I used to be grateful to Hypebot for publishing my 2026 music‑business predictions, which targeted on the authorized and structural pressures already reshaping the enterprise. For normal readers, I’m reposting these predictions right here—and including a number of extra that comply with straight from the coverage work, regulatory engagement, and royalty‑system scrutiny we’ve been immersed in over the previous yr with the Artist Rights Institute. These further observations are much less about development‑recognizing and extra about the place the underlying authorized and institutional logic seems to be heading subsequent.
1. AI Copyright Litigation Will Transfer From Summary Concept to Operational Discovery
In 2026, the middle of gravity in AI‑copyright instances will shift towards discovery that exposes how fashions are skilled, weighted, filtered, and monetized. Courts will more and more deal with AI techniques as industrial merchandise quite than analysis experiments, and discovery fights for the great of humanity…ahem…quite than abstract judgment rhetoric. The end result will likely be stress on platforms to settle, license, or restructure earlier than full disclosure happens significantly because it’s turning into more and more possible that each frontier AI lab as ripped off the world’s tradition the quaint approach—they stole it off the Web.
The subsequent spherical of AI copyright litigation will come from followers: As extra offers are executed with AI just like the Disney/Sora deal, followers who use Sora or different AI to create separatable rights with AI (like new characters, new story strains) and even new universes with previous story strains (like possibly new variations of the Luke/Darth/Hans/Leia arc within the Previous West) will begin to get the concept their IP is…properly…their IP. If it’s used with out compensating them or getting their permission, that complete copyright factor goes to begin to get actual for them.
2. Streaming Platforms Will Face Structural Payola Scrutiny, Not Simply Royalty Complaints
Minimal‑cost thresholds, bundled choices, and “larger‑of” formulation will not be handled as remoted enterprise selections. Regulators and courts will start to look at how these mechanisms perform collectively to shift threat onto artists whereas preserving platform margins. Antitrust, client‑safety, and unfair‑competitors theories will more and more converge across the similar conduct. As a result of Spotify’s market dominance and intimidation issue for majors and massive to medium sized unbiased labels, these instances must come from unbiased artists.
3. The Copyright Workplace Will Approve a Conditional Redesignation of the MLC
Quite than granting an unconditional redesignation of the Mechanical Licensing Collective, the Copyright Workplace is prone to impose circumstances tied to governance, transparency, and monetary stewardship. This method permits continuity for licensees whereas asserting supervisory authority grounded within the statute. The message will likely be clear: designation is provisional, not everlasting.
4. The MLC’s Gundecked Funding Coverage Will Be Unwound or Materially Rewritten
The observe of investing unmatched royalties as a pooled asset is turning into legally and politically indefensible. In 2026, count on the funding coverage to be unwound or rewritten by new laws to require go‑by means of of positive aspects, or strict capital‑preservation limits. As soon as framed as a fiduciary subject quite than a finance technique, the present mannequin can’t survive intact.
It’s additionally value noting that the MLC’s funding portfolio has grown so massive ($1.212 billion) that its funding revenue reported on its 2023 tax return has additionally grown to an quantity in extra of its working prices as measured by the executive evaluation paid by licensees.
5. An MLC Impartial Royalty‑Accounting and Techniques Evaluate Will Grow to be Inevitable
As a part of a conditional redesignation, the Copyright Workplace might require an finish‑to‑finish operational overview of the MLC by a prime‑tier royalty‑accounting agency. In contrast to a SOC report, such a overview would study whether or not matching, information logic, and distributions really produce appropriate outcomes. As soon as accomplished, that evaluation would form litigation, coverage reform, and future oversight.
6. International CMOs Will Push Towards Licensee‑Pays Fashions
Outdoors the U.S., collective administration organizations face rising know-how prices and political scrutiny over compensation. In response, many will discover shifting extra prices to licensees quite than members, reframing CMOs as infrastructure suppliers. Sarcastically, the U.S. MLC experiment might speed up this development overseas given the MLC’s wealthy salaries and huge sources for growing poorly applied tech.
These developments aren’t speculative within the summary. They comply with from incentives already in movement, information already being constructed, and establishments more and more unable to depend on deference alone.
7. Environmental Harms of AI Grow to be a Core Local weather Challenge
We are going to begin to see the AI labs normalize the idea of personal power technology on an enormous scale to help information facilities in-built present inexperienced areas. In the event that they construct or purchase electrical crops they don’t intend to share. This complete factor about they’ll construct small nuclear reactors and promote extra again to the native grid is loopy—there gained’t be any extra and what about their conduct over the past 25 years makes you assume they’ll share a factor?
So a while after Los Angeles rezones Griffith Park industrial and sells the Greek Theater to Google for a brand new information middle and personal nuclear reactor and Fb buys the Diablo Canyon reactor, the Music Trade Local weather Collective will formally combine AI’s ecological footprint into their nationwide and worldwide coverage agendas. After mounting proof of knowledge‑middle water depletion, aquifer stress, and grid destabilization — significantly in drought‑susceptible areas — local weather coalitions will conceptually reclassify AI infrastructure as a excessive‑influence industrial exercise.
It will develop into acute after folks notice they can not count on the state or federal authorities to require new state allowing regimes due to the overwhelming political affect of Massive Tech within the type of AI Viceroy-for-Life David Sacks. (He’s not going anyplace in a post-Trump period.). It will result in environmental‑justice litigation over siting choices and stress to require reporting of AI‑associated power, water, and land use.
8. Legal RICO Case Towards StubHub and Affiliated Resale Networks
By late 2026, the Division of Justice brings a landmark legal RICO indictment concentrating on StubHub‑linked reseller networks and particular person reseller financiers for systemic ticketing fraud and cash laundering. The enterprise idea alleges that main resellers, platform intermediaries, lenders, and bot‑operators coordinated to have interaction in wire fraud, market manipulation, speculative ticketing, and misleading client practices at worldwide scale. Prosecutors current proof of an organized construction that used bots, fabricated shortage, misrepresentation of seat availability, and value‑fixing algorithms to inflate income.
This turns into the primary main legal RICO prosecution within the secondary‑ticketing economic system and triggers parallel state‑degree investigations and civil RICO fits. Public resellers like StubHub will face shareholder lawsuits and securities fraud allegations.
Simply one other vivid sunshiny day.”
