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The Weeknd Closes Catalog Partnership

The Weeknd
Jason Tate

Variety is reporting The Weeknd has closed a catalog partnership with Lyric said to be valued at one billion dollars:

The rep notes that the joint venture is not a conventional catalog sale: “From the beginning of the meeting, it was clear to all at Lyric that Abel would not sell his catalog. He wanted to be more innovative and creative in the way we established a partnership. To that end, through this venture, we constructed and launched a new business model with Abel and his iconic catalog whereby Abel and his team have the freedom to execute their creative vision with the entirety of his rights, both publishing and masters. This unique catalog deal sets a new standard for artist equity and control.”

Imogen Heap’s Auracles Signs SoundCloud Partnership Deal

Imogen Heap
Jason Tate

 Dylan Smith, writing for Digital Music News:

The involved companies just recently confirmed their deal in a formal release, after SoundCloud head Eliah Seton and Heap discussed the integration during last month’s Web Summit event. Coinciding with the official disclosure, the November sit down’s audio has become available on SoundCloud.

Billed as a “comprehensive and forward-thinking suite of tools,” Auracles is said to afford artists one-stop control over metadata, stems, press materials, contact info, and a whole lot else via its “sovereign digital ID.”

President Aren’t Industry Plants

President
Jason Tate

President talk about their rapid accession and why they’re not an industry plant.

“When you blow up really quickly, it’s assumed you’re backed by a huge corporate machine,” he tells us. “People find it hard to accept that something can just explode organically. But if something’s getting a lot of attention, you’re gonna draw equal measures of hate as you are love. I’d rather people felt something than nothing at all.”

In fact, Mr President insists that he “couldn’t have planned a harder way to introduce President to the world”.

I can’t see that mask and not hear “I am not a plant” in the Richard Nixon voice/cadence of “I am not a crook.”

Nine Inch Nails Working on New Music

Trent Reznor
Jason Tate

Nine Inch Nails are working on new music:

”We are working on new stuff and we’re excited to work on it, and we are prioritizing working on Nine Inch Nails over just taking on every single thing that comes up in the other category,” reveals Reznor. “So, beyond that, I can’t say much, but the difference between now and a year ago is the fuse has been lit and the desire is there.”

Spotify Tests AI-Powered Prompted Playlists

Jason Tate

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

The new tool allows users to describe what they want to hear in a personalized playlist that reflects the “full arc” of their tastes, according to the company. That means the playlist focuses not only on the songs you like now, but your entire Spotify listening history from day one — something that differentiates the feature from other playlists, the company says.

Report: Impersonators Scam Fans Out of $5.3 Billion in 2025

Billboard
Jason Tate

Billboard:

Hackers impersonating celebrities like Taylor Swift and her team contributed to fleecing fans for $5.3 billion online in 2025, as AI has made online scams more successful, according to a report from social media security company Spikerz. […]

The report found that scammers target Swifties with convincing fake tickets, merch and VIP experiences, while Carpenters’ young fanbase is targeted by clone accounts offering “fake meet-and-greet offers, pre-sale links, and counterfeit merch drops.” Billie Eilish hackers have run fake livestreams or giveaways that mimic her image.

Federal Judge Dismisses MF Doom’s Trademark Suit

Legal
Jason Tate

Digital Music News:

“Temu manufactured and sold a myriad of items that are counterfeit or blatant copies of Plaintiff’s artwork, products, trademarks, and intellectual property,” the suit elaborated, also including multiple screenshots of allegedly infringing MF Doom merch listings.

From there, Temu returned fire in October with a dismissal motion that placed the alleged trademark infringement blame on the shoulders of “independent third-party sellers.”

Evidently, this argument did the trick; Judge Blumenfeld stressed the seller-marketplace distinction when doing away with the MF Doom estate’s direct infringement claim.

In the judge’s view, the plaintiff “cites no authority holding that price control renders an online marketplace a ‘seller’ liable for direct infringement,” while “the presence of Temu’s name on packaging…does not support an inference that Temu is the seller of any product, let alone the products at issue here.”

Turnstile Talk With Rolling Stone About Grammy Noms

Turnstile
Jason Tate

Turnstile talked with Rolling Stone about their historic Grammy nominations:

Genre definitely can be a good guide for finding sounds that you like in certain worlds. Hardcore is maybe more of a culture and a community. At a hardcore show, you can have bands that all sound very different, but there’s a shared essence.

We grew up going to punk and hardcore shows. And we grew up listening to rock. We grew up listening to metal, to alternative, to R&B, to rap, to electronic music. We listened to all kinds of things. We’ve never denied ourselves the musical influences that have been a part of our lives growing up, what our parents were playing when we were kids. Everyone is kind of just a sponge of what they are drawn to. I think it’s important to not put a box around what you naturally are drawn to.

Spotify Rolling Out Music Videos

Jason Tate

Spotify:

This expansion gives millions more listeners access to a catalog of official music videos, from studio versions to live performances and covers. The initial video catalog is limited for now while the feature is in beta, but stay tuned as availability will grow quickly over the coming months.

Data Analysis Finds Coordinated Attack Against Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift
Jason Tate

Miles Klee, writing for Rolling Stone:

In a white paper examining more than 24,000 posts and 18,000 accounts across 14 digital platforms between Oct. 4 (the day after The Life of a Showgirl came out) and Oct. 18, shared first with Rolling Stone, the firm concluded that just 3.77 percent of accounts drove 28 percent of the conversation around Swift and the album during that period. This cluster of evidently coordinated accounts pushed the most inflammatory Swift content, including conspiracy theories about her supposed Nazi allusions, callouts for her theoretical MAGA ties, and posts that framed her relationship with fiancé Travis Kelce as inherently conservative or “trad,” with all of this framed as leftist critique.

2025 Nostalgia Tours Did Well

Jason Tate

StubHub have released their 2025 live experiences report:

Legacy acts ruled the stage in 2025. Nostalgia tours from Oasis, Green Day, and My Chemical Romance turned memory into momentum, inspiring fans to travel, reconnect, and re-engage with the live music economy. 

2026 Prediction: In 2026, expect more “heritage cycle” programming, festivals, and promoters curating lineups around legacy artists and milestone albums.

“Those Were the Best Days of My Life”

Bryan Adams
Jason Tate

Henry Yates writes about the history of Bryan Adams’ hit “Summer of ’69” for Louder Sound:

Bryan Adams was nine years old in the summer of ’69. He didn’t join his first band (Shock) until ’76. Which doesn’t quite fit the song’s lyrical content, which appears to rue the break-up of a teenage band (‘Jimmy quit and Jody got married’) and the collapse of a love affair (‘I think about you, wonder what went wrong’).

In reality, Adams’s clean-living image has helped disguise one of the most blatant innuendos of modern rock: the ‘69’ in question doesn’t refer to the year 1969, but to the sexual position. Adams has announced as much from the stage, and even appears to sing ‘me and my baby in a 69’ during the song’s outro.

Mariah Carey Grabs Record-Tying 19th Week at No. 1

Billboard
Jason Tate

Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You” has once again topped the charts:

The recurrent tune surges four spots to the Hot 100 summit, tying the record for most weeks at the top alongside Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus. It also marks the seventh consecutive year that “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has hit No. 1. The song previously became Carey’s 19th No. 1 on the Hot 100, the most for any solo artist and only one behind the Beatles as the record-holder.

Netflix Buys Warner Bros. + HBO

Jason Tate

Netflix has won a bidding war to purchase Warner Bros., including HBO.

The cash and stock transaction is valued at $27.75 per WBD share (subject to a collar as detailed below), with a total enterprise value of approximately $82.7 billion (equity value of $72.0 billion). The transaction is expected to close after the previously announced separation of WBD’s Global Networks division, Discovery Global, into a new publicly-traded company, which is now expected to be completed in Q3 2026.