Google and Microsoft have made significant changes in the ways they court publishers – partly driven by rising demand for sustainable ad inventory in programmatic buying and production, as well as automation, AI, competition and regulatory changes. Creative weight — also known as data volume — significantly impacts carbon emissions associated with ad delivery.
Source: MediaDailyNews: Google, Microsoft Push Changes To Support Publishers
A group of independent music companies and trade associations called on the European Union to launch an in-depth investigation into Universal Music Group’s acquisition of Downtown Music Holdings, saying the deal threatens competition if antitrust officials let it go ahead. Universal entered into a definitive agreement in December for its Virgin Music Group label to buy Downtown for $775 million in cash.
Source: Universal Music’s Downtown Deal Warrants In-Depth EU Investigation, Critics Say
Between Luma Labs’ Dream Machine launched in June 2024, OpenAI’s Sora in December, Runway AI’s Gen-4 in March 2025, and Veo 3 in May, the sector has crossed several milestones in just a few months. Lionsgate vice president Michael Burns told New York Magazine about the possibility of using artificial intelligence to generate animated, family-friendly versions from films like the “John Wick” or “Hunger Games” franchises, rather than creating entirely new projects.
Source: AI video becomes more convincing, rattling creative industry
An important aspect of the Anthropic case is that it focuses on the inputs of AI systems as opposed to the outputs. In other words, it answers the question, “Is copying a whole bunch of books a violation, independent of what you’re doing with them?” with “No.”
Source: Why the new rulings on AI copyright might actually be good news for publishers
The American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) and the Recording Academy applauded Congress on Thursday (July 3) for passing the Help Independent Tracks Succeed Act. The legislation, also known as HITS Act, will allow recording producers and artists to deduct up to $150,000 in recording expenses immediately rather than spreading costs over multiple years.
Source: A2IM and Recording Academy welcome congressional passage of HITS Act
The team at Moonvalley, a Los Angeles-based AI video-generation startup, doesn’t think you can prompt your way to making a movie. That’s why the company on Tuesday opened up its “3D-aware” model to the public, promising a “hybrid” approach that gives filmmakers more control than other standard text-to-video models.
Source: Moonvalley’s ‘ethical’ AI video model for filmmakers is now publicly available | TechCrunch
A group known as the Independent Publisher Alliance has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission over Google’s AI Overviews. The complaint accuses Google of “misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss.”
Source: Google faces EU antitrust complaint over AI Overviews | TechCrunch
After stepping down from Hipgnosis following its $1.6 billion sale to Blackstone and a turbulent period of boardroom drama, Mercuriadis is launching a new venture under the Hipgnosis branding. The new Hipgnosis will focus on a partnership model, bringing together artists and their managers as co-owners.
Source: Merck Is Back! Hipgnosis Founder is Plotting a New Venture
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’