Memphis-based Connect Music has raised $80 million and disclosed plans to aggressively pursue catalog acquisitions and AI expansions. “This investment represents transformational growth capital for Connect Music and the artist partners we serve,” said the former Memphis Symphony Orchestra COO Monger.
Source: Connect Music Raises $80M, Eyes AI and Catalog Expansions
Two of the lawsuits target Google for antitrust violations, alleging that publishers’ content is effectively compelled for inclusion in AI Overviews as a condition of search visibility. But no court has yet addressed the more fundamental question: even where summaries do resemble protected content, might they still qualify as fair use?
Source: The Missing Fair Use Argument in the Copyright Battle Over AI Summaries
On Tuesday, European songwriters and composers, along with representatives of their collective management organizations, came together with key EU policymakers to address the long-standing and growing phenomenon of so-called “coercive buy-out practices” affecting audiovisual composers. Buy-out practices in contracts typically force music authors to give away all or part of their rights in exchange for an often low onetime upfront payment.
Source: EU Legislators Call for an End to ‘Coercive Rights Buy-Outs’
NVIDIA has asked a federal court to dismiss an expanded copyright lawsuit, arguing that authors failed to prove their books were actually used to train AI models. The chip giant says merely contacting Anna’s Archive doesn’t constitute infringement and challenges virtually every new claim in the amended complaint.
Source: NVIDIA: Contact With Anna’s Archive Doesn’t Prove Copyright Infringement * TorrentFreak
If you generate an image entirely through AI and use it in your marketing, you may have no copyright protection over that asset. A competitor could use it without consequence. If you want legal protection, you need to add a substantial human creative contribution, and you need to document what that contribution was. However, the threshold of how much AI help is not yet precisely defined.
Source: Deploying Visual AI is a legal minefield…how to avoid getting hit – Kaptur
As part of its role in the Generative AI for Agriculture (GAIA) project, CABI is examining data governance issues to improve access to robust content for gen AI developers in a legal, equitable, and sustainable way. We are developing a model content license (MCL) intended as a standardized template that can be adapted to specific contexts by agritech AI developers and creators (e.g., publishers, creative copyright licensors, universities) or collective rights organizations.
Source: AI, copyright, and content licensing in digital agriculture
Sony Music Group is forming a music rights-buying joint venture with Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC Pte. According to Bloomberg, Sony and GIC plan to pursue “high-quality, marquee music assets across a range of genres”. “As a long-term investor, GIC seeks to be a creative and flexible capital partner to strategic industry leaders like Sony,” Girish Karira, head of the sovereign fund’s integrated strategies group, said in a statement.
Source: Sony launches $2B music rights acquisition JV with Singapore’s GIC
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
Today (January 28), the company announced it paid out more than $11 billion to the music industry in 2025, which it says is “the largest annual payment to music from any retailer in history.” Spotify previously paid out “a record” $10 billion to the music industry in 2024 and $9 billion the prior year. .
Source: Spotify says it paid out over $11bn to the music industry in 2025
Web publishers and news organizations could be given the power to stop Google scraping their content for its AI Overviews, under measures announced by the UK competition watchdog to loosen its grip on online search. Media organizations have experienced a drop in click-through traffic to their websites – and therefore their revenue – since Google started posting AI summaries at the top of search results.
Source: UK media groups should be allowed to opt out of Google AI Overviews, CMA says