This was a week for courts and regulators. A US appeals court ruled on whether AI companies can train on copyrighted material without permission, the US Copyright Office opened an inquiry into streaming fraud, the majors asked the Supreme Court to step into a fight over songwriters reclaiming their rights, and the five-yearly battle over what US streaming services pay songwriters got under way. Add Suno's growth and its trouble in Italy, a $110bn Hollywood merger, a busy week for Live Nation and a new catalog buyer in Nashville. The common thread: the rules on how music is licensed, paid for and owned are being renegotiated on several fronts at once.
1. Appeals court rejects AI 'fair use' defense, with music litigation in view
On September 29, a US federal appeals court (the Third Circuit) ruled against ROSS Intelligence, a legal-AI startup sued by Thomson Reuters. ROSS had trained its AI on Westlaw's "headnotes", the short summaries of court rulings written and owned by Thomson Reuters' editors. ROSS claimed "fair use", the US exception that allows copying without permission in limited cases. The court said no: ROSS used the summaries to build a competing product, and because companies now pay to license content for AI training, copying it for free harms the owner, even though Thomson Reuters had never sold such a licence. The labels' and publishers' trade bodies (RIAA, NMPA) backed Thomson Reuters, pointing to their own lawsuits against Suno, Udio and Anthropic.
There is a catch. US court rulings are free and public: ROSS had roughly ten million of them to train on, so the court saw copying the paid summaries as a shortcut, not a necessity. Suno can argue the opposite: there is no free archive of recordings it could have used instead. Bottom line: the ruling strengthens the industry's hand in licensing talks with AI companies, but it does not settle the Suno case.
2. US Copyright Office opens formal inquiry into streaming fraud
Streaming fraud means faking plays, with bots, "click farms", padded playlists or hijacked accounts, to capture a share of the royalties that platforms pay out. Because that money comes from a fixed pot, every fake play takes money away from real artists and rights holders. The US Copyright Office has now opened a formal inquiry into the problem, at the request of Congressman Scott Fitzgerald. It follows the sentencing of Michael Smith, who used AI-generated tracks and bots to divert more than $8 million in royalties and received 18 months in prison.
The Office wants to know how widespread fraud is, what drives it, how well today's defences work, and whether voluntary measures, new laws or regulations are needed. Anyone can respond: first comments are due November 23, replies December 21. For streaming services, distributors and collecting societies, which today each fight fraud on their own terms, this raises the possibility that fraud prevention becomes a legal obligation rather than a best effort.
3. Majors and BMG urge Supreme Court to overturn a songwriter's 'worldwide' win
US law lets songwriters take back rights they signed away decades earlier, a process called "termination". The industry has long read this as returning only the US rights, leaving the publisher's rights in the rest of the world untouched. In January, a federal appeals court (the Fifth Circuit) disagreed in a case brought by songwriter Cyril Vetter, ruling that termination hands back his rights everywhere. Publishing companies owned by Universal, Sony and Warner, together with BMG, have now told the Supreme Court not to let that decision "radically disrupt copyright worldwide". The justices will consider whether to take the case at their October 16 conference.
The publishers say deals now being negotiated run as far as 2072, and that foreign rights are a significant part of their value. If nobody can tell who will own those rights in the future, every licence becomes riskier and more expensive. Paramount, the IFPI and the Motion Picture Association have backed them. For publishers and anyone licensing catalog, the outcome decides whether a worldwide licence stays a worldwide licence.
4. Streaming services respond as the US songwriter-rate battle opens
Every five years, a US tribunal called the Copyright Royalty Board sets the "mechanical" royalty: what streaming services pay songwriters and publishers for the songs (not the recordings) they stream. The next round, nicknamed Phono V, covers 2028 to 2032, and the parties have just filed their proposals. The Songwriters Guild of America and others are asking for a simple flat rate of $0.003 per stream from 2028, adjusted for inflation each year. The aim is partly to end "bundling": Spotify reclassified most of its US subscriptions as bundles by adding audiobooks, which lowers what it owes, and the NMPA, the US publishers' association, says this cut almost $500 million in payments.
Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Qobuz answered through their trade body, DIMA, in a conciliatory tone: US publishing revenue has grown more than 30% since 2022, to $7.3 billion, and they hope for a quick resolution. They said nothing about the proposal itself. The last round ended in a settlement; this one could turn into a long fight. For publishers and streaming services, both the 2028-2032 rates and the future of bundling are now on the table.
5. Paramount completes $110bn takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery
Paramount has completed its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The combined group, named Skydance and controlled by David Ellison (son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison), brings together the Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services, channels such as CBS, CNN and MTV, and franchises including Game of Thrones, The Lord of the Rings and the DC Universe, for annual revenue of nearly $70 billion. The deal closed after settlements with a group of US states and a Hollywood writers' union, and after Paramount outbid Netflix, which had first agreed to buy Warner's studios and streaming business.
Why it matters for music: film, TV and streaming productions are major buyers of music licences for their soundtracks ("sync"). With two large studios now under one owner, labels, publishers and sync agents face one fewer big buyer, which can shift the balance of power in those negotiations.
6. Suno hires its first CFO as stock-market questions grow
Suno, the AI music generator, is building the finance team of a company that could one day go public, although it has announced no such plan. Valued at $5.4 billion in June, it has raised more than $775 million in total and says it is now "far beyond" its last disclosed figures of 2 million paying subscribers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue. In September it hired its first chief financial officer, Cherry Miao, and a July job advert mentioned preparing for "IPO readiness". Its new v6 models launched with three licensing partners: Warner, BMG and Believe.
Its rival ElevenLabs is further along: it hired a CFO who took the payments company Adyen public, is reported to be eyeing a listing around 2028, and was valued at $22 billion in a recent share sale by employees. Suno, meanwhile, is still being sued by Universal and Sony, as well as collecting societies and independent artists, and now faces a probe in Italy (see below). For labels and streaming services, AI music companies are becoming large, well-funded businesses they will deal with as partners as well as opponents.
7. Italy's competition authority investigates Suno's user terms
Italy's competition and consumer authority has opened a formal investigation into Suno, saying its terms of service are unfairly weighted against users. It points to Suno's freedom to change the contract, the service and its prices without justification, to remove users and content, to impose extra terms users cannot read before signing up, and to limit its own liability in vague language. Above all, it says the copyright clauses "deserve particular attention": the licence users must grant Suno over what they create is too loosely defined, and users must give up their "moral rights", which in European law protect an author's right to be credited and to object to misuse of their work. A public consultation will open in the coming weeks.
For the music industry, this is a different line of attack from the copyright lawsuits: a European consumer regulator is challenging how an AI platform treats the rights of the people who use it.
8. Kakao and Warner's Atlantic team up to develop K-pop artists from day one
Kakao Entertainment, a leading Korean entertainment company, has signed a K-pop partnership with Atlantic Music Group, the Warner Music label group that includes Atlantic Records. Together they will plan K-pop careers "from the earliest stages", covering production, distribution, marketing and promotion, with the aim of building fan bases in North America and beyond. Kakao brings its experience in developing and managing K-pop acts and engaging fans; Atlantic brings its talent scouting (A&R), promotion and global network. No artists or financial terms were announced.
Atlantic already had a K-pop hit with APT., the duet by BLACKPINK's ROSÉ and Bruno Mars, which spent 12 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200. Kakao, for its part, partnered with Sony's Columbia Records in 2023. For labels, the direction is clear: Western majors want to work on Asian artists' careers from the start, rather than simply releasing finished Korean acts abroad.
9. Live Nation refinances $1.2bn of debt with new bonds
Live Nation is selling new bonds, $730 million in dollars and €600 million in euros, repayable in 2032, mainly to pay off $1.2 billion of debt issued in 2020 at 6.5% interest and due in 2027. The new dollar bonds pay 7.125% a year and the euro bonds 6.125%; the sale is due to close on October 15. The final mix changed during the sale: $110 million less in dollars and €100 million more in euros than first announced.
The backdrop: in April, a federal jury in New York found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster had illegally monopolised ticketing at major US venues, and the company has set aside $450 million for the case. It is also fighting a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit over ticket pricing. The business itself keeps growing, with first-half revenue up 10% to $11.5 billion. For the live sector, the takeaway is that investors keep lending to Live Nation despite its legal troubles, at a higher rate than before on the dollar side.
10. Live Nation sued over a personal-data breach
Live Nation faces at least three proposed class action lawsuits (group lawsuits brought on behalf of everyone affected) over a data breach that exposed Social Security numbers, ID numbers and health records. Two plaintiffs are former employees; the third obtained services from the company. Their near-identical complaints, filed in California, allege that the data was not encrypted, that it is now available on the dark web, and that victims were told more than four months after Live Nation learned of the breach. They seek damages, lifetime credit monitoring and a court order to improve security.
Live Nation says the incident was "limited in scope", affected a "small number of individuals" and did not disrupt its operations; it reported the breach to the Vermont Attorney General on October 1. Its Ticketmaster subsidiary was already breached in 2018 and 2024. For any music company holding personal data, of fans, artists or staff, the case is a reminder that a breach now turns into litigation very quickly.
11. Live Nation funds Creator Nation to buy up creator-management firms
Live Nation is the financial backer of Creator Nation, a new company that will buy and grow agencies managing online creators and influencers, along with related businesses. Its first acquisitions are expected in the coming months; the size of Live Nation's investment was not disclosed. It is run by Scott and Alexis Fisher. Scott founded Select Management Group, which represents more than 500 creators with a combined audience of over a billion; Alexis founded Timeline Management, majority-owned by Live Nation since 2024, which has turned creators into live shows.
The goal is to help creators earn from content, selling products, brand deals and live events, much as music artists already do. For the music industry, Live Nation is applying its artist playbook, from touring to sponsorship and management, to a new kind of talent.
12. Big Loud, Morgan Wallen's label, becomes a catalog buyer
Big Loud Records, the Nashville label behind Morgan Wallen, has appointed Dusty Miller as President of Catalog Acquisitions. His job: find, value and buy music catalogs, the collections of existing recordings or songs that investors buy for their long-term royalty income. Miller spent 13 years advising sports and music clients at Truist Bank (formerly SunTrust) before founding his own wealth-management firm.
Big Loud already knows this market from the selling side: in 2025 it sold a substantial minority stake in Wallen's first three albums to Chord Music Partners, in a deal sources valued at over $200 million. Chord is itself part-owned by Universal Music Group. For the catalog market, this means one more experienced buyer competing for deals.
