Complete Music Update

The music industry has welcomed a speech on AI by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in which he said “no company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI” without ensuring that creators have “control”, adding “anything less is theft”.

The US National Independent Venue Association has urged American music fans and music industry professionals to submit comments on the US Department Of Justice’s antitrust settlement with Live Nation. The public has until 4 Sep to comment on the live music giant’s DoJ deal before Judge Arun Subramanian has to decide if the proposed arrangement is in the public interest.

This week we caught up with Katerina Koumourou, music publicist and founder of Twelfth House. Before she landed her first paid role in the industry, Katerina was juggling unpaid internships alongside part-time jobs, running a YouTube channel with a university friend, freelancing for magazines and interviewing artists for her student radio show. It was a lot to hold together, but it’s also exactly the kind of resourcefulness and initiative that the industry rewards.

Warner Music says that the American Federation Of Musicians cannot rely on a ‘new use’ clause in the Sound Recording Labor Agreement it negotiates for its members in order to demand information about and compensation from the major’s licensing deals with AI companies like Udio and Suno. The US performer union sued both Warner and Universal Music last month, insisting that the new use clause in its SRLA applies to AI deals.

Dani Offline is completing a PhD in Comparative Literature, writes essays on culture and art that go viral on Substack, and makes some of the warmest, most carefully constructed soul music you’ll hear right now. These things are all connected. She grew up between Alabama and Italy, writes by hand, records to tape, and releases music that sounds like it was made slowly and on purpose, because it was.

Ticket resale platform StubHub calls itself a “marketplace for fans to buy and sell tickets”. But that positioning as a simple fan-to-fan exchange became a little awkward for the company last week when it was revealed that CEO Eric Baker has a side hustle running a separate company that is directly involved in touting tickets and which provides finance to industrial-scale ticket touts who sell tickets on StubHub.

The UK government has published a big old plan for how it will support music and the music industry in the years ahead. It’s called ‘Turn It Up: Our Plan for Music’ and will, an official statement brags, “create the conditions for the music sector - already worth at least £8 billion to the economy - to grow, innovate and succeed”. The plan seeks to cover all the ways in which music and the music industry interacts with the government, grouping everything into ten main strands.

Ireland last week took over the presidency of the Council Of The European Union for the next six months, prompting the culture spokesperson of Sinn Féin, Aengus Ó Snodaigh, to table a motion in the Irish parliament calling on the country’s government to use the presidency to “draw attention to and lead efforts to resolve” issues around copyright and artificial intelligence.

Representatives for the European record industry have responded to a letter from their American counterparts which asks the US government to put pressure on the European Union over possible changes to the rules around broadcast and performance royalties. Specifically, the rules governing if and when royalties generated in Europe should flow to American artists and labels.

American radio giant iHeartMedia has committed to ramp up its anti-payola policies in an agreement with US media regulator the Federal Communications Commission. Although the broadcaster remains adamant that everything was above board under its existing policies. Payola refers to radio stations receiving money or other benefits from record labels or artists in return for guaranteeing airplay.