Music Business Worldwide

The agency says Reps' business model is built on identifying high-demand events and buying up tickets before ordinary consumers even get a chance.

Our next ticket story, it's from Mandy DeLugdugget, Music Business Worldwide.

SeatGeek, Vivid Seats, and others sue Washington, D.C. to block its 10% cap on ticket resale prices.

So four ticket resale marketplaces, that's SeatGeek, Vivid Seats, TickPick, and GameTime, have sued the District of Columbia.

Tickets to most sporting events in the district are exempt and so are movie tickets.

The law also requires marketplaces to show the original purchase price of every single ticket that they list.

Right, so our next story again on ticketing is from Mandy DeLugdug, also at Music Business Worldwide.

Live Nation calls the FTC's BOTS Act lawsuit misguided, says agency is trying to flip the act on its head.

And it's affecting 270 jobs overall.

Music Business Worldwide reports on this.

The announcement of this program was back in 2024, February, and was supposed to be included next year, so the plan was always to have a combination of headcount reduction and other operational efficiencies.

UMG makes the point and says that they're bringing in new skills and technology and connecting expertise across teams to deliver greater global impact and greater efficiency.

There's like four of these SaaS products, which, well, makes the point that Spotify is now a tech vendor like Atlassian or Microsoft.

The article in Music Business Worldwide doesn't say what the tools do except for its AI development tool.

Now, everybody knows that a pure tech play is a better business than music tech, and Spotify is no exception.

The move was announced in a blog post last Wednesday, October 7th, and Spotify got a nice little stock price bump of 9% in the days since, pushing it back over 500 bucks after it had been consistently slumping for the past three weeks.

There are many who wish that Spotify would just become a pure play tech company and not even a music company anymore, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Again, Music Business Worldwide has the coverage.

All right, let's get viral.

Ever since Instagram added music, paid influencers and brands have been making use of music in their social posts.

It's going after Suno's terms of service.

Music Business Worldwide is reporting that the agency governing competition in Italy has decided that Suno's TOS is too vague and too, well, wiggly to pass muster in Italy.

It's an interesting tack, but I suppose if you're gonna take legal action against a tech company, the TOS is as good a place to start as any.

It might also be an interesting precedent for other tech companies because, let's face it, TOS agreements are kind of a joke.

Even when it comes to the small things, the rich get richer.

Murray Stassen has a detailed version of what's going to happen in April over at Music Business Worldwide, and Kristen Robinson has a more user-friendly detailed explanation of the black box over at Billboard.

Speaking of Billboard, the magazine released another list this week, another week, another list, and this time it's Latin power players leading up to the Latin Grammys.

Although all of these power player lists have expanded well beyond actual power, they are a handy-dandy list of who works where and occasionally include a nugget of narrative that you wouldn't know, especially in this case, if you don't follow the Latin music industry closely.

Um, but this, this really jumped out at me.

Again, this is from Music Business Worldwide.

"Music streaming fraud inquiry launched by US Copyright Office" says here, "The US Copyright Office has launched a public inquiry into music streaming fraud.

The office published a notice of inquiry in the Federal Register on Wednesday, October 7, seeking information on how streaming fraud is carried out, its economic impact, and its relationship to AI-generated music." Now, I'm very curious to know what, what exactly do they mean by streaming fraud, as I take a gulp of my water here.