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What You Missed In The Music Business Podcast March 7 - 13 2026

·29 min·1 clip

Live Nation reached a tentative DOJ settlement that caps amphitheater fees at 15% and opens Ticketmaster to rivals.

This episode is a week in review for the music business, covering March 7 through March 13, 2026. It opens by noting that there was a lot to miss while listeners were busy with everything else. The show also points people to a companion podcast, What You Missed in the Music Industry, for the parts of the ecosystem outside record labels and music companies. A quick like and subscribe reminder shows up early, because the algorithm apparently still cares. The first major label item is Sony Music West Africa's Women's Month flagship initiative, Bloom and Bloom 2026. The program is presented as an effort to move women's leadership in Africa's creative economy from visibility to real value through mentorship and deliberate collaboration. It also mentions a networking mixer called a grand bloom, planned for later in March. Another major label headline is Universal Music Great China's launch of Def Jam Recording's China in Chengdu. Chengdu is described as a city globally recognized as the capital of Chinese hip-hop. From there, the episode moves into legal and AI news without much warning. Live Nation settles, Google gets sued, and Anthropic is part of the week's legal noise too. One of the bigger cases is a class action lawsuit filed by independent musicians against Google. The plaintiffs say Google used up to 50 million copyrighted audio clips to train AI models including Lyria 3 and Producer AI. They also argue that Google used YouTube and Content ID in a way that stripped metadata and artist identifiers from copyrighted music. The show treats that as a major test for the economics of generative AI. It also covers oral proceedings in Munich in a copyright lawsuit brought by GEMA against Suno. GEMA says Suno trained its text to audio tool on copyrighted recordings of well known songs. The claim is that the resulting AI music is too close to the originals. GEMA's CEO is quoted saying that AI providers must respect human creativity and that Europe needs clear standards to protect artists' rights. A ruling in that case is expected on June 12, 2026. The legal rundown continues with the Mechanical Licensing Collective and Pandora Media filing opposition briefs in a Middle District of Tennessee dispute over unpaid mechanical royalties. The question is whether Pandora Free counts as an interactive service under the Copyright Act. The MLC says features like skipping and on demand selection trigger full royalty payments. Pandora says its algorithm driven stations are non interactive, which is a neat way to describe a fight that is anything but neat. The episode keeps a conversational tone, with blunt asides and plain explanations when the legal language gets dense. It keeps reminding listeners that this is a fast briefing, not a seminar. The show closes by saying it is only delivering the news and that anyone treating it as advice would probably regret it, which feels about right for this part of the market.

As heard by us

A fast, unsentimental check-in on the business side of music.

This episode is a brisk music business roundup with a courtroom edge. It moves quickly from label initiatives and market expansion to lawsuits, royalties, and AI disputes, so the pace stays sharp without getting lost in the weeds.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Catch the week's label news, AI lawsuits, and royalty disputes in one sharp pass.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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