The two latest music-industry acquisitions cover different areas: one an extension of AI-assisted music-making, and the other an expansion into Australasia and Asia-Pacific.
Author Archives: Stuart Dredge
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Spotify’s latest Afrobeats move is a festival partnership
The deal sees Spotify become the official ‘sponsor and exclusive streaming partner’ for the three-day Afrobeats-focused festival, which takes place this weekend in Portimão, Portugal. The streaming service will launch an Afro Nation hub on its service with an official playlist and “selected performance videos after the event” according to Nigerian news outlet Business Day.
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Justin Bieber continues post-Coachella surge with live album
Immediately after Justin Bieber’s first set at Coachella this year, we saw some mutterings online of the ‘he was playing his old YouTube videos and singing along, that’s that about?’ […]
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Qobuz revenues grew 45.7% in 2025 as it reached 1.2m users
Streaming service Qobuz has regularly been in the press noting its growth, but this morning it has actually published some figures to quantify that. The French company says that its […]
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Anthropic’s Claude FM is a 24-7 music stream on YouTube
Thus far, AI giant Anthropic’s main interaction with the music industry has been a legal battle with publishers, who are suing it for copyright infringement of their lyrics. More positively, […]
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Francisco Partners exits its investment in Muse Group
Muse Group is the parent firm of brands and companies including Ultimate Guitar, Hal Leonard, MuseScore and Audacity among others: a key company in the music-education and tech space. Its […]
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Peanuts music rightsholder launches four infringement lawsuits
As Charlie Brown might say: good grief! The music from the Peanuts TV shows and films is at the centre of four new lawsuits filed by its rightsholder Lee Mendelson […]
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Amazon’s Alexa+ debuts feature to create AI-generated podcasts
‘This Week’s Biggest Music Releases’ sounds like an interesting podcast, right? But there’s a twist in this case: it’s a show created entirely by AI, as part of Amazon’s latest […]
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WMG and Bain Capital splash $300m on Red Hot Chili Peppers catalogue
Warner Music Group clearly realised it didn’t want to be miser when it came to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ recordings. The major’s joint-venture with Bain Capital has reportedly splashed […]
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The Grateful Dead team up with Nugs for ‘Play Dead’ archive
Venerable US jam-band The Grateful Dead have one of the largest archives of live recordings, thanks to their longstanding policy of supporting fans who wanted to tape their shows. Now […]
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BTS ‘Arirang’ album was streamed 739.1m times in first week
You don’t need us to tell you that the BTS comeback album ‘Arirang’ was a hit in its first week. But you might need Luminate’s number-crunchers to tell you exactly […]
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Spotify and labels seek $322m default judgement from Anna’s Archive
‘Shadow library’ website Anna’s Archive’s decision to scrape Spotify and announced that it would be making a huge stash of metadata and audio files available last year is increasingly looking like the […]
