Happy New Year!

We hope you had a fantastic holiday season filled with joy and inspiration. As we step into 2025, we’re excited to keep driving innovation, creativity, and success in the world of music.

Wishing you a prosperous and harmonious year ahead. Let’s keep the music business thriving!

In this newsletter:

The BPI’s 2024 annual music consumption figures spotlight record-breaking success for women, who dominated half of the UK’s top 20 albums and 47% of top 10 singles.

Anthropic must maintain guardrails to prevent future AI tools from producing infringing material from copyrighted content. This stipulation partially resolves the music publishers’ preliminary injunction motion filed in the Northern District of California.

An investigation has been launched into suspected fraud at UK collection society PPL following suspicious activity on a few member accounts.

Now, the details...

Exploration Weekly - January 3, 2025
Compiled by Ana Berberana

UK’s Year-End Charts See Women Soar

“Record-breaking success for women” is one of the key lines in British labels body the BPI’s annual consumption figures, which were published earlier this week. Half of the UK’s top 20 albums last year were by women, while women artists spent 31 weeks atop the UK’s singles chart – 21 of which were Sabrina Carpenter – and accounted for 47% of tracks that reached the top 10 in 2024. While much of the media coverage of the announcement ran with this aspect, the BPI didn’t duck a less positive trend for the UK industry: the performance of British artists in their home country. “UK artists were behind just nine of the 40 top tracks of 2024 across streaming and sales, with the highest being Stargazing by Myles Smith at number 12,” it noted. “Five years ago, in 2019, 19 of the year’s 40 biggest singles were by UK artists.” As for the topline stats, the UK saw sales and streams consumption grow 9.7% in 2024 to 200.5m album-equivalents, including an 11% spike in audio streams to 199.6bn. Streaming is now 88.8% of consumption in the UK, although 2024 also saw a 1.4% rise in physical album sales – the first since 1994. Vinyl sales were up 9.1% to 6.7m units meanwhile: that format’s 17th consecutive year of growth.

Anthropic Agrees to Maintain Copyright ‘Guardrails’ In Concession to Music Publishers In Late-Year Legal Agreement

Eight music publishers sued Anthropic in October 2023 and sought an injunction in August 2024. Music publishers argued that the injunction was necessary to prevent the infringement of their works. Anthropic opposed the motion and argued its use of training AI models on copyrighted content was ‘fair use,’ given the output was transformed from the original work.Under this new agreement, Anthropic will maintain its implemented filters on responses to users’ queries. It is allowed to expand, improve, optimize, or change the implementation of these guard rails as long as their overall efficacy at preventing the reproduction of copyrighted content is not diminished.“Anthropic will maintain its already implemented Guardrails in its current AI models and product offerings. With respect to new large language models and new product offerings that are introduced in the future, Anthropic will apply Guardrails on text input and output in a manner consistent with its already-implemented Guardrails. Nothing herein prevents Anthropic from expanding, improving, optimizing, or changing the implementation of such Guardrails, provided that such changes do not materially diminish the efficacy of the Guardrails,” the agreement reads.

PPL Faces Embezzlement Investigation Following Account Irregularities

Police have launched an embezzlement investigation into London-based collection society PPL after the organization reported suspicious activity on a few member accounts. PPL said one staff member has been dismissed following an internal investigation carried out earlier this year. Now the crime is being investigated by The Metropolitan Police, according to a statement from PPL. “We recently became aware of suspicious activity on a small number of member accounts. We immediately conducted an internal investigation, and one employee was dismissed,” a spokesperson for the organization said Thursday (December 19). PPL said it was “working with the limited number of impacted members to rectify accounts.” According to industry sources who spoke to Billboard, the suspected embezzlement is believed to have involved either a person or group of people who posed as recording artists not registered as PPL members. They then fraudulently claimed royalties on their behalf. When the real artists tried to register as members earlier this year, PPL discovered the scheme. The fraud is believed to have taken place over several years — possibly as far back as 2016 — with fraudulent transactions amounting to around £500,000 ($625,000).

Music Publishers Formally Move to Consolidate 13 Infringement Suits Against NBA Teams

Several music publishers are moving to consolidate the copyright infringement lawsuits they’re spearheading against more than a dozen NBA teams. That development came to light in a recent letter to the court from the publisher plaintiffs, including Kobalt, Prescription Songs, and others. In a nutshell, those publishers over the summer accused the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Philadelphia 76ers, and more of infringing on their protected works in videos posted to TikTok, Instagram, and NBA.com. The league itself isn’t a party to the straightforward suits, which are part of a growing stack of complaints against brands and companies over alleged copyright violations in social media promos. In general, social platforms’ song libraries are cleared only for personal, not professional, use. Bringing the focus back to the sought consolidation, the publishers’ related motion “seeks to consolidate thirteen cases, including the instant action, with the Cleveland Cavaliers Action serving as the lead case,” according to the relevant letter to the court.

Random Ramblings

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