Leading music funding platform beatBread has announced securing an additional $124 million in credit and equity capital as it continues to scale. The company will use the capital to expand its sales, marketing, and product operations, while providing more flexible funding to artists, writers, and independent label clients. Strategic investors who took part include Citi, Deciens Capital, Mucker Capital, and Advantage Capital.
Source: Music Funding Platform beatBread Secures $124M in Latest Round
A report last month from search analytics firm Ahrefs showed Reddit appearing in 5.5% of Google’s AI Overviews responses, the most of any source. Reddit’s position as a repository of knowledge shared and curated by actual people is a big part of the appeal. “Human conversation is not being replaced by AI, instead, it’s becoming more important,” Reddit Chief Executive Steve Huffman said on the company’s earnings call.
Source: As AI Changes Internet Search, Reddit Lies in a Sweet Spot
On Monday, Cloudflare published research saying it observed the AI startup ignore blocks and hide its crawling and scraping activities. The network infrastructure giant accused Perplexity of obscuring its identity when trying to scrape web pages “in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences,” Cloudflare’s researchers wrote.
Source: Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping | TechCrunch
News companies have been warned of a “devastating impact” on online audiences as search results are replaced by AI summaries, after a new study claimed it caused up to 80% fewer clickthroughs. The threat posed by Google’s AI Overviews, which summarise a search result with a block of text, has rapidly risen to the top of the concerns among media owners. Some regard it as an existential threat to outlets reliant on search result traffic.
Source: AI summaries cause ‘devastating’ drop in audiences, online news media told
Recognition Music Group has priced its USD $372 million asset-backed securities (ABS) offering on July 30, with the bonds carrying a 5.604% coupon and yielding 1.7 percentage point over the benchmark. The bonds were three times oversubscribed, suggesting strong investor appetite for music royalty-backed debt.
Source: Recognition Music prices oversubscribed $372M bond deal backed by Justin Bieber and Shakira catalogs
The deal raises SESAC Music Group’s outstanding senior notes to a total of approximately $1.1 billion. This bond issuance is notable as it is the largest 144A-rated whole business securitization ever completed in the music sector. The newly issued bonds are backed by nearly all of SESAC Music Group’s assets and revenue streams, spanning both its Performing Rights and Music Services divisions.
Source: SESAC Music Group Closes $889M Whole Business Securitization
In a court filing Thursday, Microsoft argued that the current version of its Copilot AI assistant for consumers should be excluded from the process of legal discovery — opposing an effort by the plaintiffs to require the team behind the product to turn over documents and materials deemed relevant to the case. But lawyers for the news organizations contend that Copilot is powered by the same core AI systems, performing the same functions, with the same alleged harms.
Source: Microsoft tries to keep its consumer Copilot out of New York Times AI copyright case
UK-based Stability AI, which faces lawsuits over allegedly scraping images without authorization to train its AI models, is looking at developing a marketplace where artists can license their work for AI training. CEO Prem Akkaraju told the Financial Times in an interview that the proposed marketplace would allow creators to voluntarily submit artwork and receive compensation when AI companies use their content for model training.
The financial terms of the multiyear deal, which haven’t previously been disclosed, offer a window into how publishers and artificial-intelligence companies are valuing news content in the midst of a seismic change in how consumers seek information online. The annual payment amounts to nearly 1% of the Times’s total 2024 revenue. It was the first AI-related licensing pact for the Times and Amazon’s first such agreement with a publisher.
Source: Amazon to Pay New York Times at Least $20 Million a Year in AI Deal
Adult film producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media have filed a significant copyright infringement lawsuit against tech giant Meta. A complaint filed at a California federal court alleges that their films were downloaded via BitTorrent for AI training purposes. With at least 2,396 movies at stake, potential damages could exceed 350 million dollars.
Source: Copyright Lawsuit Accuses Meta of Pirating Adult Films for AI Training * TorrentFreak