Mapping the flow of music publishing

In 2022, Kate Bush’s song Running Up That Hill was famously featured on Stranger Things.

Kate Bush rarely licenses her music to film or TV, so the music supervisor wrote a long, personal essay asking for clearance, and explaining why the track was so important to the storyline and character throughout season four.

It worked and Kate Bush agreed. The placement ended up generating an estimated $3.5 million in fees and downstream royalties for Bush.

This TV placement is the perfect example to explain how music publishing works (the most confusing, and fastest-growing, half of the music industry!) Just look at how many unique publishing payments it triggered:

Running Up That Hill - Counting the music publishing payments

1. Kate Bush agrees an upfront fee for use of her track [publishing sync fee].

2. She now earns a [performance royalty] every time the episode is viewed.

3. The resurgence in popularity is so strong that Running Up That Hill gets a 9,000% streaming bump and hits a billion plays on Spotify [mechanical royalty].

4. The song is play-listed across radio stations all over the world and played in bars and cafes everywhere [performance royalty]. It re-enters the Top Ten in more than 20 countries.

5. Fans on social media use the song in their Instagram Reels and make UGC covers and edits on TikTok [blanket license and performance royalty].

6. More than 100 covers and remixes are released by other artists. All driving [mechanical royalties] and [performance royalties] back to the original songwriter, Kate Bush.

7. Coldplay plays a cover version live at Wembley and Halsey plays it at festivals that summer [performance royalty].

From one TV placement, it triggered millions in downstream publishing royalties, in dozens of different ways.

The power of music publishing

This example shows how powerful and wide-reaching music publishing can be. It touches every aspect of where music is played.

And it’s growing fast.

The growth in music publishing now outpaces recorded music. So now, more than ever, it’s important to understand the ecosystem, how it works, and where the opportunities are.

This week’s map aims to capture how money flows in the music publishing world.

This part 1 covers the basics of how music publishing works. Next week, we’ll go deeper and highlight the companies, tools and opportunities across the publishing stack.

But first, why does this matter now?

Publishing growth overtakes Recorded music

In 2022, music publishing growth overtook recorded music growth in the US for the first time. (Coincidentally the same year that Kate Bush licensed Running Up That Hill to Netflix!)

Publishing has continued to outpace recorded music every year since (in the US).

It doesn’t get talked about much. But it’s clear that music publishing is becoming a much more important part of the music business. And if we’re heading to a future of infinitely remixable AI music products … then songwriting and publishing might be the heart of all value-capture in music.

Contents

1. What is music publishing?

2. What triggers a music publishing payment?

3. Five ways music publishing earns money (mechanical, performance, sync fee, licenses, print royalty)

4. Who collects music publishing payments?

5. Why is music publishing growing fast?

6. Untapped publishing opportunities

7. Is AI good or bad for music publishing?

1. What is music publishing?

Every song has two types of rights:

• Recorded rights (“master”) - The actual recording of the song. The version you export from your DAW and upload to Spotify.

• Publishing rights - The composition of the song. The lyrics, the notes, the essence of the song in whatever format.

The purest way I think of it is: publishing is songwriting. It drives value back to the original creator of a song, in whatever format possible.

2. What triggers a music publishing payment?

Almost everything!

Any time you hear music, it triggers a publishing payment somewhere:

• On a video game

• On the radio

• In a shop or restaurant

• On a film or TV show

• Advert

• At a live show

• On Spotify or YouTube.

• On any new music tech platform.

• At the theatre

• Scrolling TikTok

Simply put … if you hear music anywhere in the world, in any format, there’s a publishing royalty associated with it.

And so begins an extremely complicated web of tracking and paying the correct artists and organisations.

3. The five ways music publishing earns revenue

Publishing is much more difficult to track and collect than recorded music because it’s triggered from so many different places.

There are basically five ways to earn on the publishing side:

a. Performance royalties

Performance royalties are triggered every time your song is played or broadcast in public. This could be a live show, in a store, on the radio, on the TV, at a bar or restaurant, etc. This is the largest pool of publishing money (about 52%).

b. Mechanical royalty

A mechanical royalty is triggered when your song is streamed, downloaded or reproduced on physical forms (CD or vinyl). This accounts for ~19% of publishing revenue.

c. Music sync license

In addition to these two royalty streams, you can also earn a large upfront publishing fee if your music is used in an advert, TV show, movie or video game.

This corner of the music industry has seen rapid growth in the last ten years, and now accounts for ~24% of publishing revenue.

d. Blanket licenses

Blanket licenses are used to capture mass music use where it’s difficult or impossible to capture a single song use. Typically we see these for social media / UGC and some early new AI licenses.

• Social media / UGC - TikTok, YouTube and Instagram have a “blanket license” with publishers to cover a huge catalog of music.

• AI licenses - Publishers are beginning to negotiate licensing deals with AI companies to cover both AI training and AI remix outputs. For example, Kobalt has cut publishing deals with ElevenLabs and Udio.

This category is currently estimated less than 5% of publishing revenue, but it has room for growth. The deals here are patchy and fragmented which means the true value probably isn’t being captured yet.

e. Physical or print royalties

This is triggered if your sheet music is published and sold anywhere. Same goes for your lyrics or guitar tab notation.

It’s a small part of the publishing royalties stack, but it’s still useful for many artists.

4. Who collects music publishing payments?

So … we know the surface area for earning publishing royalties is huge.

But actually collecting it? Not easy.

Those performance royalties and mechanical royalties? They are not automatically sent to artists. They’re collected by a web of different agencies in every part of the world … and you must actively join those agencies and register all of your music.

Here’s a quick glance at the collection agencies based on region:

• Performance royalties: ASCAP or BMI (USA), PRS (UK), SOCAN (Canada), GEMA (Germany), SACM (Mexico)

• Mechanical royalties: The MLC (USA), MCPS (UK), CMRRA (Canada), GEMA (Germany).

You must be a member of these organisations and register all of your work (correctly, with no errors) to receive any publishing royalties.

Further reading: I recommend reading ’s article: “How to collect every dollar your song earns” if you’re an artist and want to make sure you’re fully registered for all publishing royalties.

… And if you don’t collect it … it goes in the black box

Your publishing revenue can unfortunately get completely lost in this complicated web, and end up in the infamous “black box.”

The black box essentially means that a collection agency has tracked your song, but can’t match it to the right artist. Instead, your money goes into the “black box” for a holding period of 2-3 years. And if it remains unclaimed it will get distributed to all rightsholders based on marketshare (largely the major publishers).

What could cause this to happen?

• If your music is not registered with a collection agency.

• Metadata problem: typos in your name, incorrect song titles, missing ISRC codes.

• Inconsistent splits: you register a song as 50-50% split but your collaborator registers it as 60-40%.

• Geographical plays: your song gets played in a country that can’t easily match it with your territory.

Approximately $2.5 billion of royalties accumulates in the black box every year, and some estimates say it could grow to an $8 billion annual problem.

Publishers vs publishing admin?

If you’re an artist reading this, you have a few options to ensure you’re capturing all these royalties:

1. DIY - you can join all the collection agencies, register your works, and handle all sync license requests yourself.

2. Publisher - you can sign to a publisher who will handle all of this for. They’ll actively go out to secure syncs and grow your publishing revenue. However, they will own your publishing rights in exchange.

3. Publishing admin - A publishing admin company doesn’t own your rights. Instead, they’ll register your works, collect and organise your royalties for a percentage share of revenue. The main difference is that publishing admin companies are not typically “active” in sourcing syncs or increasing revenue for you. But they will “passively” collect everything that you’re owed, which can be a great starting point for newer artists.

5. Why is music publishing growing faster?

A couple of simple reasons: Publishing income is more diverse and distributed than recorded music, so there’s a growing surface area to capture revenue outside of pure streaming (social, syncs, gaming, AI, etc). And the technology to capture revenue from all the different playback sources is getting better.

1. Unlocking unpaid royalties - The music industry is aggressively chasing down anyone playing or exploiting music without license and forcing them to pay. The technology to track performance royalties when music is played in public is improving. More than $2.5bn of 2024’s revenues (about 27%) came from these actions.

2. Better rates on publishing royalties - Several court orders have raised the publishing rates on streaming from 10.5% in 2018 to 15.1% today.

3. New avenues for publishing revenue - Gaming, fitness apps, user-generated content and social apps often pay higher publishing rates than the music streaming services. And the number of digital experiences with music licensing is growing. Mobile games are expected to 4x their spend on music by 2030.

4. Boost in sync-licensing - Sync licensing revenue has doubled in the last decade (from $200 million in 2015 -> $400 million in 2024). Licensing across content-platforms like Netflix and video games are providing fresh paths for growth.

Generally speaking, publishing can piggy-back on growth across every part of the industry. If streaming grows, publishing captures revenue via mechanical royalties. If live music grows, publishing captures performance royalties. If new digital products open up, publishing captures new licensing opportunities.

6. The untapped publishing opportunities

There are two ways I think about opportunities in the publishing space:

1. Plug holes in the existing system - as you can see in our map, billions of dollars ends up in the publishing “black box” because it isn’t correctly attributed. Several billion more may be lost when songs are played in public without the license or accurate reporting. Social media licenses are still fragmented, and AI licensing is brand new etc. etc. The publishing ecosystem is a leaky bucket and there will always be opportunities to make it more watertight as technology improves.

2. Drive new future publishing streams - There are so many new paths emerging where music will be a core part of the experience. Gaming, fitness, social, live performance, virtual experiences, AI etc.

We’ll get deeper into more opportunities and main players next week in part 2.

7. Is AI good or bad for music publishing?

I’ve saved the final part for the potential impact of AI on the publishing industry, because I’m conflicted on whether it is positive or negative for publishing growth.

a. The positive: publishing as the heart of AI remix tools

All the biggest players in the music AI space are focused on AI remixing, mashups and “derivatives.” Spotify is readying its AI remix products. Suno is heading in this direction, too. Over the next ten years, everyone will battle for “interactive” music dominance.

If this is the case, then publishing is the heart of where the value lies. Publishing captures the value of the original work, no matter how it’s remixed, altered or re-imagined and subsequently distributed.

In this future, where derivatives are created at the click of a button, with ever more chances of being distributed and heard, publishing rights to the original works will become even more important.

b. The negative: a world of background music AI slop

However, there’s a flip-side to publishing in the AI future.

What if every cafe starts playing AI music over the speakers? What if every music supervisor generates a soundscape that fits their TV show rather than licensing from an artist? What if every marketing team generates their own advert jingle on Suno? What if video-games can generate the perfect soundscape without ever hiring a music studio?

There’s a huge surface area of performance royalties and sync licensing that could be disrupted in a future where music is generated instantly.

Conclusion: A world where songwriting becomes more important?

Ultimately, songwriting is the most human thing we have. It is deeply personal, innate, unique and almost impossible to replicate the human emotional perspective.

As technology makes it easier than ever to create and distribute music, we think the value of truly great songwriting grows more important than ever. Iconic publishing IP may be the only scarce “thing” left in a sea of endlessly reproducible music.

Next week: Part 2 - mapping the publishing ecosystem

This week we outlined the basics and mapped out how money is captured and collected through publishing. Next week, we’ll zoom into the sectors in more detail and outline the companies, tools, and opportunities across the ecosystem.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO research and visuals are verifiably fully human-created.

You’ve probably noticed there’s been A LOT of acquisitions in music lately …

Distrokid, Bandcamp, Kobalt, Downtown, Dice, Boiler Room, etc.

The music industry is shifting and changing constantly.

The big question is … who’s buying? And why?

This week we mapped out 40+ recent music acquisitions and exits, and placed them into categories to better understand the landscape.

• For founders: if you’re building a startup in music, this map shows your most likely exit paths.

• For artists: this map helps you understand who really owns the platforms and tools you’re using every day.

• For the music industry: this demonstrates how our industry shifts and consolidates.

Note: this map is not exhaustive. It’s a sample of acquisitions and exits over the last ~8 years to demonstrate the different categories.

Quick conclusions

A few things jumped out to me as I was putting this together.

1. Most roads lead to consolidation: The most common exit path for music startups ends in acquisition by … a larger music company.

2. Almost no-one goes public: It’s extremely rare for a company to grow large enough to break into the stock market, leaving only a few big players at the top.

3. It’s hard to stay independent: Bootstrapping a music business and staying independent is extremely hard.

So, let’s go through all these acquisitions and exit paths to better understand how the process works.

1. Going public: Stock market IPO or direct listing

This is the biggest possible “exit” for most founders.

Launching on the stock market is reserved for only the biggest and most established companies. In music, however, this rarely happens.

Only a very small number of music companies have ever graduated to the public stock markets: Spotify, Universal Music Group, Live Nation, Warner Music Group, Tencent Music, CTS Eventim, and Believe Music.

Although it’s extremely rare, the exit tag for a company who makes it to the public market is typically a multi-billion dollar reward.

The more common path, however, is acquisition …

2. Acquisition

Almost every possible exit route for music entrepreneurs ends in acquisition. You get bought by another company (either full or partial acquisition). The question is … what type of company?

Private Equity

Private Equity typically aims to buy large, established companies (not small startups), with a goal of improving efficiency, then selling for a profit in 5-7 years.

Some recent examples in the music industry:

• Distrokid → CVC Capital (~$2 billion)

• Superstruct Entertainment → KKR

• Hipgnosis → Blackstone

• Global Music Rights → Hellman & Friedman

As you can see, this path is only for extremely large and established names like Distrokid.

Why do they buy? The private equity company sees a big opportunity to improve profitability or grow the business in the short-medium term. Sometimes this leads to bad outcomes (aggressive cost-cutting, layoffs, restructures, or backlash from the music community). In some cases, however, it can accelerate the business in ways it couldn’t before.

Major Labels

The majors are also very active buyers. Unlike private equity, they’re not trying to “flip” the company in a few years’ time. They acquire the company to gain market share, bring in talent or catalog, or get access to technology that gives them an edge. For example, they’ll acquire:

• Record labels (Spinnin’ Records → Warner)

• Distribution companies (Downtown → Universal)

• Catalog (Recognition → Sony)

• Tech companies (Sureel [AI attribution] → Warner)

Indie music companies

Large independent labels or publishers typically make acquisitions to expand their catalog and market share. For example:

• Ninjatune → Concord

• Kobalt → Primary Wave

• Nettwerk → Create Music

However, we’re starting to see more acquisitions of technology and infrastructure, such as:

• Stem Distribution → Concord

• BabelOps → Secretly Distribution

Big Tech

Big tech has historically snapped up music companies to help accelerate their music goals. Apple is the most active in the music space.

Apple famously acquired Beats by Dre to boost its Apple Music brand. It acquired Shazam so it could enable music recognition tech straight into the iPhones. Going further back, Apple also acquired a music production software called Emagic back in 2002, which it turned into Garageband and Logic Pro.

Google has also been active recently. It acquired ProducerAI in 2026 to strengthen its position in AI music generation. Amazon has done a few deals to support Amazon Music and Podcast products, like Snackable AI in 2022. And Meta acquired several spatial audio startups (Two Big Ears) to support its VR and metaverse sidequests.

Why do they buy? These are almost always strategic or technical acquisitions. Apple or Google will acquire smaller music companies because it makes their products better, and so they don’t have to build the tech from scratch themselves.

Big Music Platforms

Big music companies or platforms will acquire smaller companies for all sorts of reasons. They might want to acquire the team, the tech, or reach a new audience. For example:

• WhoSampled → Spotify (to improve its discovery and song notes).

• Loudr → Spotify (to improve royalties accounting)

• DICE → Fever (so that live events platform Fever can own the full ticketing flow)

• Bandcamp → Songtradr (reportedly so it could offer sync licensing to millions of artists).

However, this also shows the negative impact of acquisitions. Songtradr famously laid of 50% of Bandcamp’s staff after buying it and sparked widespread criticism.

Music Tech Platforms

This is the smallest category of acquisition, and it’s almost always strategic. Typically a growing music tech company (like Splice) snaps up a smaller startup (like Spitfire Audio) so it can quickly integrate its tech and users, rather than build its own competing product. Some other examples:

• Reason → LANDR (so that LANDR’s can expand its AI technology into Reason’s trusted suite of producer products)

• Encore → Mixcloud (so that Mixcloud could expand deeper into the live sector via Encore’s usderbase)

• Spitfire Audio → Splice (to integrate orchestral samples from Spitfire into Splice).

Conclusion

Acquisitions are a normal part of any industry. Founders who take enormous risk deserve an exit for themselves, their team and early investors.

However, the music industry pathway seems more consolidated than other industries. In the tech world, the acquisition paths are numerous and diverse across multiple sectors, creating at least some competition and diversity. And there’s a clear path to IPO for those with the most ambition.

Music industry startups, on the other hand, seems to end abruptly at a) a bigger music company, or b) private equity. Unless, of course, you have the stomach and pain-tolerance to remain independent and bootstrapped!

I don’t pretend to have the answer here. Perhaps more funding options at the growth stage? Can we help fast-growing companies stay independent for longer without turning to acquisition or private equity? Perhaps more patient capital that will back companies all the way to the latest stage? Perhaps more early-stage funding options so that venture capital is not the only available pathway for new founders?

If you happen to be working on any of these, please do reach out!

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO research and visuals are verifiably fully human-created.

The pendulum swings: digital → physical

We are now drowning in digital music with 150k new songs uploaded to Spotify every day.

A tidal wave of mp3s are flung at the algorithm every minute, hoping to somehow break through.

Music fans are exhausted from it… and they’re looking for something deeper.

Despite (or because of?) the pace of technology, there’s a clear trend back to physical music formats:

• Vinyl sales have risen for 19 years straight, surpassing $1 billion in 2025.

• CD sales jumped 58% in the first half of 2026.

• Searches for “CD players” are up 96% this summer.

• Smart physical albums just got chart-approved by Billboard and Luminate.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction! In a world of algorithms and digital acceleration, music fans are gravitating towards something deeper, scarce, tangible.

So this week, we’re mapping out the return of physical music formats. Why are physical formats rising, who’s buying, and where is the opportunity?

We mapped the ecosystem across the whole supply chain. From manufacturers → to distribution → to stores (physical and e-commerce) → to playback products.

From Bits to Atoms

This shift is not unique to music. As the internet grows saturated, we’ve seen innovation and investment activity move from online → real world. From “bits to atoms.”

• From social media → IRL activities and events.

• From digital software → hardware and robotics.

• From AI research → datacenter buildout and energy infrastructure.

“We are witnessing a fundamental shift in the center of gravity for global innovation: specifically, a return from bits to atoms … The low-hanging fruit of the digital revolution has largely been harvested” - Yat Ming Ooi.

What if the same is true for music?

What if we’ve squeezed all the efficiency out of digital music? (150k new songs every day!)

Perhaps the next opportunity is not another digital advancement. Maybe it’s in the atoms. In the factories, distribution warehouses, record stores, and playback equipment.

Something to think about …

Enjoy this week’s map and as always let me know what we missed!

First, the data:

Who’s buying?

• Millennials are still the biggest vinyl buyers (37%) with Gen Z the fastest-growing sector coming up behind (24%). [Luminate]

Where?

• Independent record stores still lead (40%), followed by mass retailers (35%), and direct-to-fan as the fastest-growing (15%). [Luminate]

By format

• CDs - the recent CD surge is driven by younger Gen Z who are often priced-out of increasingly expensive vinyl.

• Vinyl - largely driven by millennials and older Gen Z with disposable income, motivated by aesthetic and identity curation.

• Smart-formats - extremely popular among K-Pop fandoms, driven by repeat purchases, fandom rituals and participation.

Part 1: Manufacturers

Vinyl and CD pressing

Vinyl and CD pressing plants are, of course, the heart of this whole supply chain. Some of the largest include:

• GZ Media - World’s largest producer of vinyl records, based in Czech Republic.

• United Record Press - Vinyl press based in Nashville.

• Memphis Records - Produced tens of millions of records every year.

• Pallas Group - Major European vinyl and CD pressing.

Smart album formats

Smart albums are extremely popular among K-Pop audiences but they’re making their way West. Luminate and Billboard confirmed they are now chart-eligible across the US and Canada. But what are they?

Smart albums are physical merch products that contain a digital album. For example: a vinyl or collectible merch with a scannable NFC chip that unlocks bonus content or full album. However, only a handful of companies are approved suppliers for chart-eligibility:

• IYK - NFC chip provider for merch products.

  • Vinylkey - Vinyl manufacturer with embedded IYK chips.

• Serenade - Chart-eligible smart formats like mini cassettes, mini vinyl

• Kitbetter - Makes collectible albums “Kitalbum,” more than 10m sold.

• YOTO - Physical cards that unlock albums or music on the YOTO music player.

• Weverse - Weverse albums contain QR code access to digital albums and content.

• ZATAP - Mini CDs and cards with tappable digital albums.

• Totem - Totem is listed an approved supplier for smart albums but, candidly, we can’t find any public information about them.

Note: there are dozens more companies that make smart albums and tappable merch, but they are not yet chart-eligible. Examples include TapTunes and LEMN DROPS.

Part 2: Distribution

Distribution is the middle layer of this supply chain. In simple terms: they get the records from the factories to the record stores. Distributors also manage supply, inventory, marketing, relationships and logistics.

Independent Physical Distribution

• Cargo Independent - Formed by Cargo Records UK, Beggars Group and Secretly Distribution to safeguard independent physical distribution in the UK.

• RedEye - Physical distribution for many of the largest independent labels.

• Secretly Distribution - Physical distribution for Secretly Group labels (Jagjaguwar, Dead Oceans, Secretly Canadian, & other affiliates), and more than 100 other independent labels and artists.

• Artone - Largest European physical distributor

  • Proper Music - The UK’s largest physical music distributor (owned by Artone)

  • Bertus - Large European distributor (owned by Artone).

Major labels

You might instinctively think that physical sales are good for independents (they are) … but they’re even better for the major labels. At the superstar level, majors can distribute multiple vinyl variants, collections and merch packages.

Indeed, most of growth in CDs this summer came from major artists like BTS, Ariana Grande and Olivia Rodrigo.

Major labels often manage their distribution in-house. However, they have also acquired several independent distributors which still serve indie labels, too.

Major label Distribution

• The Orchard (Sony) - Handles physical distribution for many independent labels as well as artists on Sony’s roster.

  • Above Board Distribution (The Orchard) - Specialises in physical dance music distribution, owned by The Orchard, Sony.

• UMG - UMG handles physical distribution through its Commercial Services division.

  • Virgin Music - They also serve independent labels through Virgin Music (which absorbed indie distributors Ingrooves and Downtown Music)

• Warner Music Group - Warner also handles physical distribution in-house.

  • ADA - And serve independent labels via ADA.

Major label merch + branding

Since physical music overlaps with merch at the superstar level (large merch packagaes and D2F channels), we’ve included some of the major label in-house merch and branding houses:

• Ceremony of Roses (Sony) - Sony Music’s creative merch arm

• Bravado (UMG) - Universal’s merchandise company.

• The Thread Shop (Sony) - Merchandise and brand management.

• WMG Store (Warner)

Part 3. Sales

Record Stores

Independent record stores are the still the biggest sellers of vinyl, accounting for 40% of US record sales, according to Luminate.

• Rough Trade - Reported 24% year-on-year growth in 2025.

• Amoeba Music - One of the US‘s largest independent record chains.

• HMV - UK mass retailer

• Juno (online) - E-commerce site for dance records.

• Turntable Lab (online) - Website for vinyl and equipment.

Direct-to-fan platforms and dropsites

• Bandcamp - Reported 2 million vinyl sales in 2020.

• Subvert - A newer collective-owned platform for direct-to-fan music sales.

• Single - Chart-eligible D2F physical music sales via Shopify.

• Laylo - Communicate new physical music drops and track buyers.

• Sandbag - Merch and E-commerce partner for labels.

• MusicGlue - D2F physical music sales.

• MerchNow - Online music merch store and record pressing.

Part 4. Playback

Playback (traditional)

The growth of vinyl, and this early hint of CD resurgence, also has an impact on companies that produce physical players. Record players alone are now a $1.8 billion market, projected to almost double to $3.4 billion by 2034.

Previously, it was widely circulated that only 50% of vinyl buyers actually owned a record player. However, the gap has reportedly shrunk to ~66% suggesting that people are buying more record equipment.

• Audio-technica - UK’s biggest-selling turntable brand

• Technics / Panasonic - High-end turntables.

• Sony - Sony discontinued its CD range, but still makes turntables and other physical playback formats.

• Pro-Ject - High-end turntables and hifi equipment.

• Rega - CD players and hifi equipment.

• Yamaha

Physical Playback (novel)

There’s also a revival of portable, offline music players. People are trying to disconnect from Spotify, iPhones and connected devices. These are still niche markets, but worth watching.

• We are Rewind - cassette players and retro

• Sleevenote - music player with a focus on cover art.

• Skipless - just announced a new “pico disc” format.

• Mightyvibe - offline music player

• Yoto - screen-free music player, for children.

• Crosley - Boomboxes and novel record players

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO research and visuals are verifiably fully human-created.

STVDIO maps the future of music. Every week we publish deep visual research mapping where money and technology is moving in music, for 5,200+ founders, music execs and artists.

You’ve seen the headlines.

Justin Bieber sells his catalog for $200 million. Queen sells for $1.27 billion. Sony Music just raised $2 billion for catalog acquisitions.

And the cries from frustrated music fans: “Private equity is buying up music rights!”

But why is this happening? Why are giant Wall Street finance companies getting involved in music? And where does the money go?

This week we’re mapping out how the music catalog ecosystem works.

First, why is music catalog a thing?

Because … streaming.

For the first time, the music industry has a consistent, predictable business model.

Artists like Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift and Queen now generate millions in royalties every month in a steady, predictable cash flow.

1. Big record labels and publishers love this because it gives their business some stability. Relying solely on frontline releases is risky (“How will the next album sell?” “Will our next artist break?”) But acquiring legacy catalog gives them monthly revenue they can rely on.

2. Wall street loves it. The big finance bros love “yield” - a steady, predictable monthly income from their money.

3. Artists love it. Big artists like Bieber and RHCP get a lucrative up-front payment after decades of grinding.

So, music has become a new “asset class.”

Wall Street provides the money. Music companies acquire the catalog. They both share the spoils. Let’s map out how it works.

Who are the major players?

The Quick Version

In very simple terms it works in layers like this:

• Layer 1: Monster Capital - Gigantic financial institutions provide the money. But they don’t understand music, so they partner with or invest in music companies at Layer 2.

• Layer 2: Record labels, Publishers and Music Rights Vehicles - These music companies take money from the Monster Capital Layer. They go out and acquire and manage the music rights.

• Layer 3: Indies and Boutique - After the gold rush of buying Queen and Justin Bieber, a smaller layer has emerged to acquire indie and mid-sized catalogs.

• Layer 4: Services - A new wave of companies have sprung up to support this catalog industry with data, ratings, advisory, audits, and markets.

Let’s go deeper into each one.

Layer 1: Monster Capital (Private Equity, Institutional and Sovereign Wealth)

Meet the biggest financial whales - sovereign wealth funds, private equity firms and pension funds. This is where the money starts.

These monster whales have money, but they don’t have music industry connections to go out and negotiate deals. So they put up the cash and write a check to people that do.

Note: these are very different to Silicon Valley technology venture funds. They’re not trying to bet on the next big breakthrough or take risks. They manage multi-billions in capital, often for pensions. They can only invest in steady, predictable returns which is why they like legacy music catalog (and the biggest, most successful artists).

• Apollo - Deployed $990 million into joint venture with Sony Music. Deployed $1 billion into Harbour View.

• Brookfield - $2 billion+ into Primary Wave.

• Bain Capital - Contributed to $1.65 billion joint venture with Warner Music.

• Carlyle - $500 million into Litmus Music.

• Ares - $350 million into Firebird, and contributed to Create Music.

• Searchlight - $400 million into Chord Music.

• Flexpoint Ford - $165 million into Create Music, and contributor to Duetti.

• The Raine Group - 9-figure contribution to Firebird. Also lead Duetti’s last investment round.

• Blackstone - Deployed $4 billion into music catalog via Hipgnosis. Since sold most of its exposure to Sony Music Publishing and is now a net seller 🔴

• KKR - Backed Chord Music in its $1.1bn acquisition of Kobalt Capital. Since sold its stake and exited all music catalog 🔴

• Francisco Partners - $750 million into Kobalt (now exited) 🔴

Sovereign Wealth and Pensions

• GIC - Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, deployed $2-$3 billion into joint venture with Sony Music Publishing.

• BlackRock - Backed Influence Media Partners $750 million fund.

• Ontario Teacher’s Fund - Contributed to Anthem Entertainment, but now exiting 🔴

Layer 2: Large Catalog Buyers

The money flows down to the large music companies: either a major label, publisher, big independent company, or a music rights fund.

These companies take money from the Monster Capital layer, then go out and acquire catalog, manage it, and work to promote it.

The setup is slightly different each time. Sometimes they team up top form a direct partnership (e.g. Warner Music formed a joint venture with Bain Capital). Sometimes it’s a revenue share, and sometimes it’s an equity investment in the music company.

There are also rare exceptions such as Pophouse which spans layer 1 and layer 2: it’s a private equity vehicle and active manager of music catalog. For the purposes of this map, we’ve placed it in Layer 2 because it actively acquires and manages catalog.

The Major Labels

Naturally, the major labels are perfect partners. They have access and leverage to the world’s biggest artists and their teams. And they know how to work the catalog.

Most of the majors have set up a “joint venture” with one of the Monster Capital providers.

• Sony Music Publishing - $3 billion joint venture with GIC, acquired Recognition’s catalog (Justin Bieber, Beyonce, Fleetwood Mac)

• WMG - Joint venture with Bain Capital, acquired Red Hot Chili Peppers recorded music catalog.

• UMG - Owns 25% of Chord Music Group (The Weeknd, Ryan Tedder, Lorde)

• Sony Music Group - Used funding from Apollo and Domain to acquire catalog by Queen, Bruce Springsteen and Pink Floyd.

Independent Music Companies

Next we have the largest independent music companies. BMG Concord (often referred to as the “fourth major”), Believe and Create Music are home to dozens of record labels and publishers, making them excellent partners to acquire and manage catalog.

• Primary Wave - Just raised $2.225 billion for the largest dedicated music rights fund to date. Previously acquired Kobalt, as well as catalog by Bob Marley and Kurt Cobain.

• Create Music - Recently acquired Deadmau5’s catalog.

• Roundhill Music - Merged its funds this year to create a $1.1 billion music catalog portfolio (MGMT, Estelle, Goo Goo Dolls).

• Firebird - Just raised $750 million to acquire music catalog.

• BMG Concord - Owns catalog from Bruno Mars, Daft Punk, Imagine Dragons.

• Pophouse - Swedish company, owns Avicii, Abba, KISS.

• Believe - Owns Sentric music publishing (Janet Jackson)

• Iconic Artists Group - Cher, Beach Boys, Rod Stewart.

• Spirit - Backed by Lyric Capital, owns rights in songs by Ed Sheeran, The Who.

• HYBE - Major K-Pop catalog.

• Rostrum Pacific - Raised $150 million to expand its music catalog acquisitions.

• GoDigital - Recently acquired $115 million in Latin music rights.

Music rights funds

In some case, experienced music execs will set up dedicated music rights funds at this level to go out and acquire catalog. These are different to the music companies above because they are not an existing record label or publisher. They are set up specifically to buy and exploit catalog.

• Rezonate - Raised $150 million to acquire music producer catalog.

• Chord Music - Partnered with UMG, acquired catalog by Ryan Tedder, Lorde.

• Lyric Capital - Acquired catalog by The Weeknd for $1 billion.

• Harbour View - Slipknot, Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson.

• Litmus Music - Funded with $500m to acquire Katy Perry and Benny Blanco’s catalog.

• Influence Media Partners - Funded by BlackRock and Warner Music Group, it recently acquired Anthem Entertainment’s assets for $600 million.

• Domain - $768 million fund for music, TV and film libraries.

• Shamrock Capital - Just raised $813 million to acquire assets across music, film and TV.

Layer 3: Mid-level, indie and specialist buyers

There’s now a third layer for acquiring niche, indie or boutique catalogs. The multiples are lower, but there’s also a chance of finding hidden gems.

Buying Justin Bieber’s catalog is a “sure thing” but hunting for the next Justin Bieber at the indie level is a chance at bigger returns.

Some of the companies at Layer 3 will offer independent artist deals from as low as $2,000 for full or partial catalog acquisition.

• Duetti - Raised $625 million to acquire independent artist catalog at early stages. Duetti has carved out a lead in this niche with more than 1,100 artists on board. The company also has active music operations to help promote and market their roster of catalog.

• XPosure - Raised $50 million to acquire early artist catalog, partnered with distributor Too Lost.

• RUN - Offers advances, partial catalog acquisition and full catalog acquisition.

• Symphonic NEXT - Distributors like Symphonic are now exploring catalog acquisitions as part of its feature set for artists on its platform.

Boutique music firms

These are smaller funds specifically designed to acquire and manage a curated roster of catalog and rights. They often employ a personal touch or work with families of legacy music rights.

• Bella Figura - UK $160 million company managing Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” Robbie Williams’ “Angels” and David Gray’s catalog.

• Music Bird - Owns co-writes for Drake, DJ Khaled and Beyonce.

• Iconoclast - Owns classic songs by TLC, Ed Sheeran and Empire of the Sun.

• SRR Capital - A newly launched fund specifically to invest in artists at the very beginning of their career.

Layer 4: The Services Layer

A new wave of platforms and companies have sprung up to help execute these catalog deals. Lawyers, data, advisory, valuations, etc.

There’s also a growing list of public marketplaces where anyone can buy a share of music rights for themselves.

Data, ratings and discovery

• Standard Innovation - Data and operational support for catalog owners and funds.

• KBRA - Credit ratings.

• Citrin Cooperman - Music catalog valuations.

• Seasons Music Group - Advisors and brokerage.

Markets

• Royalty Exchange - Leading marketplace for music catalog rights.

• ANote - Allows anyone to invest in songs.

• Songvest - Buy “shares” in famous songs from Dua Lipa, Queen, Mariah Carey, etc.

What does it mean for the future of music?

The “goldrush” for megastar music catalog has cooled down, but this financing model is now a core part of the music industry.

• The bad? Many people, including us, have pointed out that legacy music consumption is now crowding out new releases. In part, that’s because music companies are incentivised to exploit and promote the vast legacy music catalog they’ve recently acquired.

• The good? The music industry has a new source of funding that was never available before, as well as steady cashflows. Will it free up more investment for frontline releases and new artist development? We certainly hope so.

The full implications of this catalog model deserves its own report in the future. For today, consider this an introduction and overview of how it all works.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

Today I’m very proud to launch STVDIO’s first official music industry report, in partnership with Secretly Distribution:

Independent Music 2026: The Fight for Music’s Infrastructure.

You can download it for free at stvdio.io.

Independent music is thriving, but independent infrastructure is at risk …

Independent music now accounts for almost 50% of all recorded music. A huge achievement. However, our report finds that the independent infrastructure underneath is shrinking and consolidating.

After a string of acquisitions early in the first half of the year, many independent distributors are now under major label or private equity control.

Download report free

Thanks to Secretly Distribution

A special thank you to Secretly Distribution who supported this research (while also putting out their biggest ever album campaign for the new Phoebe Bridgers record)!

Secretly Distribution is not only a huge champion of independent music, serving over 100 indie labels, but also deeply passionate about preserving independent infrastructure, tooling and operations.

What’s inside?

Our report highlights 3 crucial areas where the independent sector must defend music's infrastructure layer in 2026, and in some cases take the lead.

1. The Erosion of Independent Infrastructure

The music industry is consolidating into major label and private equity control. We map out how the majors have acquired several distributors over the years, leaving fewer independent routes to market.

Read more …

2. The AI opportunity for independents

AI licensing will be the next critical infrastructure layer for the music industry. Major labels and big tech are battling in court at the extremes. The independent sector has an opportunity to lead an ethical, fair middle path, but the opportunity won't be open for long.

Read more …

3. The power of collectives and new models

Independent collectives like Merlin and ORCA are acting faster and more effectively than ever, while new, niche, independent streaming models are eating into Spotify's dominance.

Read more …

Download free report now

About STVDIO

STVDIO is a research company tracking the future of the music industry. STVDIO’s weekly visual reports explain how tech, AI, and the music industry is shifting for more than 5,000 music execs, managers, labels, founders and investors who need to know what’s next.

We started our visual maps to starkly represent how the music industry is changing. When you map acquisitions over ten years, for example, you see how much the music industry is consolidating into a few big players.

About Secretly Distribution

For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres.

By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward.

Among SD's partners are Rhymesayers, Third Man, Touch & Go, Moshi Moshi, Ipecac, DFA, Run For Cover, Asthmatic Kitty, Big Crown, Colemine, Nyege Nyege Tapes, Jazz Is Dead, Oh Boy Records, ZZK, Secretly-affiliated labels Dead Oceans, drink sum wtr, Ghostly International, Merge Records, Sacred Bones, Jagjaguwar, Secretly Canadian and the Numero Group – and so many more.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends.

If you’d like to partner on future reports with us, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io.

The more time we spend online, the more we crave real human connection.

The more AI content floods our screens, the more we value real experiences.

Every piece of data we can find points to the same thing: IRL is in higher demand than ever.

• UK live music spending is now £2 billion higher than pre-covid levels.

• Ticketmaster says concert ticket sales just hit record highs.

• 88% of people will cut spending on “things” to prioritise “experiences.”

• 65% say they seek out IRL events to balance out the time they spend online.

We are beyond the “Covid bounce” and now in a structural growth trend for IRL and events.

However … the demand is not even

Like many things in the music industry, the word “thriving” does not apply to all.

Megastar stadium tours and big festivals are doing well as fans prioritise one or two blow-out events per year. The big players like Live Nation and Ticketmaster just had a record quarter.

However, we can’t ignore the fact that grassroots venues and clubs are still being squeezed, while blue-dot fever plagues the middle class of touring artists. For example, one owner of 5,000 cap venue reported a 60% drop in ticket sales.

IRL is back … but concentrating at the top.

Mapping the live music landscape

Sometimes we start researching a new topic and realise that it’s way bigger than we can capture in one weekly report. That’s definitely the case here.

The live music ecosystem is a monster. Each of the categories below could be an entire report on its own. And the widening economic gap between the biggest live events and everyone else deserves its own report.

So treat this week as a primer: an overview of some of the key sectors and companies in the live music ecosystem. Use it as a starting point to dig deeper or identify gaps for opportunities.

Big ticketing

• Live Nation: The world’s biggest live music company, combining ticketing, promotion and venues.

  • Ticketmaster: The largest mainstream ticketing platform (owned by Live Nation)

  • OCESA: The largest Latin American promotion company.

• AEG: The second-biggest live music company. Owns ticketing companies, promoters and venues.

  • AXS: Ticketing platform (owned by AEG).

• Fever: Live event discovery and ticketing platform.

  • DICE: Mobile-first tickets and events.

• CTS Eventim: Europe’s biggest ticketing company.

  • See Tickets: UK and EU ticket platform (owned by CTS Eventim).

• Eventbrite: A self-serve event and ticketing platform (recently acquired by Bending Spoons)

• SeatGeek: Ticketing and resales.

Reselling

• StubHub

• Viagogo

• Tixel: Startup focused on face-value ticket resales between fans.

• Twickets: Ethical resale marketplace at face-value.

• TicketSwap: Fan-to-fan resale platform.

Introducing SIX - the first product we’ve built at STVDIO Labs. It’s an AI agent for independent artists. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude it analyses your streaming and social stats and knows your goals and long-term vision.

It can also upload your music to Spotify, find playlists, create a rollout plan and EPK. SIX is in beta now - you can try it for free.

Try it free

Indie, local and grassroots events

• Ticket Tailor: Self-serve ticketing tool for independent organisers.

• ITM: Tickets and data-capture for independent events.

• Ticket Fairy: Ticketing platform for festivals, club nights and independent live events.

• Skiddle: A UK events platform.

• Tixr: Used by independent festivals and venues.

• Ticket Source: Self-service ticketing platform for local and grassroots events.

Fan engagement + UGC

• Set.Live: Allows artists to capture emails and phone numbers from their gig audiences.

• Laylo: Fan CRM and drop platform that drives tons of audience capture through live event announcements and activations.

• SWSH: Collect and share video clips from live shows.

• Bootleg.live: Live recordings of concerts.

• ITM: Fan-activation layer to track and capture all attendees and how they engage.

Augmented Reality and future tech

• Coachella Innovations: Coachella’s R&D arm for testing new live formats and tech.

• Lux Machina: Augemtned reality and visual production company for live shows.

• Disguise: Live visual experiences, graphics, projection, XR and immersive show design.

• Moment Factory: Immersive entertainment, festival installations and experiences.

• Snapchat: Recently powered festival lenses and IRL fan experiences.

• Musion: Hologram visual performances.

• Melody VR: Immersive VR music performances.

Nightlife

• Best Nights VC: Berlin-based investment firm focusing on nightlive and IRL experiences.

• Universe: Ticketing platform used heavily in nightlife and experiential events

• 222: Social app for meeting new people through events and experiences.

• XCEED: Event discovery and ticket booking for clubs and nightlife.

• Discotech: App for guest lists, VIP tables, bottle service and club ticketing.

Live agents

• CAA: Adele, Bon Iver, Deadmau5

• Primary Talent International: Kings of Leon, Wolf Alice, Alt J

• THE TEAM (formerly Wasserman): Tyler, the Creator, Kid Cudi, Vince Staples

• UTA: Bad Bunny, Lizzo, Guns’n’Roses

• WME: Alicia Keys, Royal Blood, Sam Smith.

Backend / operations

• Opendate: Operating system for venues and promoters (bookings, tickets, marketing)

• Fourvenues: Venue operations used by clubs, festivals and local venues.

• Cymbal: Marketing platform for venues and events.

• GigPig: Connects artists with venues.

• StageRider: Manage artist riders and tech specs.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

When I started my first band in music, I was “the manager.”

I was the one that set up our releases, built the rollout plans, reached out to blogs, booked shows.

It’s … A LOT.

Every artist loves making music, but turning that passion into a career is a whole different skill set, and I believe AI can help accelerate a lot of this.

We launched SIX last year to give artists some basic AI tools, but we had a cool breakthrough recently:

SIX can now release your music.

What is SIX?

SIX is an AI agent that releases your music to Spotify, Apple Music and 30+ stores.

• It analyses your streaming and social metrics to build a personal rollout plan that matches your goals and vision.

• It finds playlists that match your genre and career stage.

• Finds industry contacts you can reach out to.

• Builds an EPK around your release.

First release is free

If you’d like to try it out, the first release is completely free and I’ll personally be in touch to make sure everything goes through smoothly.

We are still in the testing-stage so any feedback is much appreciated.

Try SIX free

Plus … setting up your release in natural language is pretty fun.

An experiment

SIX is our attempt to stay on top of the latest technology. We are a tech-first newsletter and industry resource, and that means getting deep and using the technology. We build with it, pressure-test it and push to see what’s possible.

We started looking into this concept last summer, and then released V1 of our “AI music team” in October last year. And while people liked chatting with it, we quickly realised that the AI needs to do more. It needs to go out and execute. So V2 is all about execution: releasing music and building marketing assets.

Of course, there’s still plenty of limitations and I’ll keep being honest about them.

Thanks for reading

If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. We’ll be back as usual next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music with deep visual reports. Helping 5,100+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward. Listen to the latest SD releases on the Secretly Weekly playlist.

AI music: How will we pay real artists when their music is used?

This is the biggest unanswered question in music.

We know that AI generated music is everywhere: 90,000 new tracks every day, according to new data from Deezer.

AI is now part of almost every musician’s creative process: from generating MIDI and audio parts, vocal swaps and processing, sample generation, drums and chord progressions, mixing, mastering.

AI music is in adverts, podcast background music, live streams.

And we’re about to see a wave of new AI remix tools from Spotify, Udio and others.

If this is our future (it is) then the important question is: how will we pay artists whose life’s work was used to create these AI models and the outputs?

As always … the answer is messy.

Today we’re mapping out the landscape of key tools and where they sit in the process:

1. Detection - detecting when AI has been used in the creative process.

2. Attribution - analysing whose music was used to influence the AI model or output. And paying them for it.

Part 1. Detection

Detecting AI is the somewhat easy part. AI detection tools evaluate whether AI was used during the creative process and delivers a percentage score depending on how much AI was used in the creation of a song. 100% for a fully AI generated song. Perhaps 50% if it contains AI generated vocals or 30% if it contains AI generated drums.

The question is where you put it in the flow.

1. Distribution

This is the first place to catch music created with AI elements. Most distributors now use third-party AI detection tools as part of the upload process. Many also require artists to manually flag whether they used AI.

Tools: Vobile (PEX), Sound Patrol, ICRAM Amplify, Cyanite, ACR Cloud, Audible Magic, Authio, AI or NOT.

2. DSP level

DSPs like Deezer, YouTube, Qobuz and Soundcloud all use their own in-house AI detection tools to double check whether a song has been created using AI. (although they all have different policies on how to deal with it). Deezer also makes its detection technology available to other platforms. Spotify and Apple Music don’t have AI detection yet, but rely on whatever information the distributor sends them.

Tools: Deezer, YouTube, Qobuz, Soundcloud, Sightengine

3. Takedowns

Lastly, you can detect AI-generated music after its published on DSPs or social media. Artists or labels can request takedowns if they believe it infringes on their copyright.

Tools: Vermillio.

Part 2: Attribution

Attribution is much more difficult. This is the process of identifying and tracking when an artist’s music has been used in the AI generation process, and how they get paid.

For example, if a song sounds like Drake’s Take Care, can we trace it back to Drake, and the producers and songwriters involved? How much influence did it have on generating the new track compared to other songs? How much should they be compensated? And how do they receive those royalties?

There are three main options here:

1. Attribution at the model level

Paying and crediting artists when their music is used in a training model.

AI music models are trained on thousands (or millions) of songs and music samples. If we know who those songs belong to, we can credit and pay artists when their music is put into the machine, paid via revenue share. Some examples of where this works right now:

• ElevenLabs - ElevenLabs has an “opt-in” agreement for training its music model. Artists or labels that opt-in to the ElevenLabs training model are eligible to receive a revenue share (based on how many songs they have in the dataset and adjusted for how “popular” their music is).

• LANDR - LANDR is a suite of AI production tools which are partly trained on a pool of music uploaded to its distribution service. LANDR pays out a pro-rata share of royalties to all the artists in that pool.

Other examples include Source Audio and Massive Music which are large training datasets with attribution and royalties built in whenever the dataset is used. Another example is Soundverse, an AI music generator that lets users opt-in to their training pool and receive royalties when their “DNA” is used to train a model.

Downside: the downside of this path is that artists are paid for their collective contribution to a training pool, but it doesn’t measure or credit their impact on a particular song or output.

2. Attribution at the output level

Paying and crediting artists after an AI output is generated, when their music influences a specific AI song or output. It sits inside the tool or product so attribution and royalties become a core part of the flow. Examples include:

• MusicalAI - MusicalAI works with AI companies like Beathoven.ai to detect and attribute known songs right after an output is generated. It’s specifically designed to sit after the generation point and estimate the influence of different songs.

• Splice - Splice’s AI tools triggers an attribution at the moment a new sample is changed or generated with AI, and will compensate the original creator of the sample.

We can also include Udio’s new Starstruck app in this category, although there’s a big asterix. Starstruck lets users remix and reimagine songs, and it will trigger an attribution and royalty flow whenever a user creates a new remix. However, it will only compensate the artist you choose to remix. It will not attribute artists that influenced the remix sound. In other words, if you make a drum’n’bass remix of a Taylor Swift song, Taylor Swift receives the royalties, not the drum’n’bass producer that influenced the AI generation.

3. Attribution after the fact

This attempts to analyse, attribute and compensate AI music after it has been created and released. Its designed for tracking AI songs that are already out in the wild and chase down attribution and royalties.

• Sureel - Sureel can analyse any AI-generated output and map the likely songs and artists that influenced it. Sureel has the most number of patents and most advanced technology, according to Water & Music, providing a layer of high-signal assumptions rather than 100% conclusive matches. Sureel was acquired by Warner Music Group earlier this year.

• Major label initiatives - Major label R&D departments are all working on AI attribution technology to track down infringements. Universal Music Group, for example, is partnering with Sound Patrol.

This entire landscape remains very messy and early. There’s no consensus on whose responsibility it is to detect or attribute AI-generated music, or where it should sit in the flow, from creation to upload to published work.

Another way to visualize these tools along the creative process: from creation to publishing.

Additional reading

The inspiration for this report came from Water & Music’s recent work with AI attribution, and my attempt to learn, visualize and understand what’s happening. Some of our categorisation is not perfect, nor comprehensive. Many of the tools overlap and operate in multiple categories (detection tool providers may operate at the distribution and dsp level, for example. Some attribution tools like Sureel operate across the training stage, generation stage, and the post-generation stage).

If you’re looking to go deeper on this topic I recommend reading W&Ms recent presentation and checking their earlier report on attribution.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music with deep visual reports. Helping 4,900+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward. Listen to the latest SD releases on the Secretly Weekly playlist.

Checking in on 2026 so far

We’re half way through the year so it’s time to check in on the biggest music industry deals of the last six months.

It’s been a monster year already.

The “fourth major” rose from the merger of BMG and Concord. Distrokid changed hands, and billions of dollars were raised to invest in music catalog.

Meanwhile, Suno and ElevenLabs continued to attract enormous venture capital to accelerate their AI music models.

Let’s go through it all.

Note: all our deal tracking is manual. There may be omissions, please feel free to reply or email me if we missed something.

Part 1: Mergers and Acquisitions

This is probably the biggest year I can remember in terms of massive acquisitions, including (maybe) the biggest music deal in history when Concord merged with BMG.

The music distribution landscape was severely shaken up. Downtown was acquired by Universal, Revelator was bought by Warner Music, and Distrokid (with 30-40% of the world’s new music uploads) changed hands to CVC Capital Partners.

• Concord BMG merger $7bn - The biggest music deal of the year (maybe ever, depending on some valuations) creating what many called the “fourth major.”

• Distrokid ~$2bn - Private equity company CVC Capital acquired a majority stake in Distrokid, the world’s biggest self-serve distribution platform. The deal was rumoured to be valued at $2bn.

• Kobalt $1.5bn - Kobalt is one of the world’s biggest independent publishers. It sold to Primary Wave in March.

• Downtown Music $775m - Downtown Music is home to distribution platforms CD Baby and FUGA. It sold to Universal Music Group at the beginning of the year.

• Curve Royalty Systems (undisclosed) - As part of the Downtown Music / UMG acquisition, regulators forced the divestment of Curve Royalty Systems over fears of creating a monopoly. It was later acquired by Merlin and Jamen Capital in a bid to keep Curve independent.

• Revelator (undisclosed) - Revelator is a white-label distributor which works with hundreds of independent record labels and distribution platforms. It was acquired by Warner Music Group.

Part 2: Music catalog raises

The land-grab for music catalog continues this year. The major labels are partnering with sovereign wealth funds, and private equity is committing billions of dollars to “music as an asset class.”

• Primary Wave $2.23b - Primary Wave has already scooped up $700m worth of music publishing catalog including Notorious B.I.G. and Village People. This year they raised a fourth fund at $2.23b, making it the largest dedicated music royalties fundraise in history.

• Sony and GIC $2b - Sony Music Group teamed up with GIC (Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund) to create a music catalog joint venture. They plan to commit $2-3bn towards acquiring legacy music catalog.

• Shamrock Capital $800m - This is not purely a music fund, but Shamrock raised $800m to invest in rights across music, film and TV. They previously acquired music rights from Taylor Swift, Dr. Dre and Calvin Harris.

• Create Music $450m - After previously buying rights from Deadmau5 and acquiring record labels like Monstercat, Create Music has raised a further $450m in equity and debt funding this year.

• Duetti $200m - Duetti has set out to capture the independent catalog market. It raised $200m in January, taking its total to $635m.

• Atlantic Screen Group $30m - Dedicated to acquiring film scores and TV music, ASG raised $30m in January this year.

Part 3: Music Financing

A smaller category this year, we include any investment firms that raised money specifically to deploy into music companies.

• Jamen Capital $200m - Led by Matt Spetzler, Jamen Capital raised $200m at the start of the year to invest specifically in the independent music sector.

• Bridgepoint + Goldstate Music [undisclosed] - Two private equity companies teamed up to invest in music this year. Although terms are undisclosed, the firms have previously raised $7.5 billion and $500 million respectively.

Part 4: Music tech [Series A+ and private equity]

Music tech financing is still heavily tilted towards AI companies, both AI generation and AI detection/attribution. Let’s start with the bigger rounds, from Series A onwards and large private equity deals.

• ElevenLabs $500m - ElevenLabs raised a Series D at $500m in February, then later launched its V2 AI music model and ramped up its presence across the music sector.

• Suno $400m - Despite ongoing legal battles and almost no licensing agreements with the music industry, Suno secured a $400m Series D at a $5.4 billion valuation.

• Too Lost ~$100m+ - One of the fastest-growing new music distributors, Too Lost tapped the private equity markets to secure a “nine-figure” investment for artist advances, catalog acquisitions and technology build-out.

• Mirelo $41m - Mirelo is an AI audio and sound-effects generator for film and video content. It raised $41m at the very end of 2025.

• Stationhead [undisclosed] - The social music streaming app received a strategic investment from Universal Music Group this year. It comes after Stationhead previously raised a $12 million Series A.

• Breakaway $30m - The EDM and pop-music festival brand raised a $30m Series B to expand internationally.

• Hook $10m - AI remix and mashup app Hook raised $10m Series A.

Part 5: Music tech [seed stage]

• GRAI $9m - AI remix and interactive music app raised $9 million in April.

• MozartAI $7m - London based AI music startup raised $1m at the start of the year, quickly followed by a follow on $6m after hitting 100,000 users.

• SURF Music $6m - Japanese platform for connecting artists to labels, publishers, and sync opportunities.

• Mogul $5m - Mogul helps artists and their teams identify and collect missing royalties. It raised $5m this year after tracking more than $1.5 billion in royalties.

• MusicalAI $4.5m - MusicalAI is developing AI attribution technology, raising $4.5 million at the start of the year.

• SWSH $4m - A superfan app for sharing UGC content around live events raised $4m in June.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music with deep visual reports. Helping 4,900+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward. Listen to the latest SD releases on the Secretly Weekly playlist.

This is my least favourite trend in music:

Old music is crowding out new music.

For seven years straight, old music has gained streaming share while new music has shrunk. Ted Gioia wrote about this four years ago, but it’s been getting worse.

New music (defined as released in the last 18 months) dropped below a quarter of music consumption for the first time ever in 2025.

And the first few months of 2026 were particularly bad. New music made up just 3.5% of Spotify’s Global Top 50 in January according to Chartmetric (compared to 8.4% in 2023 and 9.4% in 2024).

As I write this, Spotify’s Global Top 50 is made up of Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Oasis, The Killers, Journey, Goo Goo Dolls, Shakira and Katy Perry classics. Only a few new records appear in the playlist at all.

What is going on?

1. Algorithms favour familiarity

Streaming algorithms favour familiar records and existing popular tracks. They want to keep you listening, not interrupt your flow with anything new or jarring.

These algorithms are self-reinforcing. So the more you listen to those older records, the more Spotify pushes them into other playlists.

Spotify playlists are increasingly “evergreen” by keeping strong-performers in the playlist for longer and relegating the weaker performers before they have chance to catch on. It’s much harder for new music to break into the algorithmic playlist rotation.

Meanwhile, Spotify continues to de-prioritise editorial playlists where human curators can place new music in context for discovery.

2. Catalog re-ignition

There’s been a feeding frenzy of catalog acquisitions in the last six years. Major labels and private equity companies have teamed up to acquire legacy records (Red Hot Chili Peppers just sold for $300m, Queen sold for $1.2 billion, Justin Bieber for $200 million).

Old catalog is lucrative in the streaming era precisely because it’s so predictable and sticky.

There’s also a flywheel effect. After acquiring old catalog, many of the labels and companies put fresh capital and resources into “exploiting” this catalog.

For example, Universal Music created a joint venture with WTSL to push its legacy records in new ways, through Netflix partnerships, fashion, TV, film etc. Record labels are re-engaging their older catalog in a way they rarely used to.

3. There’s no “mainstream” any more

The music landscape is fragmented these days. There is no “mainstream” where we all agree on the “song of the summer” or the next big hit. There’s no big radio station that decides what we all listen to.

We all live in our own algorithmic bubbles. A song can blow up in one corner of the internet, but never make it to listeners on the other side of the internet. New music bubbles up in one niche but rarely takes over the mainstream.

Similarly, nostalgia and retro records can reappear faster in our social feeds.

4. The sheer volume of music

There’s a tidal wave of new music hitting streaming services every day. It’s much, much harder to parse through it, curate it and come to consensus on great tracks.

When there’s too much new music to choose from, listeners often default to what they know and love.

Conclusion

There’s more new music than ever before, but it’s having less impact.

It’s harder than ever for new artists to break through and push out the old guard. The passive algorithms are feeding you familiar hits that keep you listening rather than challenging you with new music.

Incredible new music is still out there. You just have to work harder to find it now.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music with deep visual reports. Helping 4,900+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward. Listen to the latest SD releases on the Secretly Weekly playlist.

Spotify isn’t dying, but for the first time it is vulnerable

Spotify has dominated music streaming for almost 20 years now.

No-one else has even come close.

It doesn’t matter how many “Spotify is dying” articles people write. How many startups try to disrupt it. Or how many artists boycott the platform. It keeps growing.

Lately though, I’m starting to think it’s getting vulnerable.

Spotify is being threatened from five different angles, with competitors that are growing faster, and they can’t fight against them all.

YouTube Music is now growing subscribers quicker than Spotify. Audiomack + regional platforms are winning in Africa and developing markets. Suno is gunning for interactive streaming. Qobuz is capturing the audiophiles.

It’s not “one thing” that could topple Spotify. It’s lots of smaller platforms coming from different directions.

You can tell Spotify is feeling threatened. Most of their new product initiatives are defensive, aimed at competing with these newer threats. (Video uploads to push back against with YouTube. AI remix tools to compete with Suno).

Let’s explain with real data.

1. The mainstream challenger: YouTube Music

For the first time, Spotify has a real challenger for the mainstream music streaming market: YouTube. According to Midia’s report last week, YouTube Music is now the fastest growing DSP, overtaking Spotify’s subscriber growth in Africa and the Middle East, and almost matching them in new subscribers across America and Europe.

Spotify fights back? Last week Spotify launched a direct video upload service, so artists can upload video content directly to Spotify. This feels like a direct response to YouTube’s rapid growth in music.

2. The AI challenger: Suno

Suno is generating headlines for flooding the world with AI generated music. But the quieter story is that Suno is trying to take on Spotify itself.

Suno doesn’t just want to be the place you create music. It wants to be the place you create, listen and interact with music all at once: a new form of participatory music consumption.

Suno’s homepage is full of curated playlists and recommendations. It invites you to remix and reimagine your own versions. Suno’s investors even talk about switching from Spotify to Suno as their main listening tool - that’s the narrative their building.

Spotify is definitely rattled. At their last investor call, they were asked twice about how they plan to compete with these new products from Suno.

Spotify fights back? Spotify has cut deals with all the major labels to build out AI-remix tools, although none have been released yet.

3. The regional challenger: Audiomack

The vast majority of streaming subscriber growth now comes from outside the US and Europe. Latin America, Africa, Middle East and Asia are the fastest-growing regions for music streaming, largely thanks to broadband expansion, mobile data plans, affordable smartphones, and a population that skews younger.

However, they aren’t all downloading Spotify. Many are prioritising other streaming services that put regional music front and centre.

For example, Audiomack has captured African music fans with its focus on Afrobeats, rap and other niche genres. It hit Apple’s number one music app in 21 different African countries. Audiomack now has 50 million monthly active users and 31% year-over-year growth (3x as much as Spotify). Others regional services include Boomplay and Anghami.

3. The Audiophile challenger: Qobuz

Qobuz is a high-fidelity streaming alternative that recently hit 1.2 million monthly active users, and grew subscriber revenue 45% in 2025.

Although it’s small, it’s growing over 4x faster than Spotify and taking hold among audiophiles and deep music fans for its artist-centric brand, high-fidelity audio and editorial curated playlists.

I think you can also put Soundcloud in this category for the younger, deep, music-obsessed audience. Not exactly audiophile, but deeper music fans.

Spotify fights back? In September last year, Spotify releases lossless audio streaming to its premium customers.

5. The curated challengers: Cantilever, IDAGIO, Medallion

Instead of trying to capture the masses, a new wave of startups are drilling down into niche genres and communities.

Cantilever is a curated streaming service featuring only a handful albums at a time, and rotated regularly. Each album is featured with an editorial segment to give deeper context around the music.

Medallion is a similar service with curated albums, demos, and secret tracks from Pixies, Sigur Ros, Major Lazer and more. In both cases, the payouts are artist-centric so your subscription money goes only to the artists you listen to.

IDAGIO is a genre-specific streaming service, focusing solely on classical music. Jazzed is a similar platform with only jazz music.

Is Spotify dying?

Not anytime soon. Spotify’s dominance is still huge and they’re growing. But for the first time, they do have threats from multiple angles. It’s death by a thousand cuts rather than one big hit.

And it feels like Spotify is in fight mode, rather than leading the way. Their new product initiatives are all defensive and reacting to their competitors instead of innovating within music culture.

The opportunity is in the niches. The streaming economy is now so large that full business models can operate at the edges and steal market share away from the giants.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music with deep visual reports. Helping 4,900+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward. Listen to the latest SD releases on the Secretly Weekly playlist.

Mapping the AI music datasets

Last week the Atlantic revealed several unlicensed datasets used to train some of the large AI music models.

Most of us in the music industry instinctively knew this was happening. We knew that music was being fed into the AI machine without permission. But I didn’t fully appreciate the scale and the detail of what was happening.

If you’ve only read the headlines, I encourage you to keep reading and look at exactly how these datasets were built and fed into mass-extraction song-rippers.

Like many artists, I found my own music in two of these datasets, and even though I’m excited for AI there’s something unsettling about reading through them and the cold disregard for music and copyright.

Today we’ll go through them in detail.

Note: not all AI music companies use these datasets. There are plenty of brilliant ethical AI music generation tools that have licensing agreements and fair compensation for artists. I’ll list some of them at the end.

First … how does it work?

It’s important to understand the datasets do not actually contain music. Here’s how it works:

1. A giant spreadsheets of metadata: artist names, song names, lyrics and corresponding links to the song on either YouTube or Spotify.

2. AI companies and developers then feed these spreadsheets into mass-extraction software to rip the audio.

3. The extracted audio is used to train the models.

There’s an important legal difference between each one … which we’ll get into later. First let’s go through the datasets and who made them.

1. LAION DISCO 12M 🟠

Made by: LAION

• A broad dataset of 12 million links to music on YouTube.

• Released for “academic research”

• But widely downloaded by commercial users, then fed into audio extraction software.

LAION DISCO is the largest dataset uncovered by the Atlantic. It’s a huge document of metadata: 12 million artist names, song titles and links to YouTube.

This LAION DISCO dataset is designed to capture music at scale, by scraping YouTube’s “related artists” algorithm.

Who made it?

LAION is a German non-profit research organisation. They believe in open source datasets to ensure that AI isn’t controlled by a few big companies.

LAION defends the dataset by saying it’s only a list of links for “research purposes” … not to be used for “creating end products.”

Yet at the same time, it’s fairly clear they knew how this dataset would be used:

2. Sleeping DISCO 9M 🟠

Made by: Sleeping AI

• Contains links to 9 million songs on YouTube.

• Lyrics scraped from Genius.

• Hyper-curated to capture “popular and well known songs”.

Sleeping DISCO 9M is similar to the first dataset, in that it contains metadata and links to YouTube. But this one is optimised to capture the most popular songs and relevant artists.

In other words, it’s designed so that AI music models can mimic and recreate “world-renowned” artists and their sounds. It also scraped lyrics from Genius.com so that AI models can learn from the lyrics of famous songs.

Who made it?

Sleeping AI. They are a non-profit research lab, self described “hackers who provide datasets.” Like LAION, the group said the dataset is for research purposes and should not be used for commercial products.

However, there are plenty of points in their paper where they clearly acknowledge how their dataset would be used:

1. To rip YouTube audio:

2. To build commercial models:

Notably: Team members from SleepingAI also contributed to LAION so these two teams have close links. The teams are fully public on their websites, on the published papers and on LinkedIn. Since Atlantic published their article last week, Sleeping AI has shut down their website.

3. The “Private Pointer” 🔴

Made by: Unknown / anonymous

• A smaller list of 100,000 Spotify and YouTube links to popular songs.

• Created anonymously and circulated among developer forums

This dataset is smaller but in some ways more egregious than the previous two. There’s no “research organisation” behind it or ethical pretence of open source data. It’s purely a black-market training document passed around specifically to build unlicensed AI music models.

The dataset contains Spotify and YouTube links that can be fed into a mass-extraction software to rip the audio.

Who made it?

We don’t know. It’s an anonymous dataset which may have numerous contributors as it was passed around through forums and developer channels.

4. The Free Music Archive 🟢

Made by: WFMU

• A creative commons dataset of ~100,000 songs.

• Used by Google and Stability to train its music models.

This one should not be viewed in the same way as the others. It’s a creative commons dataset of royalty-free music built with clean intentions. Artists have submitted their music and made it available to stream, share and use under a CC license.

However, AI labs have then downloaded and used this “royalty-free” library to train its models. We don’t yet know if this counts as a breach of terms.

Who made it?

A New Jersey radio station called WFMU. They started it in 2009 to create a library of legal, royalty-free, downloadable music for podcasters, filmakers and music fans. The downloads come with limits on commercial use and artists are supposed to be credited.

How is this allowed?

Organisations like SleepingAI and LAION are open and public about these datasets. They publish their scraping methodology in academic papers, with names attached.

So, how is allowed?

• Both organisations claim the datasets are for “research” purposes.

• They’re not ripping the songs directly. They’re just aggregating metadata that’s already public (song names and links).

• They include disclaimers to stress that their data shouldn’t be used in products or “commercial purposes.”

• They lean on EU regulations that allow scraping and copying data for research purposes.

They’ve created a layer of plausible deniability, which shifts the blame onto AI developers or companies that actually rip the audio and train the models.

The argument: making a list of links is not illegal, but ripping the music might be.

Reminder: fully licensed AI music does exist!

It’s important to say: not all AI music is pirated.

There are many, many great tools that have not used these unlicensed databases. Some have cut deals with independent organisations or major labels. Some have built their own models using music contributed by artists. Some have properly licensed royalty-free libraries, opt-ins, and compensate artists when their work is used.

• ElevenLabs - Fully licensed training model via independent label and publisher agreements.

• Mozartai.com - Fully licensed AI music generation built using ElevenLabs’ model.

• Ace-Step - Uses a combination of licensing agreements and copyright-free music libraries.

• Stable Audio - Licensing agreements with Warner, Universal (+ the Free Music Archive library).

We recently mapped a full list of AI music tools and mapped the current licensing deals if you want to explore further.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music. Helping 4,800+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward. Check out the Secretly Weekly playlist for the latest from SD labels and artists.

An important music industry headline last week:

A collective of indie record labels invested $250k in Cantilever, a curated music streaming platform.

The indie labels involved:

SubPop, Domino, NinjaTune, Secretly Group, City Slang, Secret City, Because, Partisan, Hopeless, Everlasting, Exceleration, !K7 and Playground.

As someone who writes a lot about music investment, this is rare! Music tech funding is usually dominated by venture capital and major labels. You hardly ever see indie labels on these funding announcements.

I love to see this. The independent sector should be investing and shaping the music infrastructure of the future. While it’s rare, I have noticed signs of indies getting more active. So this week, we’re mapping out some recent exciting independent investments.

Collective investing

One thing you’ll notice is that independents often invest via collectives.

They come together in groups to pool their capital and resources. For example, the Cantilever investment was orchestrated during a meeting of ORCA associated labels (ORCA is the Organisation for Recorded Culture and Arts).

Another active investor is Futures Music, which is a collective formed by Neon Gold Records and Avenue A Records. They’ve invested in Splice, Indify, and ITM.

Or Secretly Group, one of the biggest independent music groups formed of record labels like Jagjaguwar, Secretly Canadian and Dead Oceans. It has made recent acquisitions from its distribution arm, and strategic co-investments with other label groups like Beggars.

Independent labels and organisations have more power and leverage when they work together. It’s often the only way they can compete with the big pockets of venture capital and major labels.

Balancing out the big money

We’ve written a lot about how money flows in the music industry. Major labels have spent the last decade growing their investment in music’s core infrastructure. They have large stakes in Spotify, acquired several large music distributors, and increasingly invest in early-stage music tech tools and products.

Music’s most disruptive new products like Suno, are largely funded by generalist tech funds in Silicon Valley.

None of this is necessarily bad. But the music industry does need balance.

The independent sector now represents almost 50% of global recorded music share. It makes sense that indies should also have ownership and stakes in music’s core infrastructure and shape its future products.

Recent independent investment + acquisition activity

Below we’ll list some recent independent investments. This is not exhaustive and feel free to comment or email me if I’ve missed some.

1. Futures Music raises $6 million

Futures Music is a collective of labels including Neon Gold Records. Recently the group raised $6 million to invest in both artists and music technology. They own stakes in Splice, Indify, Chordal, and more recently ITM — a live events infrastructure platform.

2. Secretly Distribution acquires BabelOps and Ei

The distribution arm of Secretly Group (home to Secretly Canadian, Ghostly Internation, Jagjaguwar and Dead Oceans) recently acquired BabelOps, independent data infrastructure for more than 55,000 record labels.

3. Cantilever raises $250k pre-seed

The curated streaming platform raised its first capital from a group of 20 independent record labels, orchestrated by ORCA, a think tank for the independent sector.

4. Merlin and Jamen Capital acquire Curve

When Universal Music bought Downtown Music earlier this year, the courts forced them to divest one of their holdings, Curve Royalty Systems. Last week it was announced that Curve had been acquired by two independent organisations: Merlin and Jamen Capital. Merlin is one of the biggest independents orgs, representing about 15% of global recorded music, and Jamen Capital aims to be the “largest funder of independent music globally” via its $200 million Pipeline financing platform.

5. Concord acquires Stem Distribution

Concord is one of the largest independent music companies with a lot more capital to make meaningful investments and acquisitions. In 2025, they acquired music distributor Stem and invested in Tone, the royalty accounting platform spun out of Stem.

6. Believe acquires Sentric Music Group

Believe acquired Tunecore back in 2016, followed by another 16 smaller acquisitions over the coming years. More recently it acquired publishing rights management platform Sentric Music Group.

7. Jukebox launches VC firm

Independent music PR company Jukebox recently announced a venture capital arm and raised $15 million to invest in new music tech.

8. Red Light Management & ThreeSixZero

Some of the large independent music management companies are also getting active in the early-stage venture department. Red Light Management has invested in Komi, Stationhead, Afterparty and Mixhalo. ThreeSixZero is invested in Hook and Maestro. Another example is LVRN, a creative agency with investments in Laylo and Symphony Distribution.

9. Independent music collectives

Hubs like London’s AEI often back local startups and music companies (UKF, SubSoul, several studios and live event companies). Another example is Tileyard, a community of local London music startups.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music. Helping 4,800+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward. Check out the Secretly Weekly playlist for the latest from SD labels and artists.

Does the music industry still invest in new music?

The music industry gets a lot of criticism for no longer backing new artists.

This month Thom Yorke blasted the industry for failing to invest in artist development, and ploughing money into catalog instead.

This feels true, so I wanted to see if I could find any data about it.

Are the major labels still signing artists? Do they still invest in artist development? And how much?

I pulled three data points to try and get closer to the answer:

• New signings: how many new artists have the major labels signed this year?

• A&R spend: how much are the major labels spending on artist costs?

• Industry estimates: what do industry organisations estimate?

Mapping the music industry: new artist development

1. New signings 2026

The major labels have signed a total of 124 new acts since the start of the year, according to the data we pulled from Rostr.

Universal is the most active, signing 46 new acts across all its labels. And the most prolific imprint in the whole industry is Atlantic (owned by Warner Music) which signed 19 new artists so far this year, including Barry Can’t Swim and Emei.

This seems to suggest that majors are still backing new artists, at a rate of nearly one new signing every day.

What we don’t know: deal terms and structures (singles, album, 360?), advance figures, commitment to long-term development. We haven’t tracked the rate-of-change (we don’t know if this is more or less signings than the same period last year).

2. A&R and artist costs

The majors are still signing acts, but how much are they spending? Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group are public companies, so we can look at their financial reports to estimate A&R spend.

Universal

UMG reported €5.83 billion in “artist costs paid” last year, which is where A&R and new artist development budget lives. However, that figure a little misleading and opaque.

We know that €402 million is artist advances (about 7%), which is more than double the previous year, so investing in new music rose substantially.

Beyond that, we don’t know exactly how the budget breaks down (e.g. how much is allocated to marketing, tour support, studio time, long-term artist development etc.) The €5.83 billion figure captures a huge umbrella of artists costs including (i) royalties paid to artists across the roster, (ii) signing and developing new acts and (iii) writedowns on unrecouped advances.

We can assume that (i) royalties paid to artists is almost certainly the largest expenditure in this bucket and likely well over 50%, leaving only a smaller cut for active new music development.

Warner

Warner reported $2.34 billion in artist and repertoire costs last year but this is also reported in a similarly opaque way to Universal. Warner’s A&R costs are spread across i) royalties paid to artists across the roster, (ii) signing and developing new acts and (iii) studio costs.

Again, we can assume that royalties are the biggest cost here, and active artist investment is a smaller slice.

3. Industry estimates

Given that labels don’t break down the specifics, several organisations have tried to drill down and estimate the industry’s actual spend on A&R, marketing and artist development.

• The IFPI estimates that labels spent $8.1 billion globally in A&R and marketing in 2024.

• The BPI estimates that UK labels spent £358.1m in A&R and £136.7m in marketing and promotion in 2021 (the most recent estimate).

Conclusion

Major labels are still signing artists (on a daily basis) and spending up to $8 billion a year on A&R and marketing, so there’s clearly a large artist development engine running.

However, we’re still left with a lot of questions. We don’t know whether those 124 new deals are long-term development commitments or short-term single spikes. We don’t really know how much money is allocated to new artists vs new music from legacy and superstar acts.

The data is quite hopeful (lots of resources and cash still committed to new music). However, like most data in the music industry, the big numbers don’t necessarily tell us the real story, like how much belief, trust and commitment is going into those artists for the long-term. That’s really the heart of the criticisms and unfortunately the raw data doesn’t give us an answer to that one.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music. Helping 4,800+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward. Check out the Secretly Weekly playlist for the latest from SD labels and artists.

The rules for AI generated music are … confusing

Last month Tunecore announced it was banning AI generated music from its distribution platform. If you’re making 100% AI-generated music on “pirate studios” like Suno, you can no longer upload it to Spotify using Tunecore.

This sent me down a rabbit hole. What are the rules at other distributors? And how do the DSPs like Spotify and Apple Music handle AI music when it arrives?

The answer is confusing. There are no consistent clear rules at all.

• Sometimes AI music is banned. Sometimes it’s freely allowed.

• Sometimes you’re allowed a little bit of AI for vocals or drums … but not 100%.

• Sometimes it’s demonetized or blocked from playlists. Sometimes it appears in your recommendations.

• Sometimes it’s tagged publicly. Sometimes just internally.

• Sometimes you have to disclose AI use. Sometimes not.

There’s no unified framework

Almost every distributor, DSP and music platform has a different rule book, and rules are changing all the time. So today we’re mapping out the current landscape of AI rules from two angles.

• Part 1: The Distributors. Which distributors allow you to upload AI generated music, and what rules do they follow?

• Part 2: The DSPs - Which music platforms accept AI generated music, and how do they handle it?

And it’s tricky because no-one really knows whose responsibility it is to enforce the rules.

Part 1. Distributors

Strict 🔴

• CDBaby - The strictest of all distributors. Complete ban on generative AI, even for creative or partial use. AI is only allowed for limited production use like mixing and mastering.

• Tunecore - Tunecore will not accept 100% AI generated music. However, AI used in the creative process is allowed, so long as human creation is “clear, provable and dominant.”

• Identity Music - Bans fully AI generated music, and limits distribution for partially generated tracks.

• AWAL - Bans fully AI generated music and employs human review for partially-generated AI.

Allowed with disclosure 🟠

• Distrokid - Distrokid allows fully and partially generated AI tracks but now requires a disclosure.

• Too Lost - AI music is allowed but requires a disclosure and proof of commercial rights.

• Symphonic - Allowed but requires a disclosure.

• Soundcloud for Artists - Allowed but AI releases are flagged and require additional licensing docs.

• OneRPM - AI is permitted but artists must disclose how AI was used in the creative process.

• Roc Nation Distribution - Allowed with disclosure.

Allowed with limited distribution 🟠

• Amuse - AI generated music is allowed but Amuse restricts distribution to certain platforms such as Qobuz, Meta and YouTube Content ID due to risks over copyright, metadata complication and impersonation / takedown risk.

• United Masters - Allowed but limited distribution to Meta and TikTok.

• Routenote - Allowed but limited distribution to YouTube Content ID.

Fully permitted 🟢

• Ditto - Ditto’s policy is to pass through DSP rules to the artist. You can upload any AI music, but warns that DSPs may reject or demonetize now or in the future.

• ONCE - AI generated tracks are fully allowed as long as you have commercial rights. An extra charge is employed and the money goes to an “artist compensation fund.”

Note: our research largely focuses on the self-serve distributors that handle the long-tail of most artist uploads. Major label distribution and large independent distribution partners do not have public policies and rely on human review.

Part 2: DSPs and music platforms

Strict 🔴

• Bandcamp - Bandcamp is the only platform with a strict ban on AI generated music. It will not allow “music that is generated wholly or substantially by AI.”

Allowed but demonetized 🟠

• YouTube - AI generated music is allowed but YouTube will demonetize if it does not contain sufficient human creation, or if it violates copyright.

• Deezer - Fully AI generated music is publicly tagged, demonetized and removed from editorial and algorithmic playlists. Partially generated tracks are fine, and treated like normal music.

• Qobuz - AI generated music is allowed but will be demonetized and removed from editorial and recommended playlists.

Allowed but supressed 🟠

• Apple Music - In March, Apple Music introduced AI tagging, asking distributors and labels to indicate whether their uploads used AI generation. These tags are optional right now but will be mandatory in the future. Apple is using these tags to actively suppress AI-generated music out of editorial and algorithmic playlists. For this reason, we’re putting Apple Music slightly higher than Spotify in strictness.

Allowed but with some limits 🟢

• Spotify - Spotify introduced voluntary tagging via DDEX, and these will show up publicly in song credits if the artist or labels tags them during distribution. Spotify does not currently restrict AI music from its recommendation engine or playlists, but it does remove “spam” tracks.

• Soundcloud - Soundcloud has internal AI detection tags which it uses to filter out spam or bot-farms.

• Tidal - AI generated tracks are allowed but the artist takes liability for any copyright issues in the future.

• Audiomack - Audiomack does not appear to have a public policy on AI generated music. Some distributors claim that Audiomack may reject AI tracks, but there are definitely AI-generated tracks on the platform. We can’t verify publicly whether these are demonetized or suppressed.

AI rules continue to confuse …

As you can see, there’s no unified framework to follow yet. And it’s still not clear whether responsibility for detecting, policing and attributing AI music lies with the distributor, the DSP or someone else.

There’s a general trend towards increased transparency via tagging and disclosures. And there’s an increasing appetite to suppress and limit fully-generated AI music from discovery and playlists, but those rules are not universally applied yet. Decisions are still made on a platform-by-platform basis.

This confusion is a common theme. A few weeks back we mapped the AI music licensing landscape where the deals are equally chaotic with no uniform framework emerging yet. The music industry is collectively figuring this out in real time, and there are lots of open questions remaining.

All this research is done manually and the rules are changing rapidly, so if we got something wrong in this article please let us know and we’ll try to keep it up to date.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music. Helping 4,700+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward. Check out the Secretly Weekly playlist for the latest from SD labels and artists.

The big music catalog deals are back.

Earlier this month, Sony Music Publishing spent $4 billion to acquire a huge chunk of music catalog (including Justin Bieber, Beyonce and Fleetwood Mac).

Days later, Warner Music bought Red Hot Chili Peppers’ recording catalog for $300 million.

These are crazy numbers.

So … where’s the money coming from?

The major labels are big, but even Sony doesn’t have $4 billion in cash lying around.

The truth is, there’s “quiet money” behind the scenes funding these deals: a web of sovereign wealth funds and private equity giants that love big, juicy music catalog deals.

Today we’ll map out where that “quiet money” comes from, and how it’s structured.

Major label expertise + investment firm money

As you can see, this money does not come solely from the record labels.

Instead, they partner with giant investment firms to fund these deals.

Sometimes they create a “joint venture” — a totally separate company that exists solely to invest in music catalog. Sometimes it’s a one-off deal for a specific artist catalog.

But the playbook is the same:

The investment fund provides the money. The record company brings the expertise, deal-making and manages the catalog. They work together.

For example, catalog acquisition company Chord Music Partners boss John Chapman described the early process of raising money for music catalog as “crawling through glass.” But after partnering with Universal Music: “It is just a clear, fundamental difference – a pipeline of opportunities that I see as a direct result of our partnership with UMG.”

These are MONSTER funds

To be clear, these are not your average investment funds from Silicon Valley.

These are the biggest of the biggest financial whales. For example:

• Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund (manages almost $1 trillion)

• Private equity firms like Bain Capital (war chests of $200 billion+)

These funds are interested in music catalog because it has a relatively safe, predictable return, via streaming royalties and performance royalties.

These type of funds do not take big risks like investing in new artists or new tech platforms.

This context will be important later.

So, who are the major labels’ “quiet money” partners?

Sony

Sony Music Publishing’s main partner is GIC, Singapore’s Sovereign Wealth fund, which manages Singapore’s foreign investments. The fund contributed $2-$3 billion to the recent joint venture which purchased catalog from Justin Bieber, Fleetwood Mac and Beyonce.

Sony also has a $700 million deal with Apollo, a US asset manager. This is a slightly different arrangement. It’s not a join venture, but a ring-fenced $700 million to invest in music catalog and share royalties. This money was put towards buying Queen’s catalog at a record $1.27 billion.

Warner Music Group

Warner’s main JV partner is Bain Capital, a private equity fund that manages $225 billion in assets. The JV has also borrowed money from Goldman Sachs and Fifth-Third Bank. Part of this cash was used last week to secure RHCP’s catalog.

Universal Music Group

Universal is a bit different. It partnered with a music catalog giant called Chord Music Partners. Chord Music Partners has raised a total of $2 billion from private equity firm KKR (now exited), family office Dundee Partners, and private equity firm Searchlight.

It’s not a pure “joint venture” like Warner and Sony. Instead, Universal joined later as partner, acquired a stake in Chord Music, invested $240m+ and now administers the catalog.

Investing in the past?

At first glance, these headline deals might feel quite depressing to anyone that lives on the edge of new music and culture.

It feels like record labels are investing in the past.

$4 billion to buy Fleetwood Mac and RHCP songs feels frustrating when that money could be spent on developing new artists.

But would that money ever go to new artists anyway?

I definitely sympathise with that view, but the counter-argument is …

When you follow the money, it’s clear that cash could never be spent on new artists.

The vast majority of this money comes from sovereign wealth funds and private equity. These funds have very strict rules on how they can invest. They can’t invest in speculative early-stage tech or creative artist development.

The only reason that money is flowing into the music industry is due to the stable, predictable, low-risk yield from catalog. It’s not “taken away” from new artists. It was never there in the first place.

A better question …

Sony can’t spend that $4 billion to break new artists. It’s structurally not possible.

But this giant catalog gives Sony a much stronger core business, and therefore gives them space to take more risks on future music development. Music catalog brings stability and generates predictable revenue for the business.

That should give the major labels confidence to go out and take bigger risks on the front-line records. It should give them breathing room to develop artists for longer.

That’s what I hope to see.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music. Helping 4,700+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward. Check out the Secretly Weekly playlist for the latest from SD labels and artists.

The UK is undoubtedly one of the best places in the world for new music culture.

The birth place of Rough Trade.

Home to XL Records, EMI and so many foundational record labels.

But lately I’m getting the tingly feeling that London is also levelling up in terms of music tech.

Maybe I’m biased (we are UK-based!) but London is in a sweet spot right now where its music culture is colliding with a rapidly growing startup, tech and investment culture.

Today’s map is a quick glance at London’s music and tech scene. A highlight reel of record labels, music brands, and its emerging music tech startups. This map is by no means exhaustive, and should serve as a starting point to explore further. I’m sure I missed plenty - please feel free to comment or email me to let me know what we missed.

Record Labels

The UK’s influence on music culture is enormous. We could publish an entire report on our independent record label history … but here’s a taster.

• Decca - You can trace Universal Music Group’s all the way back to Decca, founded in 1929.

• EMI - Founded in London and now part of Universal Music Group.

• XL Recordings - Legendary indie label home to Adele, Radiohead, Prodigy.

• Beggars Group - The umbrella group for XL, 4AD, Matador and Rough Trade Records.

• Ninja Tune - Electronic music label (Bonobo, Roots Manuva)

• AWAL - Label services company, now part of Sony Music.

• Ministry of Sound - Iconic dance music brand.

• Rough Trade - The most famous independent record store, turned label.

More: Factory Records (Manchester, to be fair), Domino, Anjunadeep, Transgressive, Wichita, Black Butter, Communion, PMR, Bella Union, Chess Club.

Established Music Tech

London might not have the same music tech impact as New York and San Francisco but we’ve still produced some major companies in the last decade.

• Shazam - Music recognition app.

• Dolby - Soundsystem and sound technology.

• Mixcloud - For radio shows, DJs, mixtapes and curators.

• DICE - One of the leading live event platforms and apps.

Brands

These brands grew out of the UK’s independent music culture scenes.

• Boiler Room - DJ sets and live events.

• Sofar Sounds - Stripped back live sessions and events.

• NTS Radio - Independent radio broadcast.

• UKF - Underground electronic music channel.

More: RinseFM, Subsoul

Media

• BBC (Live Lounge, Radio 1, 1Xtra, 6Music)

• Music Business Worldwide

• Music Ally

• STVDIO (hi)

Startups

This is just a quick glance at some of the music tech startups building in London (or the broader UK) right now. It’s impossible to list them all, so do let me know what we missed.

• Mozart AI - Generative music AI platform.

• RoEx - AI music mastering and production tools.

• Serenade - Chart-compatible physical music merch.

• Un:hurd - Music marketing and promotion platform.

• Creds - Music licensing infrastructure.

• Spitfire Audio - Orchestral sample library (acquired by Splice)

• SYNTHO - Music production courses.

• Infinite Catalog - Royalties accounting and analytics.

• Audoo - Performance royalty platform.

• ROLI - Music hardware company (Seaboard and piano learning tools)

• Vochlea - Music hardware (turns your voice into MIDI)

• Monetunes - Unclaimed royalties platform.

• KLEF - Fan data capture.

• Curve Royalty Systems - Music royalty platform (acquired by Downtown)

• Voice Swap - AI voice swapping tool.

• Pirate.com - 700 studio rooms for DJs, podcasts and rehearsals.

• Musiqmesh - Catalog management.

• Audiogen - Research lab for AI music creation.

Investors

• Jukebox Ventures (currently deploying)

• Imaginary Ventures (Hook)

• Edge VC (ROLI, Pirate, Audioboom)

• Mercuri (Mozart AI, Resemble AI)

• Haatch Ventures (GigPig, RoEx)

• 528Hz (deploying)

• Tileyard

• AEI Ventures (UKF, SubSoul)

• Music Tech UK - The leading trade association and community for founders, investors and music tech startups.

Live

• Academy Music Group (AMG) - The company behind Academy music venues across the UK.

• Primary International - Leading UK live agent.

• Broadwick - Live music entertainment brand.

• GigPig - Live music booking platform.

• Amplead - Digital tools for festivals, venues, live agents.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music with deep visual reports. Helping 4,600+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward. Listen to the latest SD releases on the Secretly Weekly playlist.

For better or worse, music culture is often driven by platforms that push the boundaries of music copyright.

• Napster

• Soundcloud (bootleg remixes)

• DatPiff (ripped mixtapes and samples)

• Pirate radio

• YouTube takedowns

• TikTok (unlicensed brand UGC)

• MySpace

Technology always moves faster than copyright rules, and the music industry is always chasing to keep up.

The winners in this environment are often those who dare to push the limit furthest, while the ones who play by the rules often die.

Which is why absolutely no-one should be surprised about Suno.

Suno is the classic example of moving fast and asking forgiveness later. It is music history repeating itself.

Suno worth $5 billion … and still almost no licenses

Last week Suno announced a third major investment round, valuing the company at $5 billion.

I believe it’s now the fastest-growing music company in history (although private deals make it hard to say for certain). Whichever way you look at it, the numbers are wild.

• 100 million users in three years.

• On pace for $300 million annual revenue.

• 7 million songs generated every single day.

It’s the most disruptive and aggressive new model the industry has dealt with since piracy.

Suno is leagues ahead of any competitor. In terms of size, valuation, usage, and narrative dominance. And, despite all the lawsuits, it clearly has no trouble attracting investor capital.

How did Suno get so far ahead of everyone else? It’s all licensing (or lack of).

AI music licensing: where are we at?

Suno largely trained its music models on unlicensed music, claiming it as “fair use.” All three major labels launched lawsuits in retaliation but, to date, Suno has only settled with Warner Music. It has no other copyright deals or licensed libraries.

Compare that to everyone else in the market …

A patchwork of licensing deals

A large number of AI music companies are busy trying to “do the right thing” by negotiating deals with different rightsholders, or working with licensed music libraries to stay on the right side of the law.

Meanwhile, Suno is doing the opposite, and leaping ahead of everyone else. To explain this a little better, we can further differentiate the categories.

1. The “ask forgiveness” category

• Suno is in a league of its own in this category. They trained their models on copyright music without asking (allegedly ripping from YouTube). And, despite enormous lawsuits, they have only cut one deal with a major label (Warner).

2. The major label partner category

• Udio started out in the first category but when lawsuits landed at their door, they quickly cut deals with every big organisation except Sony Music Group. Udio was once Suno’s biggest competitor, but now it's changing its product to become a “walled garden” (users cannot download or export audio off the platform) and will deprecate old models.

• Spotify is planning a range of AI remix tools, and they went straight to all the majors and indie organisations to cut licensing deals in advance.

• Klay is a mysterious AI music model (that still hasn’t launched yet). But they’ve landed deals with all three major labels and reportedly working on AI remixing.

3. The indie-first category

• ElevenLabs took a different approach. They started out by going to the indie organisations (Merlin and Kobalt) to clear licensing deals. They also used big libraries of royalty-free and stock music catalog.

4. The royalty-free library category

• Ace-Step is an open source model trained on vast libraries of royalty-free stock music.

• Stable Audio also used large libraries of royalty-free music. Although it recently cut partner deals with Warner and Universal Music Group in late 2025 to boost its libraries.

• Other “ethical” platforms. There are many other smaller platforms that use different versions of “royalty-free” training. For example, they train models on compositions made by their team members or compensate artists directly for contributing songs for training.

5. Secret fifth thing …

• Google’s Lyria has a slightly unique approach. Google claims that its YouTube terms of service gives it the necessary rights to train music models. However, there’s no explicit wording in those agreements that covers AI music generation. Outside that, Google does has a limited AI licensing deal with Universal Music Group that covers some artists.

  ---

Why does it matter?

It matters because these early license decisions make a huge difference in who grows fastest, and who ultimately captures and controls the market. It effectively decides who has power to dictate terms and economics in the future.

Let’s explain …

1. Who has the best model?

The “best” model is subjective, but Suno’s is clearly powerful because it’s trained on the world’s biggest library of music across pop stars, indie artists and every possible genre. Suno’s model is therefore more advanced than others trained only on royalty-free stock music or limited indie catalogs.

2. This leads to the most users and growth scale

Because Suno’s model is advanced, it attracts the most users. People want to generate tracks that sound like The Weeknd, not elevator music.

Suno also allows downloading, exporting and sharing which triggers organic growth. Meanwhile, platforms that cut deals with the majors are restricted to a “walled garden” where they can’t take music off the platform. Their growth potential is cut off.

3. This leads to the most revenue and investment

When a platform attracts more users, it generates more revenue. That gives the company a higher multiple for valuation and attracts more investors.

4. This leads to more insulation from legal battles

The more investment they attract, the more they can spend to fight legal battles. Investors can underwrite the risk of prolonged lawsuits because the user-base is growing so quickly. The bigger and more ubiquitous a platform grows, the harder it is to regulate.

5. This leads to worse deals for artists and rightsholders

The longer this goes on, the bigger Suno gets. The more power and leverage it gains. The more people come to expect the speed and quality of AI output.

And this puts rightsholders (major labels, independent labels, and individual artists) on the back foot when negotiating terms. Ultimately this ends up with weaker economics for the artists.

Where have we seen this before?

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it is! The music industry is very often defined and built by those who “ask for forgiveness.”

The streaming era

Napster is the biggest example of this approach. The piracy era was defined by platforms with no regard for copyright (or any other laws). Napster didn’t ask for permission, they just unleashed music on the new internet leaving the music industry in a panic.

History forgets that Napster wasn’t the only one. Dozens of other early platforms tried to do digital downloads “the right way,” by licensing indie catalog and trying to strike deals the majors. But they were denied. Or too slow. Their music catalog was too limited. They asked permission, and now no-one remembers who they are.

And while Napster didn’t win, it put all the major music companies into a position of weakness. The world now expected free access to music. So when Spotify came along with a legal solution, the music industry accepted weak economics which has defined the music industry since.

History repeats?

You can find dozens of these examples through music’s history.

• YouTube’s early growth was powered by its “upload anything” approach, only taking down songs when DMCA claims were made.

• Soundcloud and unlicensed remixes.

• DatPiff and unlicensed mixtapes and samples.

• Pirate radio that refused performance royalty licenses.

• UGC content on TikTok that bypassed sync licensing.

• Live Nation violating its anti-trust rules by forcing venues to use Ticketmaster.

Will the music industry learn?

The rapid rise of Suno is not surprising.

Tech does not slow down. And people will always push the boundaries of music copyright.

The prize for winning is a billion-dollar company. And the risk of “playing by the rules” means your company dies.

The only surprise is that the music industry is still surprised!

Somehow we’re blindsided. Still too slow to react. Still put our head in the sand and pretend it will go away. Ethical founders can’t get started. Indeed, multiple founders in the AI space have told me that they spent years trying and failing to get licenses with no response.

People trying to do things the “right way” get ignored, while those who cut corners get to shape the music industry.

Conclusion

It’s too soon to say whether Suno becomes Napster and gets lawyered out of existence. Or if they become YouTube and grow power and influence before finding a compromise with rightsholders (I think the latter, if I had to guess).

But there’s a structural problem here that I don’t really have a solution for, other than urging the industry to act with more urgency when new technology arises. To react with more open-mindedness and curiosity even if we don’t like where things are going. And to seek out those people who are building ethically and give them tools, licensing, sandboxes and support before it’s too late.

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music. Helping 4,500+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward.

Artists don’t own their audience

We live in a world where you can play a headline show but still have no idea who came to it.

You can spend years building a following on social media, but your new album announcement still only reaches 5% of your followers.

You can hit 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify with no way to message them.

As musicians we feel these problems deeply: platforms or corporations own our audience and we can lose access to them at any moment.

Obviously I’m not the first person to tell you this. There’s endless hype around “owning your audience” and every artist knows they’re supposed to build a direct connection to their fans via email or SMS.

The problem is … no-one really tells you how to do it.

Direct to fan … but how??

Last week I spoke to the team at Laylo, a fan data tool that powers campaigns for Sabrina Carpenter, Skrillex and others, and I asked for their advice.

How do the best artists actually turn their fans into an owned audience? When are the key moments that convert the best? And how can smaller artists copy them?

Based on 200 million data points collected by Laylo, there are three clear hot-spots that jump out. Today we’re mapping them and listing some tools you can use to capitalize.

The tl;dr

1. Pre-release: the tease of new music creates a strong fomo moment to sign-up.

2. Passive conversions: You can collect steady and consistent fan sign-ups from your website or socials, but you can really accelerate this with a good incentive. (Note: Instagram has the best conversion - we’ll get into this later).

3. Tour cycle: The biggest and most powerful moment is the tour cycle, when the excitement and engagement with fans is the highest.

Let’s go through them all in more detail.

Quick caveat

Much of the data and case studies here come from relatively established artists. Of course, it’s easier to convert an owned audience when you have a large following and listener-base already. “Direct to fan” is not a single magical solution, as we’ve written plenty about, and it’s never as simple as replicating a bigger artists’ playbook.

However, this data still provides a lot of insight into fan behaviour which you can put into practice from the very earliest days to start building a foundation. We’ve also tried to give simplified variations if you’re in the early stages of your music career.

Hotspot 1. Before a Release

The anticipation before a release is the perfect moment to build a fan relationship. People love to hear unreleased music before anyone else so they’re much more likely to sign up. For example:

In 2025, Skrillex famously posted this picture …

The next day Skrillex sent the full 34 track album (on Dropbox!) to everyone who signed up, before the album was available on Spotify and streaming. It drove tens of thousands of sign-ups.

Not only did it convert fans into an “owned audience” it turned into a viral moment of its own through organic sharing and fomo.

Obviously, if you’re Skrillex, you can tease anything and drive sign-ups. But the same structure still applies for smaller independent musicians.

How to do it:

• Rather than doing a Spotify pre-save campaign you can give fans early access to music in exchange for a phone number or email. Even if it’s only ten people, make sure those fans hear it first.

• Offer unreleased audio, remixes, demos, acoustic or different versions of the track as a teaser incentive to subscribe.

• Host listening parties with an RSVP to hear new music before wide release.

Key tools:

• Laylo (drops feature)

• OpenStage

• B.Stage

• EVEN (early access to music)

• Vault.fm (drop exclusive music)

• Forever Fan

Hotspot 2. “Always-on” sign-ups (Instagram is powerful)

Most artists have a passive sign-up form. Maybe a LinkTree signup or a website form for emails.

However, you can dramatically increase its effectiveness by linking it to an incentive. According to Laylo, sign-ups are 7x stronger when linked to an incentive, drop or call-to-action. A basic landing page or sign-up form might not be strong enough. So make sure you give fans a reason to join your world!

The power of Instagram?

Instagram is a surprising winner for capturing passive sign-ups, giving you the fastest route to convert your social audience into an “owned audience.”

For example, Sombr recently collected 45,000 signups from a single Instagram Story. According to Luminate’s recent report, Instagram has the highest concentration of actively-engaged music superfans, and fans on IG are more likely to convert than TikTok. Instagram is also better set-up to capture fans via bio links and dms.

How to do it:

• Always have an email or SMS sign-up visible on your bios and website (ideally linked to an incentive such as exclusive music, merch reward, presale or early access).

• Make sure you always have a fan-capture tool clearly visible on your Instagram profile, and regularly post in your Story flow.

Tools:

• Substack

• Bandzoogle (basic artist landing page)

• Bandcamp (free track in exchange for email)

• Linktree (basic link-in-bio page)

• Laylo + Instagram (advanced capture can even trigger auto-dms to fans that engage with you on IG prompting them to sign up)

• Openstage Fanbase API (create an entire branded website and experience to covert fans).

Hotspot 3. Live events and touring

However … the most important moment (by far) is your live shows.

Laylo says 70% of fan list growth happens during tour cycles. This makes sense. Live shows are the point of most excitement and most engagement. Plus there are lots of “moments” to capture fans: tour announcements, RSVPs, presales, ticket sales and the show itself.

Capturing fans at the show

One of the biggest new routes to capture fans is at the live event itself. Artists notoriously capture little or no information about who’s at their shows, but that’s starting to change. Here are some recent examples:

• Japanese Breakfast - the indie pop band place a QR code in the venue that fans can scan to win a signed postcard or a merch bundle. It’s capturing hundreds of phone numbers and emails every night, all routed back to their fan management platform.

• Mount Joy - Mount Joy did a similar thing, where one fan who scans the QR code at the venue gets to watch the band from the side of the stage.

• Alicia Keys - gave away signed set lists on her recent US tour, generating 31,500 email sign-ups over the two month tour.

• Corey Kent - the country star generated 75,000 sign-ups with the same strategy.

They’re doing this with a tool called Set.live to power the QR code. Then linking all the emails and phone numbers to fan platforms like OpenStage or Laylo.

What about smaller artists?

Of course, when you’re playing 6,000 cap venues like Corey Kent, it’s easy to drive a lot of conversions. But even as a small artist you can still capitalize on any live event.

1. Use RSVPs to capture anyone with intent to come to a show.

2. If you’re hosting a show or pop-up, use a service like ITM where you keep all emails and data of attendees.

3. Use QR codes to capture fans at the show, whether it’s a support slot, local festival, pop-up, street performance or headliner.

Combine these live moments with a strong call-to-action (like free merch or exclusive content opportunities) you massively increase the chance of converting those early fans to your owned audience.

Tools:

• Set.Live - powers live experience QR codes (integrates with fan management tools OpenStage and Laylo).

• ITM - powers tickets, RSVPs, merch all in one platform with complete visibility into attendees.

• Dice - digital ticketing with fan insights.

• Laylo - Ticket drop links and RSVPs.

• Vault.fm - Ticket drops

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.

STVDIO maps the future of music. Helping 4,500+ artists, music industry professionals and founders navigate music industry shifts with weekly visual maps.

Supported by Secretly Distribution: For more than 25 years, Secretly Distribution (SD) has been enabling independents to challenge the mainstream. SD is not only a full-service global physical and digital music distributor, but it also provides hands-on marketing, financial and technological support to some of the most exciting record labels and artists across geographies and genres. By supporting businesses who are self-reliant by choice, not just necessity, SD champions the musicians and creative works that drive culture forward.

This week BMG merged with Concord.

Some are calling it the “fourth major label” … which isn’t 100% accurate.

However, it is the biggest music acquisition of the year and, although exact figures are not public, it values the Concord takeover at ~$7 billion, making it one of the biggest music industry deals in history (rivalling EMI’s $6.6 billion takeover in 2007).

Operating under the name BMG, this deal will create the fourth biggest music company on the planet, behind Universal Music Group, Warner Music and Sony.

Today we’ll map out exactly what happened in this merger, whether it counts as the “fourth major” and a quick analysis about what it means for the music industry.

Primer: publishing vs recording

To understand much of this analysis, you need to know the difference between music recording rights and music publishing rights.

• Recorded music - The actual recording of a song. The version you export from your DAW and upload to Spotify. You generate recording royalties when it gets streamed or bought (digital download or vinyl, etc.)

• Publishing - The composition of the song. The lyrics, the notes, the essence of the song in whatever format. You generate publishing royalties on this when it gets played in public, on TV, film and video games, or covered by another musician.

There’s some crossover — for example, you earn a small amount of publishing revenue when your music is streamed on Spotify.

The BMG Concord merger primarily weights towards publishing which is why it doesn’t necessarily create a “fourth major label.”

Two independent giants

To begin we’ll explain BMG and Concord as separate entities.

BMG

BMG is one of the world’s biggest music publishers, with a 7% global share of publishing catalog. Although it’s corporate-owned by German media company Bertelsmann, it’s considered “independent” because it’s outside the three major label machines and it doesn’t really compete on releasing new records (<1% global recorded music share). So what does it own?

• Publishing: BMG’s publishing catalog includes Bebe Rexha, Bruno Mars, John Legend, Lewis Capaldi, Rolling Stones and Tina Turner.

• Recording: BMG does operate a record label and owns several label imprints including BBR Music Group, Rise Records, Sanctuary Records, Telamo, Trojan Records, World Circuit Records.

  • Artists across the roster include: Blondie, Kylie Minogue, Chief Keef, Rita Ora, Placebo, Alt J, Iron Maiden.

• Infrastructure and tech: BMG has its own distribution engine and deals with Spotify, Apple Music etc. It also has a deep in house sync-licensing team to place music in films and TV.

Concord

Concord refers to itself as the “world’s leading independent music company.” Like BMG, it’s home to a monster catalog of publishing rights with over a million works (approximately ~5% of global publishing share).

Concord is also home to several front-line record labels, (about ~1.8% global recorded music share - moreso than than BMG).

• Publishing: Concord’s publishing catalog includes Daft Punk, The 1975, Imagine Dragons, REM, John Coltrane, as well as theatrical rights to Hamilton and The Sound of Music.

• Recording: Concord owns approximately 31 label imprints in total including Ninja Tune, Fearless Records, Rounder Records and its own Concord Records.

  • Artists: Denzel Curry, St. Vincent, Iggy Pop, Bonobo, Bicep.

• Infrastructure and tech: Concord also owns a distribution service called Stem.

What does the new merger look like?

This is a very pure “merge”. The two companies will combine all their catalog and resources, but house them under new names:

• BMG Publishing: All publishing rights from BMG and Concord will merge under “BMG Publishing.”

• Concord Recordings: All recording rights from both companies will merge under “Concord Records.”

• Infrastructure: Both companies will share underlying infrastructure and tech including their distribution, accounting, AI licensing, sync licensing etc.

Is this the “fourth major”?

Yes and no.

🟢 Yes: The new BMG absolutely rivals the majors in terms of publishing catalog. The combined entity gives BMG approximately 12% global share of publishing - which is roughly equal to Warner Chappell.

🟠 Not really: In terms of revenue, BMG is projected to make $2 billion annually. That’s less than Warner’s ~$6.5 billion, and much less than UMG and Sony’s ~$10-$12 billion.

🔴 No: BMG’s front-line recording business is tiny by comparison to the major labels. BMG (0.85% global share) and Concord (1.8% share) has a combined market of ~2.6%. That’s compared to Universal at 37.48%, Sony at 25.92%, Warner at 16.43%.

It is accurate to say BMG is now the fourth largest music company, and significantly bigger than any other independent music group, but it still sits in a category below the majors in terms of sheer size. And it’s not really correct to call it a “major label” since is commands a comparatively tiny segment of recording rights.

What does this mean for the music industry?

It’s hard to say at this point and we’ll avoid too much speculation.

Positives? This deal likely gives the independent music sector a stronger, united voice in terms of leveraging deals with DSPs and AI licensing. Having the weight of BMG alongside Merlin in the negotiating room helps balance out the loud voices of the three majors.

It may also give the independent sector more weight in terms of securing deals. With its new resources, BMG can hold its own against the majors and keep more deals independent. It may give the label imprints like Ninja Tune more capital and firepower to sign deals.

Downsides? It does continue our trend of music industry consolidation. Music businesses are being absorbed into larger corporate entities at a fast rate. Take Ninja Tune - a fully independent label six months ago - acquired by Concord, then merged into a $14 billion dollar entity. Not necessarily a bad thing (by all accounts Concord imprints still operate with full independence). But is this crowding out diversity of music ownership? Will it bid up deal prices? Consolidate opportunities for sync licensing and general routes to market?

I think it’s too early to say for sure, so we’ll leave today’s analysis with the broad merger specifics and keep watching how this develops!

Thanks for reading

If you found this useful, please do forward it to your colleagues or share with your friends. If you have questions or thoughts, reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email at benjamin@stvdio.io. See you next week with another music industry report.