Music Ally

In August we wrote about a startup called Grai becoming one of the first two companies – the other was Udio – to license a group of AI patents registered by UMG-backed Music IP Holdings. Grai is launching soon, and it has made an interesting move ahead of that: acquiring social-music startup Hangout for an undisclosed amount. Hangout was the 2024 revival of an older music service called Turntable·fm, which enjoyed a blaze of popularity in 2011 before foundering on licensing issues.

Soundtrack (formerly Soundtrack Your Brand) is one of the companies licensing music for business use: restaurants, hotels, bars, retailers, gyms and more. But it seems many of those businesses still don’t see the need for specific licences. The company has commissioned a survey of 1,070 business executives in the UK about how their companies use music, estimating that around 800,000 business locations there play music every day.

K-Pop films have been a lucrative affair for cinema-distribution firm Trafalgar Releasing: back in 2024 it said it had already grossed more than $120m from them in box-offices worldwide. Now it’s making a big move with partner Hybe: the week-long ‘Hybe Cine Fest 2026’ will take place on 24-31 October, running in cinemas globally. It follows the festival’s Asia-only expansion in 2025. What’s on the menu this year?

Creatives of all stripes, from musicians to YouTubers, have been fretting about how AI might put them out of work. Yet plenty have also been exploring how AI can help them to do that work better. It should come as no surprise to see one of the biggest AI firms, OpenAI, leaning strongly into the latter dynamic. It’s building a team of people to work with ‘creators’ by tapping one of the most established companies in that space: Patreon.

Snoop Dogg has been in the children’s-music game since 2022 when he launched his ‘Doggyland’ channel on YouTube. A live tie-up with Kidz Bop followed in 2025, and now he’s partnering with another big kids-music brand: Moonbug. The latter has launched a new company called Big Feelings Music, which will offer label services, publishing administration, video distribution, rights management and marketing services to external creators and brands.

In January, Spotify launched its dedicated Haryanvi music hub in response to the strong growth of the language on the platform, the listenership of which grew almost 7x between February 2023 and February this year. Last week, it added to that suite of playlists with the arrival of the flagship Haryanvi 101, and used the occasion to share some more stats.

EarthPercent and Sounds Right’s ‘Give Nature A Split’ is the initiative where artists can use sounds from nature in their music, and list ‘Nature’ as a featured artist to donate a portion of their royalties to conservation work. Now distributor TuneCore is stepping up its support for the initiative. From now until the end of 2026, it will match the donations from any artists using its platform.

Back in 2016, a team at Sony CSL Research Lab released ‘Daddy’s Car’ – a track “in the style of the Beatles” created using their Flow Machines AI-music system. The surprising thing now, looking back at that, is the lack of controversy. Nobody seemed publicly cross or concerned about the idea of training an AI on the most famous band in music history’s catalogue. It’s a far cry from the current landscape of arguments about Suno, training and copyright.

The Sanremo Music Festival is a veritable institution in Italy: an annual music contest and TV broadcast that’s often had a secondary purpose of choosing Italy’s entry for the next Eurovision Song Contest. It’s got clout. And this year it’s using that clout to set some new rules around the use of AI in entries. Specifically this: “Le canzoni dovranno essere espressione della creatività umana.” Or, in translation: ‘the songs must be an expression of human creativity’.

We reported yesterday on Universal Music Group and Sony Music’s new legal complaint against Suno, with a filing that attacked its latest v6 models as “the fruit of the same poisoned tree”. Now Suno has responded to the filing with a statement sent to Music Ally, including the claim that “these claims remain fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law”. “What remains unchanged is that Suno exists so that more people can make new music.