The acquisitive company confirmed on Wednesday (March 4) that it has invested more than $500 million across acquisitions, advances, and other growth initiatives over the past 12 months alone. Create said that this M&A activity has positioned it “as a scaled co-owner and operator of enduring music businesses with global reach”.
Source: Create Music Group, at $2.2 billion valuation, completes $450 million fundraise
The accelerator is the work of a company called Prose Ventures, founded by veteran investor and founder Jules Miller, who decided to make the demo day a public event on Twitch to counter some of the current narrative about AI musicmakers. “There’s a lot of noise around AI music, and the only way to understand it is to listen – to the music and to the real people behind it doing serious creative work,” said Miller.
Source: AI-music artists get their own accelerator from Prose Ventures
Robert Kyncl has published a letter to Warner Music Group shareholders that pushes back against any under-appreciation of WMG’s value in the financial market, while talking up AI’s potential to drive that value higher. Both WMG and Universal Music Group shares are currently trading significantly below their 52-week peaks. Last Tuesday (February 24), a telling analyst note from Rothschild & Co Redburn argued that music rightsholders are particularly “exposed” to threats from AI-generated content.
Source: Robert Kyncl tells WMG shareholders: AI is music’s next growth engine, not its downfall
Perplexity wrote to a New York judge last week arguing the News Corp subsidiaries should be forced to hand over records showing the hundreds of queries they made to “fish” for a basis to sue within its AI search tool before launching the claim in October 2024. Perplexity told Judge Katherine Failla: “This discovery would reveal an inconvenient truth: Plaintiffs repeatedly and deceptively crossed the line from investigation to entrapment.”
Source: Perplexity claims News Corp tried to ‘entrap’ chatbot to make copyright case
Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery is not just a Hollywood deal. Powered by $24 billion from sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, the proposed merger is sparking debate over soft power, influence and media independence at a company that includes CNN and HBO. Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) are jointly putting up a total of $24 billion investment into the Hollywood mega merge
Source: Paramount’s $110 Billion Warner Bros. Deal Backed by Arab Sovereign Funds
Sarandos gave the interview to Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg, where he didn’t mince words about losing out to Paramount. “It’ll be fascinating to see the next steps. I have been on the record a lot in the last two weeks talking about what I think the future looks like. I’m confident in our future that we’re not impacted by all that. In fact, maybe it’s to our advantage. But I hope I’m wrong for the sake of the industry.”
Source: Sarandos: Paramount Offers Were ‘Irrational’ Relied on Political Pressure
For Netflix, such a deal would have complicated the business model for a company that had already vaulted to a leading position in Hollywood on its strength as a streaming pure-play. Even its recently diminished market cap had Netflix nearly twice as valuable as Disney and far above any other media outlet. And at $72 billion, the price for Warner was steep for a company with just under $10 billion in annual free cash flow—and no history of doing megasize deals.
Source: All the Ways Netflix Actually Won Even Though It Lost Warner
Activist investment fund Irenic Capital Management reportedly made an unsolicited takeover bid for Reservoir Media, the Nasdaq-listed independent music company. That’s according to a report from Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, which said the bid, submitted in February, values Reservoir at between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion, including debt, at a per-share price of $10 to $11.
Source: Reservoir receives unsolicited $1.2B bid from activist investor Irenic Capital
Qobuz said in a recent blog post that it will start tagging these tracks “to protect artists and listeners from AI-generated content.” The French company follows Deezer, another France-based streaming platform, which has already made AI labels publicly visible to users. Last year, Deezer filed two patents for an AI detection tool, which it said can discover “fully AI-generated tracks.” Deezer has since published periodic updates on how many tracks the tool has flagged.
Source: High-res music service Qobuz joins France’s Deezer in flagging AI-generated tracks
As part of the expansion Van der Velden has tapped Prime Video’s Mark Whelan as head of strategy and operations at her new AI talent studio Xicoia. Whelan will be tasked with helping Van der Velden create the “Tillyverse,” described in a press release as a “dynamic, constantly evolving digital universe where Tilly and a new generation of AI characters will live, collaborate and build careers.”
Source: Tilly Norwood Creator Plans ‘Rapid Expansion’ With the ‘Tillyverse,’