Infinite Catalog

Infinite Catalog Newsletter | Hunter Giles | Substack Music industry news, company/community updates, new music and more courtesy the royalty nerds at Infinite Catalog. Click to read Infinite Catalog Newsletter, by Hunter Giles, a Substack publication wi...

IC NEWSLETTER #80 ROUNDUP

💬 The subscriber chat is now open, starting with an AMA thread
🎶 Quick look at Cantilever Music, a ray of sunshine in streaming's Dark Forest
💸 Deep dive into how AI music platforms mainly sell lottery tickets (or enable fraud)

infinitecatalog.substack.com

Music Biz Association members, join us for the first exciting webinar in internet history

"Do Your Royalties! (With Our Help)"

Register -> us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Staying on brand. They should have learned from Spotify by now that it’s much easier to just do fake artists and payola

“Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” - Mariame Kaba

We've added support for a new income source, and that source is ETSY

Shoutout everyone slinging vinyl records AND yarn slipmats

It used to be fun ignoring emails from VCs, now they're all just AI 😢

more like Infinite Calculator, am I rite

Did Sony’s Rob Stringer just hand regulators the case to tank Universal’s Downtown dreams? Sony Music boss Rob Stringer couldn’t resist boasting about his company’s vast indie data empire at Friday’s investor day. By revealing exactly how majors use distribution intelligence to dominate the...

H/t CMU completemusicupdate.com/did-sonys-ro...

Indies using major (or about to be major) distribution: your margin is now their opportunity.

Quite like how a retailer on Amazon is always being analyzed, and if Amazon sees an opportunity to replicate its products and devastate that business, they take it. As Bezos once said, "your margin is my opportunity."

Universal is trying to do the same with their attempted Downtown / FUGA acquisition.

Sony is openly bragging to investors about using data from The Orchard and AWAL to compete against the very indies the latter are meant to be serving.

The Amazonification of the music industry is here.

heavy sigh

Either way, I’m taking Ek’s words with a big grain of salt. -mark

Personal take (bc I don’t think we can know how this plays out without much more transparency), but it seems like a red herring to me. If we took money away from fraudulent songs, logically it would seem that the royalties going to real music would increase.

Platforms are shifting toward user-centric and artist-centric payment models, which should benefit the independent community. But there’s still work to do on transparency and fair payment thresholds – areas where technical solutions and industry coordination can make a real difference.

AI came up in every conversation (shocking). The most promising applications focus on audio processing, operations, and rights management. But AI-generated tracks are flooding platforms, with an estimated 18% of submitted tracks being fully synthetic.

The majors’ acquisition spree continues. Life-of-copyright deals are on the decline as savvy artists retain their rights. Organizations like the Music Fight Fraud Alliance and ORCA are providing collective strength to tackle shared challenges across distribution, platforms, and rights holders.

Greetings from Indie Week! Day 1 served up some fascinating (if unsurprising) themes that really hit home for anyone working in the independent music space…

3. Indies should organize around copyright ownership rather than distribution to maintain leverage.

Organizations like ORCA represent an opportunity for premium independent rights holders to have a unified voice

2. Don't fear AI - focus on developing artists who move culture and emotions. This will ultimately become more valuable than AI-generated content.

Three takeaways from Tim Ingham of MBW:

1. Rights ownership is becoming more powerful than distribution. Majors are evolving into global service companies that primarily serve independent rights holders

At the industry conference

Our Summer Special is on! If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading your royalty situation, now’s the time. You can try IC free for 14 days and get 20% off with code SUMMER.

IC-02 Bogotá by Unknown Mortal Orchestra on Apple Music Album · 2025 · 8 Songs

Doing royalties and listening to UMO’s new and aptly named IC-02 Bogotá, courtesy @jagjaguwar.bsky.social

Do!!You!!! World! Do!! You!!! Radio

Doing royalties and listening to the great Richard Sen on doyou.world

Spotify Payouts by Tier, According to Spotify

According to Spotify's latest Loud & Clear Report "The system we've built together is working".

According to the data in that report:
- the rich artists are getting richer at direct expense of the less well off artists
- upward mobility is getting harder
- artist income growth is slowing

Both shocking and not

Joe Public gets it