “denigrating art that borrows, appropriates and replicates prior works as something akin to plagiarism or exploitation.”

Source: The Supreme Court may force us to rethink 500 years of art

After iHeartMedia released its Q4 earnings, Joe Crowley, chair of the musicFIRST Coalition, issued a statement criticizing the broadcasting giant’s resistance to paying recording artists for radio airplay. “iHeart spent yet another earnings call crowing about its profits to Wall Street, yet even as we speak, the company’s lobbying machine is descending upon the Capitol in a desperate attempt to convince lawmakers that the radio giant can’t afford to pay artists for the use of their music on AM/FM radio.” 

Source: Congressman Joe Crowley Criticizes iHeart’s Continued Resistance to Paying Artists for Radio Airplay

UK public performance joint venture PPL PRS has facilitated the distribution of GBP £1 billion (USD $1.2bn) in revenues to music creators and rightsholders in the five years since its launch in 2018. The group was established by UK collection societies PPL and PRS for Music to provide a point of contact for companies and organizations that are looking to buy a license to play recorded music in public.

Source: UK public performance joint venture PPL PRS has paid out $1.2bn+ to creators and rightsholders to date

The Mechanical Licensing Collective, or MLC, is now trumpeting cumulative payouts of more than $1 billion to songwriters, publishers, and other compositional IP owners since its formal inception in 2020. That heady payout, however, is being rivaled by unallocated ‘black box’ royalty accounts that may also be approaching the $1 billion threshold. MLC chief executive Kris Ahrend has declined multiple requests by Digital Music News to clarify the specific black box amounts held by the organization.

Source: Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) Refuses to Disclose ‘Black Box’ Totals as Payouts Top $1 Billion