Spotify says Artist Profile Protection, now a beta with thousands of artists, will be available to all artists by the end of 2026. We expect it on time. We also make our first scored prediction, about the part Spotify has not promised.
Industry
Labels, publishers and collecting societies have sued Suno, Udio and Anthropic, and independent artists have filed class actions of their own. This page lists 24 major lawsuits, in 22 rows, with their status as of 27 Oct 2026, explains the four legal questions they turn on, and sets out what each outcome would mean for independent musicians.
Workflows
So far, every deal that pays for training AI on music runs through an intermediary (a label, publisher, distributor, collecting society or sample marketplace), and almost none publishes a rate. Here is how the four deal structures work, what the law says in the EU, UK, US and India as of 23 Oct 2026, and what an independent artist can actually claim.
Workflows
Ableton Live 12, FL Studio and Logic Pro all generate MIDI you can edit note by note, but none of the three turns a plain-language prompt into a melody. The closest thing to text-to-MIDI is FL Studio's Gopher, which writes Piano Roll scripts on request. For artists, MIDI beats rendered audio because every note stays yours to change.
Workflows
Three gatekeepers now ask about AI, and each asks a different question. The US Copyright Office wants to know which parts a human made, PROs want a human writer, and distributors increasingly care which tool you used and how it was trained. Here is what each rule says as of 23 Oct 2026, a checklist that covers all three, and the mistakes that cost artists money.
Workflows
One email a week: the music-tech and AI-in-music news that mattered, and what we think about it.