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’
A legal complaint has been submitted to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority over the impact of Google AI Overviews on news publishers. A collaboration between tech justice non-profit Foxglove, the Independent Publishers Alliance and the campaign group Movement for an Open Web aims to “stop Google stealing the work of British journalists”.
Source: Urgent bid lodged with UK regulator to stop Google AI Overviews ‘stealing journalism’
The US Senate dealt a blow to the technology sector voting 99-1 to strip a provision from President Trump’s economic package that would have prevented states from regulating artificial intelligence for a decade. The rejection signals a victory to creative industry groups that have campaigned against what they see as an attempt to shield AI companies from accountability when using creators’ art and music to create AI models.
Source: US Senate rejects 10-year ban on state AI regulation in win for creative sector
Those using the platform can now indicate their interest in AI training licensing deals by marking songs as “Open to AI licensing.” The company explains that this selection registers rightsholders in a dedicated database, “creating a simple process for AI companies to seek authorization and legally license compositions and recordings from artists, labels, and publishers”.
Source: BandLab now allows artists and rightsholders to signal interest in AI licensing
Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare is now blocking all AI scrapers accessing content by default in an industry first. The move has been backed by more than a dozen major news and media publishers including the Associated Press, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Conde Nast, DMGT, Dotdash Meredith, Fortune, Gannett, The Independent, Sky News, Time and Ziff Davis. Cloudflare said its default setting for new domains is now to block AI crawlers that don’t have permission or provide compensation.
Source: UK and US publishers back move to block AI scrapers by default