Sonilo, a San Francisco start-up founded by former TikTok AI and music staff, has raised $11 million led by B Capital for a model that writes music and sound effects timed to your footage. Its answer on training data is a licensed Shutterstock catalogue, which means stock-music composers are both the training set and the competition.
Industryvia PR Newswire (Sonilo)
Deezer will let listeners hide fully AI-generated music from search before the end of 2026. Its own figures matter more than the toggle. Deezer receives nearly 90,000 fully AI tracks a day, yet they draw only 1-3% of streams, and up to 85% of those streams in 2025 were fraudulent. For human artists, the fix that counts is in the payout system, not the search bar.
Industryvia Deezer Newsroom
The Association of Independent Festivals' tracker lists 41 UK festivals cancelled, postponed, paused or closed in 2026, against 43 in all of 2025. Big events sold out fast this summer while the losses fell mostly on smaller festivals, the tier where emerging artists get their festival slots. AIF's main ask, extending a VAT cut on family tickets, would do little for most of them.
Industryvia Association of Independent Festivals
Bandcamp is moving sellers to Stripe, with free daily, weekly or monthly bank payouts and a new fee table. Our maths says small sellers roughly break even, bigger sellers pay a little more on every mid-priced sale, and the clock on PayPal runs out at the end of 2026.
Industryvia Bandcamp
Universal Audio has released its Empirical Labs FATSO tape-simulator plug-ins in native form for Mac and Windows, 17 years after the DSP version. The price is easy to compare with a subscription; the licence terms behind it are the harder part.
Releasesvia Universal Audio
One email a week: the music-tech and AI-in-music news that mattered, and what we think about it.