follow the money
We’re a week into 2025, and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have gone full MAGA and parts of Los Angeles are burning.
Much like the world in general, the music business seems to be at an inflection point, its dominant subscription-streaming business model challenged by its success. As growth slows in the U.S. and Europe, labels and artists must contend with an avalanche of new music, disruption from distribution startups, and a possible ban on TikTok in the U.S. Then there’s the looming threat of generative artificial intelligence, which raises the uncomfortable prospect that computers could write songs about a dark future in which computers write songs about a dark future.
In a lighter spirit, here are my predictions for the coming year: the good, the bad, the ugly — and the nerdy.
TikTok’s time will not run out — but the issue won’t go away
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The case against TikTok is tighter than many people assume — the U.S. has always restricted foreign ownership of some media (which is why Sony is the only company that owned a movie studio but not a television network). But at a time when both political parties need to show that they matter to young people, the availability of TikTok is a tempting problem to solve. So it’s easy to imagine a compromise — which will last unless tensions rise with China and mysteriously popular videos portray Taiwan as a breakaway province.
Catalogs will continue to sell — but it will be obvious that some were overvalued
The market for publishing catalogs and other rights depends mostly on economics, but demographics matter, too. Baby Boomer performers and songwriters are at an age when they’re doing estate planning, and since many have led complicated personal lives, it’s often simpler to sell assets rather than divide them. That, and streaming growth, will keep the market steady overall. But it will emerge that at least some of these acquisitions weren’t worth the price. Any market only has so many blue-chip assets.
Trump’s administration will settle the federal antitrust case against Live Nation — but some states won’t back off
President Joe Biden’s administration made antitrust a priority, and the Justice Department’s case against Live Nation symbolized its ambition. (The case is complicated.) Most Republicans disdain antitrust enforcement and vice-president-elect JD Vance seems to favor it, but Trump’s consistent desire for visible wins on popular issues will tempt him to settle and declare victory. The states that joined the Justice Department case might not agree, however, and they could continue to pressure the company in other ways.
This will be the winter of our diss-content — but it will not last
Some feuds only have winners. Together, the six tracks at the center of the rap battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake generated nearly $15.4 million in streaming, digital sales and publishing revenue by late November, according to a Billboard estimate based on Luminate data. No wonder the Drake freestyle “Fighting Irish” already appeared briefly on Jan. 3. Expect a few more lyrical salvos, one or two of which could do well. After that, hip-hop fans will move on.
More mergers are coming — at high prices
The Trump administration may move to limit market concentration in technology and some sectors of the media business, but the recorded music business won’t be a priority. If European regulators approve Universal Music Group’s acquisition of Downtown Music Holdings, another label group will buy another distributor. At what price, though? Companies, like catalogs, are selling for high multiples — especially distributors, which are strategically important to maintain market share and ensure access to talent. How much is too much? We’ll soon find out.
Concert ticket prices will keep rising — while Live Nation gets the blame and the money
As my colleague Dave Brooks points out, some concertgoers have had sticker shock longer than others have been alive, yet they keep paying top dollar to see their favorite artists. Prices will rise most for big shows, boosted by FOMO and the ability to tell everyone you were there on social media. Live Nation will take the blame and make more money, even though prices have more to do with supply and demand — there are only so many tickets to go around.
“Streaming 2.0” will take off — and we’ll figure out what it means
Subscription streaming saved the recorded music business, but its flaws are starting to show. Online platforms are full of AI elevator music and sped-up versions of existing songs. Meanwhile, rightsholders are pushing for a price increase. The solution, according to UMG, is “Streaming 2.0,” a concept introduced at UMG’s capital markets day presentation and mentioned again in the company’s announcement of its new deal with Amazon Music. The basic idea is to segment pricing, to drive up ARPU by offering more value to superfans. This is the year we’ll get some details.
Streaming services will set themselves apart from rivals — at least a little
The tiered pricing model implied by Streaming 2.0 means online platforms could be incentivized to offer additional content or functionality for superfans. Exclusives died in 2016, when the industry’s focus was on adding subscribers. Now it needs to get some of them to pay more. Imagine extra tracks, like those that go to big-box retailers, or behind-the-scenes video — content that’s worth something to a relatively small number of superfans but won’t capture the interest of casual fans.
Emerging markets will keep emerging — but will stay that way for some time
As streaming growth slows in the U.S. and Europe, all eyes are on emerging markets — countries in South America, Africa and the Middle East. The growth is impressive, and the excitement is palpable, but some of these markets account for so little revenue that it will take some time for them to matter as much as people expect. For the next decade, most of them will bring in less revenue than vinyl records in the U.S.
At least one major star will go all-in on Trump — and many fans won’t care
As Trump prepares to take office, the resistance is losing its persistence — especially in the media business. Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger signed off on subsidiary ABC’s settlement with Trump, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would prioritize free speech, in a way that looks like he kissed Trump’s ring. Before 2026, at least one major pop star will follow, either out of genuine enthusiasm or just because it’s easier. The expected outrage will not materialize.
Classic rock is still big — it’s the pictures that are getting smaller.
The definitive modern pop music documentary was Beatles Anthology, the 1995 multi-night television project released with three CD sets of band outtakes and a coffee table book. More recent years brought Ron Howard’s 2016 documentary about the band’s touring years, Peter Jackson’s 2021 series about the making of Let It Be, and the self-explanatory Beatles ’64. In 2027, the Beatles’ Apple Corps will release four more films, one about each individual member of the band.
Bob Dylan, like the Beatles, has always loomed too large for one movie. Don’t Look Back, arguably the most powerful rock documentary ever made, followed Dylan’s 1965 tour of the U.K. Martin Scorsese’s 2005 No Direction Home chronicled the first five years of his career. Then the director made another documentary, this one full of fictional elements and in-jokes, just about Dylan’s 1975-’76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
Now James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which opened Christmas Day in the U.S., offers a fictionalized take on the first chapter of Dylan’s career, from 1961 through the 1965 concert at which he “went electric.” Timothée Chalamet stars as Dylan, with Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as a character based on Suze Rotolo (the woman pictured on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan). It’s a fantastic film, and the performances are incredible — Chalamet captures Dylan’s lost-boy charisma, and Norton channels Seeger’s inflexible idealism perfectly. The movie, based on author Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!, took in more than $23 million during its first week in theaters, and reviews have been almost universally favorable.
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The story of the movie is anything but unknown, and there’s not much suspense in it — Dylan grows up fast in the Greenwich Village folk scene, then plays an electric rock set at the Newport Folk Festival, upsetting much of the audience. Dylan’s early career now has the quality of myth, so even the most casual rock fan knows where the story is going — the joy is in seeing it get there in the hands of such talented storytellers. How surprising was Dylan’s decision to play with a rock band, given that the half-electric album Bringing It All Back Home had been out for three months and the single “Like A Rolling Stone” came out five days before the show? Were people booing because Dylan went electric, because the volume obscured his voice, or because his new songs weren’t political? Wald’s excellent book gets at the truth behind the myth — the movie just retells it.
And why not? Stories become myths partly because they’re compelling, and A Complete Unknown evokes nothing so much as a superhero origin story — except that in Dylan’s case, so much of his origin involves making up his actual origin as he went along. In the movie, by the time people realize that this brash young Jewish kid from Minnesota didn’t really work in a traveling circus, he had managed to acquire his own mystique. (In real life, it was a bit more complicated.) As with comic book movies, this leaves plenty of room for sequels, and jokes about this have already been made.
Now’s the time: Chalamet captures Dylan so well that I hope someone signs him up for a sequel based on Dylan’s 1965 tour with the Band, ending with his 1966 motorcycle crash. After that, there’s a domestic drama to be made about Dylan’s retreat into family life in Woodstock, ending with his divorce and Blood on the Tracks. That’s only the first decade and a half of Dylan’s career — there’s another movie to be made about Dylan’s born-again period, when he again offered new music to fans who didn’t receive it well. And what about a comeback story on the making of Oh Mercy or Time Out of Mind?
Dylan’s career lends itself to a certain kind of expansive storytelling, partly because he’s changed so much. (Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There had six different actors essentially playing six different Dylans.) But it’s also worth asking if Dylan is pointing the way forward for music films, as he did with Don’t Look Back. Think about it. Walk the Line told the Johnny Cash story in a way that ends in the late ‘60s, but Cash went on to decline in the ‘80s and came back in the ‘90s, with some of his best work, on the “American Recordings” albums. Isn’t that story worth its own movie? Straight Outta Compton tells the N.W.A. story, but the group’s members went on to have compelling careers that are worth their own stories.
Film executives might suggest that the big stories have already been done, but these days aren’t big stories just foundations for a franchise? Seeing a hero become himself is just the beginning — the best stories are often about what happens next. That’s certainly true in Dylan’s case, and I think it’s true of other artists, to one extent or another. That’s the idea behind the forthcoming Paul McCartney documentary Man on the Run, which tells his story after the Beatles broke up. I hope a Dylan movie sequel follows.
Over the past dozen years, vinyl records have grown from an indie-rock subculture to a significant, established part of the music business. In the U.S. alone, vinyl sales were worth $1.4 billion in 2023, more than CDs — and as much as Latin music — and they will probably be worth more than $2 billion worldwide by 2025.
As the market matures — and growth slows from spectacular to merely healthy — it’s also splintering. A part of the business once dominated by rock and reissues now looks more like the Billboard 200, and labels are releasing different kinds of records for different buyers — low-price products for big box retail, endless color variations for pop fans and, increasingly, high-end vinyl for audiophiles.
The descriptions of these products makes them sound quite impressive — as do the prices. If the new Joni Mitchell vinyl reissues just aren’t good enough for you — and they are very good — $125 will buy you Mobile Fidelity’s UD1S 180g 45RPM SuperVinyl 2LP Box Set, pressed from “analog master to DSD 256 to analog console to lathe.” That’s about five times the price of most records. Mobile Fidelity is selling a few of Mitchell’s albums in that format, plus titles by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen and many more. It’s not the only company selling premium products, either: Analogue Productions is reissuing all the Steely Dan albums on 45rpm on UHQR vinyl for $150 each, plus putting out a treasure trove of deluxe Atlantic Records reissues to make the label’s 75th anniversary. (Both companies have been in business for some time.) The majors are doing this themselves, too. Back in 2019, Blue Note President Don Was launched the Tone Poet series, which reissues jazz records that sell for about $35. And in 2023, Rhino began releasing Rhino High Fidelity reissues of WMG albums, which it sells online for $40.
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All of these are marketed with the exacting specificity of supercar engines — it’s not just vinyl, it’s SuperVinyl! But how much better do they really sound — especially to an untrained ear on a home stereo? This is important to the music business — consumers will only buy so many $125 records if they don’t sound great. And I was also curious myself.
Here I must confess that I’m enough of an audiophile to understand about half of the jargon above. Over the years, I’ve accumulated a few dozen audiophile records myself, including two Mobile Fidelity Linda Ronstadt records (fantastic), a CBS Mastersound version of Bridge Over Troubled Water (incredible), and the Craft Recordings Small Batch pressing of Isaac Hayes Hot Buttered Soul (like being in the studio). Others were just very good — and not worth the money. And I had never really sat down and compared different versions of the same record in any disciplined way. So I decided to do so. A few caveats: I have no real audio expertise; I listened on a very good home stereo, and it doesn’t make sense to buy records like this unless you have one; your mileage may vary. Here’s what I found.
I started with the Analogue Productions reissue of Steely Dan’s Aja because the album has a well-deserved reputation as a fantastic recording. I compared it to an early pressing I have, which is a detailed and vibrant record — it sounds great. This reissue just blew it away. The definition on the reissue was so impressive that on “Black Cow’ and “Deacon Blues,” I noticed sounds that I hadn’t really paid much attention to before. And while the older album sounded spacious, the new one sounded like I could point to which musicians were playing where. If you’re a Steely Dan fan, this is worth $150. If you’re not, this might make you one. It’s that good.
The other Analogue Productions reissue I listened to, Otis Blue / Otis Redding Sings Soul, is part of the company’s Atlantic 75 Audiophile Series, and I compared it to my copy of the album that came in a 2017 box set of Redding’s mono studio albums. (I compared these reissues to records I happened to own.) The Analogue version was more detailed and transparent — specific sounds stood out more. But the reissue was of the stereo version of the album, on which Redding’s voice is on one side, and I found that my less detailed mono version had more punch. I prefer the reissue, but it’s a close call.
The first new Mobile Fidelity album I played was Bob Dylan’s Good as I Been To You, which I compared to the 2017 European reissue. Neither record has much of a soundstage — it’s really just Dylan and his guitar — but the Mobile Fidelity version has more detail. For this album, though, that’s everything. Hearing Dylan’s fingers on the strings matters because the album is so intimate — it’s a portrait of a songwriter going back to the music that inspired him. The reissue makes a big difference.
Then I tried Mobile Fidelity’s $125 pressing of Joni Mitchell’s Blue. It’s astonishing. From the opening strums of “All I Want,” I felt like I could better hear more details on a familiar recording. I compared it to my 2007 reissue, which I prefer to an early pressing I used to own. The 2007 pressing is a great record, with the depth and spaciousness this album deserves, and I don’t have a bad thing to say about it. But the Mobile Fidelity pressing offered more space and detail. Here, the deluxe version is better, but it’s hard to go wrong either way.
Last I turned to two Rhino High Fidelity records. (Tone Poet pressings sound great, but I don’t have enough old jazz records to compare them to.) I’ve always been happy with the 2014 reissue of Gram Parsons’ Grievous Angel, a quiet, clear pressing of a detailed recording. But the Rhino High Fidelity reissue blew it away: Details came out clearer, vocals emerged more forcefully, the music just seemed more lively. It just felt more there. Listening to the old record after the new one, it almost sounded veiled. Of all the records I played, this one delivered the biggest difference for the least amount of money. It’s a no-brainer.
I found less of a difference between the Rhino High Fidelity version of the Stooges debut and my 2010 reissue. This is a less detailed recording than Grievous Angel, by design, and it should hit harder – and both versions did. The deluxe version sounded a bit more present, but only if you listened closely. To get another perspective, I also listened to a 2005 CD reissue of the album, which I kept because it came with a disc of extra tracks, and I immediately noticed that it sounded lousy — shrill, unexciting, and hard on the ears at any volume. Here, both vinyl versions are great.
Obviously, pricey records have a limited audience. But at a time when so many music executives are talking about “superfans,” this seems like a product category worth keeping an eye on.
Here we go again.
On Dec. 9, the technology activist group Fight for the Future announced that 300 musicians signed an open letter denouncing the lawsuit that labels filed against the Internet Archive for copying and offering free streams of old recordings under its “Great 78” project. The letter essentially says that labels need to focus less on profit and more on supporting creators, by raising streaming service royalty rates — and partnering with “valuable cultural stewards” like the Internet Archive.
This is exactly and entirely backward. Labels have to focus on making money — they’re companies, duh — and they are always trying to raise streaming royalties in a way that would help them, as well as artists. It would help if streaming services raised prices, which they would have an easier time doing if less unlicensed music was available for free on both for-profit pirate sites and services like the Internet Archive. And one of the worst possible groups to offer advice on such matters is Fight for the Future, which has consistently opposed the kind of copyright protection that lets creators control the availability of their work.
Most people think of the Internet Archive, if they think of it at all, as the nonprofit organization that runs the Wayback Machine, which maintains a searchable archive of past and present Internet sites. But it also preserves and makes available other media — sometimes in ways that push the boundaries of copyright. After the label lawsuit against the Internet Archive was shifted to alternative dispute resolution in late July, an appeals court affirmed book publishers’ victory in their lawsuit against the organization for making electronic copies of books available without a license under the self-styled concept of “controlled digital lending.” On Dec. 4, the deadline passed for the Internet Archive to file a cert petition with the Supreme Court, making that decision final.
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It sometimes seems that part of the purpose of the Internet Archive, which was founded in 1996 by technology activist Brewster Kahle, is to push the boundaries of copyright. In 2006, Kahle sued the government for changing the copyright system from opt-in to opt-out. (His side lost in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.) Later, the Internet Archive began buying and scanning books and distributing digital files of the contents on a temporary basis, according to how many copies of the volume the organization owned. (The digital copies became unusable after a certain amount of time.) During the pandemic, it launched a “National Emergency Library” and announced it would begin lending out more digital copies than the number of physical copies of books it owned. Two months later, three major publishers and one other sued, arguing that this controlled digital lending — a theoretical model that’s not recognized in U.S. law — infringed copyright.
The Internet Archive argued that it was a library and that its digital lending qualified as “transformative use,” an aspect of the fair use exception to copyright law that in some cases allows copyrighted works to be used for a different purpose. (The thumbnail images seen in search engine results qualify as a transformative use, for example, since they are used to help users find the images themselves.) The copyright exceptions for libraries and archives are very specific, though, and it’s hard to imagine how borrowed digital copies of books are so different from the digital books that have become an increasingly important part of the publishing business. The Second Circuit Appeals Court treated the dispute as a straight fair use case — it barely mentioned the National Emergency Library — and ruled for the publishers.
“Fair use is an important part of the law, and no one would disagree,” says Maria Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, the trade group that handled the lawsuit. “But this this was a gross distortion of fair use — they wanted to normalize that it’s OK to reproduce millions of works.”
The label lawsuit — Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Concord sued under the auspices of the RIAA — could end up being just as straightforward. (Kahle is also personally named in the lawsuit, along with other entities.) The Great 78 Project makes 400,000 recordings digitized from 78 rpm records available to stream online. The idea is to “make this less commonly available music accessible to researchers,” according to the project’s web site.
The reality, the labels’ lawsuit alleges, is that among the recordings available are Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” and Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” all of which have considerable commercial life on streaming services. “The Internet Archive’s ‘Great 78’ project is a smokescreen for industrial-scale copyright infringement of some of the most iconic recordings ever made,” RIAA chief legal officer Ken Doroshow said in a statement. The Internet Archive did not respond to a request for comment.
The Internet Archive seems to be appealing both of these cases to magazines, making the case that the $621 million RIAA lawsuit threatens “the web’s collective memory” (Wired) and the “soul of the Internet” (Rolling Stone). Maybe. But neither book publishers nor labels object to the Internet Archive’s actual archive of the actual Internet. In both pieces, Kahle positions himself as a librarian and a preservationist, never mind that “White Christmas” doesn’t need preserving and that the Music Modernization Act has a provision that allows libraries to offer certain unavailable pre-1972 recordings if they follow a process. (The labels’ complaint says the organization didn’t do this; Kahle told Rolling Stone that “we talked to people, it wasn’t a problem.”) The fact that some of the recordings are scratchy, which Kahle and his allies make much of, is legally beside the point.
It’s reasonable to hope that the labels don’t put the Internet Archive out of business, because the Wayback Machine is so valuable. But it’s also reasonable to wonder why Kahle let the Internet Archive take such big legal risks in the first place. If the Wayback Machine is so important, why distribute books and music in a way that could be found to infringe copyright, with the enormous statutory damages that come with that? Unless, of course, that’s actually part of the organization’s work in the first place.
Some of these issues can get pretty abstract, but the way they’re settled could have serious consequences in the years to come. If one wanted to assemble a collection of scanned books in order to train an artificial intelligence, one might go about it in exactly the way Kahle did. Same goes for old recordings. Indeed, artificial intelligence companies are already arguing that mass copying of media doesn’t infringe copyright because it qualifies as “transformative,” and thus as fair use. There is no evidence that the Internet Archive copied books and recordings for this reason, but it’s certainly possible that the organization might have wanted to set precedents to make it easier for AI companies to argue that they use copyrighted work for training purposes compensating rightsholders.
The letter from Fight for the Future points out that “the music industry cannot survive without musicians.” But there’s a chance that the kind of large-scale copying of music that it’s convincing musicians to defend could represent a first step toward the technology business doing exactly that.
Music made by generative AI has been on the horizon as an issue for a couple of years, and the industry started playing close attention when the “Fake Drake” track hit streaming services in April 2023. The part of the issue that gets the most attention is, of course, that part that involves celebrities — especially Drake, who objected when his voice was spoofed by AI and then used AI software to spoof the voices of other rappers.
That’s just the tip of a particularly dangerous iceberg, though, according to a new study commissioned by global collective management trade organization CISAC and conducted by PMP Strategy. Vocal imitations are fun, but how much time can you really spend listening to Frank Sinatra sing Lil Jon? The bigger issue is what generative AI means for new music — first for passive listening, presumably, and eventually for the entire business.
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Using quantitative and qualitative research, PMP concluded that a full $4 billion could be lost to composers and publishing rightsholders in 2028 — 24% of the revenue they collect through CISAC-member organizations. (This gets complicated: The study measures revenue that comes to them through collective management organizations, which includes performing rights and, in most cases, mechanical rights royalties.) This doesn’t even count the recording business, or revenue from synch licensing. By 2028, generative AI music will be worth $16 billion and the services that create it will bring in $4 billion in revenue. One previous study commissioned by SACEM and GEMA reached somewhat similar conclusions — in that case, that 27% of revenue would be at risk.
The music business is driven by new pop music, so there’s a tendency to focus on stars like Drake. But publishers and songwriters also depend on background music played in public — at bars and in stores — and streaming services have made a business out of utilitarian music, sounds to help listeners focus, relax or sleep. That might be where the impact of generative AI is felt first — the restaurant that plays AI music to avoid paying a performing rights organization, a playlist that avoids copyrighted music, a low-budget film that uses music generated by an algorithm. By 2028, the study predicts that generative AI could cut into 30% of digital revenue, 22% of TV and radio revenue and 22% of compositions played in public. Eventually, presumably, AI could generate hits as well.
To some extent, AI is inevitable.
“There’s no way we can or should stand against AI — it can be a wonderful tool,” said songwriter and ABBA frontman Björn Ulvaeus, who serves as president of CISAC, at a Nov. 3 online press conference to announce the results of the study. Many composers already use it as a tool, mostly for specific purposes. (I thought of using AI to write this column but I got nervous that it would do a poor job — and terrified that it would do a good one.) “Creators should be at the negotiating table,” Ulvaeus said. “The success of AI isn’t based on public content — it’s based on copyrighted works. We need to negotiate a fair deal.”
That’s only possible if generative AI companies are required to license the rights to ingest works, which by definition involves copying them. That seems to be the case already in the European Union, although the AI Act says rightsholders need to opt out in order to prevent the unauthorized use of their work to train AI software. In the U.S., until Congress turns its attention to AI, this is a matter for the courts, and in June the RIAA, on behalf of the major labels, sued the generative AI companies Suno and Udio for allegedly infringing their copyrights.
The study lays out a picture of how generative AI will develop between now and 2028, in both the music and audiovisual sectors — it will affect streaming revenue the most, but also change the market for music in TV and film. And although few people spend much time thinking about background music, it provides a living, or part of a living, for many musicians. If that business declines, will those musicians still be able to play on albums that demand their skills? Will studios that are booked for all kinds of music survive without the background music business?
The study predicts that the generative AI business will grow as the creative sector shrinks, as some of the money from music goes to software — presumably software trained on copyrighted works. “In an unchanged regulatory framework, creators will not benefit from the Gen AI revolution,” the study says. Instead, they will suffer “the loss of revenues due to the unauthorized use of their works” to train AI software and the “replacement of their traditional revenue streams due to the substitution effect of AI-generated outputs.”
Making sure composers and other creators are compensated fairly for the use of their works in training generative AI programs will not be easy. It would be hard for creators and other rightsholders to license a onetime right to use material for training purposes, after which an AI model can use it forever. The current thinking is that it makes more sense to license these rights, then require AI programs to operate with a certain level of transparency to track the works they reference in response to a given prompt. Then the owners of those works can be paid.
This is going to be hard. Getting it right means starting immediately — and the obvious first step is clarifying creators’ rights to be compensated when their work is used to train an AI.
Even by the standards of a litigious business, Drake’s recent legal actions against Universal Music Group and other companies look like odd filings.
On Nov. 25, Drake filed an action accusing UMG and Spotify of acting to “artificially inflate” the popularity of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us”; the next day, he made a similar filing against UMG and iHeartRadio, alleging that UMG’s release of the song could also constitute defamation. The basic idea seems to be that “Not Like Us,” Lamar’s diss track against Drake, became so successful because it was rigged.
“UMG did not rely on chance, or even ordinary business practices,” Drake’s lawyers wrote in the first filing. “It instead launched a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves.” The filings accuse UMG and its partners of acting in ways that are fraudulent, including using “bots” and payola, but little proof is provided — a “whistleblower,” an “inside source known to petitioner” and an assertion that Drake “learned of at least one UMG employee making payments to an independent radio promoter” who had agreed to pay stations. (The company has said in a statement to Billboard that “the suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue.”)
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These filings aren’t lawsuits, but rather legal attempts to get information that might provide the basis for them. And since Lamar’s success doesn’t really come at the expense of Drake’s — at least any more than any artist becomes popular at the expense of any other — it’s hard not to wonder if Drake is just upset that, with “Not Like Us,” Lamar seems to have won the long-running feud between them. That’s a long story — well-summarized here — but Drake and Lamar basically traded diss tracks for hip-hop fans until Lamar’s scathing “Not Like Us” topped the Billboard Hot 100. Drake is essentially claiming that UMG — for which both rappers record under different labels — cheated on Lamar’s behalf. It was rigged.
Quick: What other famous person does this remind you of? Hints: When he wins, he revels in his success; when he loses, he blames it on unfairness and litigates. Yes, I’m going there: Drake has become Trumpian.
Before Team Drizzy throws bottles of Virginia Black Whiskey by Drake, Drake is a skilled rapper, a compelling performer, and a fantastic Drake — it’s hard to compare him to other artists, both because he doesn’t fit neatly into a genre and because his greatest talent is being Drake. (Drake the artist seems to be an exaggerated version of Drake the person, with the soap operatic conflict amped up and the more mundane parts edited out.)
Both Drake and Trump thrive on success and fandom — their fans root for them because they win and they win because their fans root for them. (Trump the politician seems to be an exaggerated version of Trump the person, with the cultural conflict amped up and the boring parts edited out.) Neither gets a ton of respect from critics, but they are both popular beyond belief, and they love to win and then show off that they did. Drake’s feud with Lamar became so compelling because each was a champion in his own way — Drake the unmatched entertainer, Lamar the iconic old-school lyricist. By scoring a No. 1 single with a diss track, an unusual achievement, Lamar essentially beat Drake at his own game.
Is this why Drake is filing legal actions? Most people file litigation for financial restitution, to get an injunction to stop something, or to win negotiating leverage. In this case, the first would be hard to calculate, the second involves practices that would be hard to prove and the third seems unlikely — why would Drake want out of the UMG deal he signed in 2021, which includes publishing and merchandise rights and was described as “Lebron sized.” The only thing we know about Drake’s motive is that his second filing says he “brings this action for a discrete and specific purpose: to understand whether, and how, UMG funneled payments to iHeartRadio and its radio stations as part of a pay-to-play scheme.” Perhaps, like Trump, he simply can’t imagine the possibility that he would lose a fair fight.
Does Drake have a case? If UMG really had the power to make any song a hit, wouldn’t it do so more frequently? If anyone thinks Drake hasn’t received enough marketing or promotion — and I have yet to meet such a person — it’s worth considering that some Spotify subscribers found the service’s promotion of Scorpion so extensive that they asked for a refund. This, too, has political echoes: If U.S. elections are as unfair as Trump claims, how can he trust the one in November?
Like Trump, Drake loves the one-upmanship drama of competition — but only, apparently, when he wins. Trump ran several campaigns based partly on the politics of insult comedy — his dog-whistle racism was obviously far worse — but he doesn’t like to be on the receiving end of it. (The kind of thin skin that would be a personal fault in most is terrifying in the U.S. president.)
If rappers could pursue defamation claims for diss tracks, much less against the labels that release them, hip-hop never would have made it out of the Bronx. Lamar called Drake a certified pedophile, which is an ugly accusation, and a pun on Drake’s Certified Lover Boy, but not an actual thing; the reason Drake looks bad isn’t because people believe it but because “Not Like Us” is catchier and wittier than his own diss tracks. Drake certainly has the right to ask about music promotion practices — even in a legal filing. If no evidence of this emerges, though, he will need to seek satisfaction the old-fashioned way — by releasing a more compelling single.
This time, everything really is going to be different. Americans now live in a country where neither felony convictions nor dancing to “YMCA” onstage during a medical break in a political rally are disqualifying factors for the presidency; where a member of Congress who was investigated by the House Ethics Committee for allegations of sexual misconduct is nominated for attorney general; and where proposals for reckless tariffs and magic-bean-money marketed by grifters have made the stock market go up. Oy.
The music business has been humiliated. All those artist endorsements for Kamala Harris didn’t seem to matter, at least in part because most of them spoke to voters the way the Democrats did. (I found Bruce Springsteen’s ad for Harris moving, but I’m not sure it was all that convincing.) Taylor Swift, who endorsed Harris, is the dominant artist of this era. But Joe Rogan, who seems to be an idiot’s idea of an intellectual in the way that writer Fran Lebowitz once said that Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person, may have more influence. With just over 50% of the popular vote, Trump is now mainstream, at least statistically. Pop culture has changed.
What about the music business? Amid all of this winning, the industry may stay basically the same, according to a half-dozen conversations with industry policy executives and a dozen more with other music business figures. The basics of Trump’s economic agenda are tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation. Tariffs on imports will play havoc with some businesses, but they would only affect parts of the music industry; the price of merchandise, including CDs and vinyl, could go up, probably modestly. When it comes to taxes, successful artists and executives could end up paying much less, which seems inadvisable for the country but fine for business.
The industry’s biggest regulatory issue is copyright, power over which the Constitution specifically grants to Congress. (Even the U.S. Copyright Office operates as part of the Library of Congress, in the legislative branch of government.) It’s one of the few genuinely bipartisan issues that unites Democrats who champion the arts and Republicans who want to protect property rights, and the sheer complexity of the subject — as well as the fact that it’s always easier to stop legislation than it is to pass it — makes it hard to imagine significant change happening quickly.
The music business faces other issues, of course. Chief among them is the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Live Nation Entertainment, which seeks to break up the concert and ticketing giant. It’s impossible to know what’s going to happen with the case, although speculation suggests that it’s too popular a cause to simply drop. (Many concertgoers feel certain that breaking up the company will bring down ticket prices, which is hard to imagine; there are other important issues at play, but they’re more complicated.) There’s also the fate of TikTok, the Chinese-owned short-form-video platform that Trump tried to ban when he was president, then promised to “save.” (One of the hard things about figuring out what Trump will do is that he himself doesn’t seem entirely clear, either.) Right now, the issue is in the courts. And although TikTok’s Chinese parent company has said it does not intend to sell the platform, one could imagine a compromise that allows everyone to save face, probably without addressing the original problem.
These last two issues show just how much conflicts over media business regulation — and business regulation in general — now take place within parties as opposed to between them. Partly, this is because Republicans have been just as willing to regulate technology companies as President Barack Obama. When it comes to antitrust, for example, both traditional Republicans and corporate-leaning Democrats want to get rid of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Lina Khan, who has taken an aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement, but JD Vance has said positive things about the job she’s doing.
Antitrust isn’t the only issue that works that way. President Biden, and most traditional Democrats, understand the need to protect small investors from cryptocurrency rip-offs. (Trump was against crypto before he was for it.) Until a decade ago, how and how much the government should regulate business was the main divide between the parties. Now a libertarian, business-friendly agenda is pushed by parts of both parties, available in Silicon Valley fleece and Wall Street cashmere.
This, more than Trump, represents the real policy risk for the music business — the libertarian side of Silicon Valley, which stands to gain from Vance’s influence over Trump. (There are other issues that are much more important, of course, including economic policy and the independence of the Federal Reserve.) Imagine that Trump and Vance want to Make Silicon Valley Great Again, which in their minds means having the U.S. take the lead in artificial intelligence. Could that mean allowing technology companies to train their software on copyrighted works without licenses? Or relaxing some of the other protections that rightsholders have? Given all the laws and treaties involved, this is actually hard to imagine. Then again, what about this situation isn’t?
The sweeping electoral victory of Donald Trump will change the U.S. government, and the country itself, in ways that no one can yet predict. So far, though, it appears that the music industry will not be affected as dramatically as other businesses.
“I don’t think there will be that much of a change,” said a senior executive at one of the major labels. Partly that’s because music, and copyright, are no longer the hot-button issues they were a decade ago. And partly that’s because, at a time of increased partisan rancor, copyright is one of a few genuinely bipartisan issues, according to a half-dozen executives. Because it brings together Democrats who tend to look favorably on the media business and Republicans who believe in strong property rights, passing legislation often depends more on building a coalition of legislators from both parties.
There are no music companies in Trump’s crosshairs, at least from his own public comments, and he tends to look favorably on entertainers, even when they tend not to return that respect. Indeed, right-wing Republicans have been far more critical of media companies and online platforms than of major labels and movie studios.
The most immediate music business issue before the government is the Department of Justice antitrust case against Live Nation Entertainment, which seeks to break up the company. Trump will appoint a new attorney general to replace Merrick Garland, and that appointee will almost certainly replace Jonathan Kanter, who runs the antitrust division. The future of the case will depend on Kanter’s replacement, and several music executives and antitrust experts said that it’s hard to predict how that person will proceed.
“We congratulate President-elect Trump on his election,” said a spokesperson for Live Nation Entertainment. “Live Nation is proud to help bring joy to fans through concerts, sports and other live events. We look forward to working with the incoming administration to continue driving the positive impacts our industry has on American jobs and local economies.”
Several executives without direct knowledge of the matter speculated that, for optics reasons, the DOJ would be less likely to drop the case than to pursue a low-stakes settlement, but all of them made clear that there was no way to know.
Right now, the big issue in the music business is artificial intelligence, and the industry has been lobbying for the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act, which would protect the voices and likenesses of human creators. The bill was introduced in the Senate in July and the House of Representatives in September. It has sponsors on both sides of the aisle, including Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). (One might presume they do not agree on much else.) The industry is going to push to pass it in the “lame-duck” Congress, before the end of the year, but it will conflict with other priorities, and several executives said that would be a long shot. Otherwise, it will be re-introduced next year, and the changes in government are not expected to affect its chances much.
Some of the policies Trump has said he will pursue, such as tariffs for imports, could be bad for U.S. business on a broader level. This could make physical goods more expensive, especially merchandise, such as T-shirts. It could also make CDs and vinyl more expensive, although only by so much, since they could also be manufactured in the U.S.
It is also possible that changes to the tax system could affect catalog sales, as well as the desirability of songs and recordings as an investment. But it is unclear how much taxes will change — and other economic factors, such as interest rates, are likely to affect investment calculations more.
Is the music business, traditionally an arbiter of cool, out of touch with U.S. consumers? It’s a tough question to ask — and a tough time to ask it. But if you compare the results of the presidential election with the politics of artists and executives, it’s hard not to.
The dominant mood among people I know is shock at the scale of Donald Trump’s victory — most expected a race so close that ballot-counting would continue all week — and an unsettling feeling that the U.S. is not the country we thought it was. What happened and why will be discussed for years. There’s also a more immediate question: Why didn’t more people see this coming?
Part of the reason is that this still seems so weird — I’m old enough to remember when talking about a professional golfer’s private parts would have been disqualifying in politics, let alone the Republican party. But part of it is that, unintentionally, many people in the media business now live in a bit of a bubble. I’m one of them: I live in Berlin and spend most of my time in the U.S. in or near New York, and I read The New York Times and The New Yorker. When it comes to music, none of my favorite artists supported Trump, and one, Bruce Springsteen, actively campaigned against him. Some of the biggest musicians in the world also supported Kamala Harris — Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Sabrina Carpenter — as did most music executives. Many of them must share my surprise.
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Are they — are we — too detached from the mainstream?
A significant number of Trump supporters are right-wing racists — certainly enough to make one worry. But it’s hard to make the case that Trump supporters are extremists if they account for more than half the vote. By definition, they’re mainstream. Worryingly, the Democrats don’t seem to know how to talk to them in a way that addresses their concerns. Calling them deplorables didn’t work, and making the case that Trump would be a disaster for democracy didn’t, either. (Democracy means that people vote for their leaders — it doesn’t mean that they vote for the leaders you want.) The Democrats focus more on what people can do for their country at a time voters seem more interested in what their country can do for them. Ideas are important, but many people seem more focused on the affordability of groceries.
For whatever reason, it’s now clear that there are more Trump voters than many people, including musicians and music executives, thought. They are also younger and more diverse than people realized. Many of them must listen to pop music. But is the music business listening to them? The idea that it’s controversial just to endorse Trump, without echoing any of his uglier rhetoric, means turning one’s back on more than half of American voters. That’s not how mass marketing works.
The challenge Trump presents to American democracy is far more important than selling music, of course. And I suspect I will get a few emails about how crazy it is to suggest that anyone market music to people who think immigrants are eating cats. But reaching different kinds of people with different kinds of art is what the music business does.
It’s also what politics is supposed to do. Both the music business and politics need to do better at reaching large, diverse audiences. That often means connecting with existing fans, but it has to also mean reaching out to new ones. Often, people simply won’t buy what they’re being sold, whether it’s a new album or a new candidate. But it’s important to have those conversations — both for those of us who want to help elect a new president in four years and those of us who want to argue that this one is going to do a great job.
More and more, politics seems stuck in a loop, in which ideas are marketed to, and cheered, by those who have already decided on them. In music, that’s known as a superfan strategy, and it’s very important. But building one requires reaching new people to turn into fans, or supporters, in the first place.
In the future, every technology company will have a celebrity advisor.
The latest is Timbaland, who is working with the generative AI company Suno on “day-to-day product development and strategic creative direction,” according to a late-October announcement. Timbaland is a hip-hop and R&B icon — a star songwriter, an innovative producer and a compelling performer. (His performance at the June Songwriters Hall of Fame gala was stunning.) As much of a genius as Timbaland is, however, it seems reasonable to wonder where he’s going to find the time for software development.
It also seems reasonable to wonder whether Suno hired him for more than his vision. As Suno faces controversy and litigation from rightsholders arguing that AI companies need to license the music they use to train their software, Timbaland may be there to make a case that this doesn’t matter that much. (Neither Suno nor a representative for Timbaland would comment on the nature of Timbaland’s deal.) In other words, Timbaland is there to do for Suno what Limp Bizkit and Chuck D tried to do for Napster — position the company with users but against the majority of creators and rightsholders.
It seems like ancient history now, but within a month after Metallica sued Napster in April 2000, Limp Bizkit and Chuck D stood with the company against the band, Dr. Dre (who sued a few weeks later) and most of the music business. Limp Bizkit played a few weeks of Napster-sponsored free shows, and Bizkit frontman Fred Durst said the company offered fans a great way to sample albums before buying them. Around the same time, Chuck D wrote a New York Times op-ed supporting Napster and announced that he was working with the company on a contest. The company’s subsequent bankruptcy filing contained a reference to a payment to Chuck D for “the cost of speaking engagements and support,” according to Joseph Menn’s excellent All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster.
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Then, and perhaps now, the idea was to position a startup backed by venture capitalists as being on the side of artists. Suno is “the best tool of the future,” Timbaland has said. “It allows you to get any idea in your imagination out of your head.” Suno has already positioned itself as a disruptor, arguing in its response to the major label lawsuit that “What the major record labels really don’t want is competition.” Maybe. But the lawsuit is over Suno’s alleged ingestion of copyrighted recordings in order to train its software.
This kind of maneuvering isn’t so unusual. For decades, Silicon Valley has introduced innovations with a predictable strategy: Ask forgiveness instead of permission, then take political issues directly to users. This strategy, as much as the technology involved, allowed Uber and Airbnb to grow so big that it can be hard to remember that they are basically high-tech ways to get around local taxi and hotel regulations. Uber and Airbnb are essentially in the business of regulatory arbitrage — they face less regulation than their legacy-company competitors, so they often come out ahead. And they were able to stay in business at least partly because they very quickly grew too big to fail. No politician wants to be known for making it harder to book a car or a hotel.
Suno and other generative AI platforms are less problematic, because they would compete more fairly with other tools to make music. The only question is whether the company should compensate rightsholders — including, presumably, Timbaland himself. The lawsuit against Suno will get complicated — one of these AI cases could end up going to the Supreme Court. But creators who want to be compensated for the use of their work aren’t against AI music tools any more than Metallica was against digital distribution — they want to get paid for the use of their work.
At least one creator will almost certainly make a lot of money from Suno: Timbaland. And although it might look bad for him to be on the other side of the issue from most musicians, this has been a reliable way to make money. One of the big winners of the Early Digital Music Age — the 1999 introduction of Napster to the 2011 U.S. launch of Spotify — was Alanis Morissette.
Yes, really.
When MP3.com sponsored one of her tours, in 1999, Morissette invested $217,355 into early-stage shares of the company, which — well, it was never entirely clear how it would actually make money, but that address was really hot at the time. She made more than a million dollars selling only some of the stock.
At the same time, it’s worth remembering how these moves look years later. From a 2024 perspective, it seems smart that Metallica and Dr. Dre sued Napster, because that company’s demise paved the way for licensed, commercial streaming services. Cracker frontman David Lowery and Taylor Swift can also say they were on the right side of history when it comes to creators’ rights. In retrospect, Limp Bizkit and Chuck D seem a bit naive. Years from now, Timbaland, as talented as he is, may seem the same.