AI

On Spotify’s latest earnings call, there was a few moments, including the quote “Technology is seldom disruptive on its own. Significant disruption happens when new technologies enable new asymmetric business models.” The real question isn’t whether AI is powerful, but whether it enables new business models entirely.

Last week I was at Music Ally Connect in London- and as you can well imagine AI took it’s usual place as the topic du jour. Despite being well trodden ground there was some fascinating elements- both trends from the day at large and specific comments that gave insight to how the Music industry is currently both thinking about and preparing for (/guarding against) AI. Mostly these broadly fell into 3 camps- intense negativity, bullish positivity and cautious ambivalence.

AI is leverage like humanity has never seen before- but it is amplifying both signal and noise. AI isn’t creating wisdom- it doesn’t make us smarter, or more insightful, or even necessarily more effective. It is simply scaling what already exists.

From continuous large scale investments and strategic manoeuvres to tales of narrowing margins and constant restructuring, the music publishing industry seems caught in a tension between optimism and anxiety. On the one hand, Goldman Sachs’ Music in the Air 2025 and Bolero’s subsequent analysis paint a bullish medium and long-term picture. Meanwhile, publishing revenues alone- according to Goldman Sachs- are projected to rise more modestly.

In 2017 Google’s AlphaZero defeated the longstanding championship winning Stockfish 8 program at the game of Chess. AlphaZero only learned the game through machine learning, by playing itself. To conquer the world’s most powerful chess engine it only took 4 hours of training. 4 hours vs. the entire accumulation of human knowledge about the game. In Harari’s words- “Because AlphaZero learned nothing from a human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional

‘Artificial Intelligence’ is no longer a theoretical technology hovering on the horizon, but is quickly (and with ever increasing speed) being embedded into everyday workflows- powering products and increasingly shaping entire industries. For the music business, as for every other sector, the question is no longer if AI will matter but how it is being applied in practice today- and where it is likely to drive competitive advantage tomorrow.

Art has a fine line to navigate- a continuum where defining itself has far reaching implications- from the law to the economy. In almost every era of history, the same debate has resurfaced in music: art, or business? Music is expression, storytelling, and ‘soul’. It is connectivity and communication that crosses borders and languages- transcending individuals, able to curate emotion, to create community and even manifest radical action. The romantic answer is “art,” of co

The pace of change is accelerating. This week we released a new, free tool on the Fix Music website: a clean, simple way to retrieve recording metadata- including ISRCs, artwork, release info and more- from any Spotify link, in downloadable bulk format. No login. No fee. No strings. It’s already helping users save time and get what they need, fast. And… it was entirely built by AI.

That’s right. Another newsletter about data in the music industry. It’s a hill I’m willing to die on- that data is the critical lifeblood of the entire ecosystem, and that those who grasp this the quickest will be the ones who accelerate their businesses the fastest.

The Major record labels and two of the most prominent generative music platforms, Suno and Udio, have reportedly moved from trading lawsuits to negotiating licenses. These generative AI platforms were(/still are) facing litigation for using copyrighted music to train their models. Now they’re sitting at the table with the very same rights holding companies, working out deals that will both legitimise and monetise their models.

AI is clearly having a moment. Photo by Possessed Photography From image generation to songwriting tools, the emergence of generative AI has sparked widespread debate in the creative industries. In music publishing, much of the discussion has understandably centred around authorship, copyright, and how to safeguard the value of human creativity in a world where machines can mimic it. But that’s only one side of the story. If we zoom out and look beyond the courtroom, AI has t