Andy Burnham gives UK grassroots venues hope; Spotify takes on YouTube; Emo is big in Mexico; Suno user data hacked; and... K-POP SHARKS!

0:03Hello, welcome to the price of music brought to you by Music Ally. If you want an easy guide to what's going on in the music industry and how it all works, then here we are looking at the finances of the music industry, whilst also bringing you stories and comments from the pop biz in the past week. He's Stuart Dredge. I'm Joe Sparrow. Stu, let's start with a big number. A big number.

0:25Stu:It sounds like a small number, but I should explain because the number is 28%. Does that sound like a small number? How is it a big number? Well, it's bigger than you'd expect. So the question this relates to is a survey done by Luminate, the big research firm, of Americans asking them about how they'd feel about music and films and games and podcasts if they knew they were made using AI. And they asked them, would you be more interested in them, less interested in them, or would you not care? Can I guess what this 28 % is out of those three choices then. Go for it. Which chunk of the pie? I think they just don't care.

1:04Stu:No. Oh. So, 38 % people would be less interested in music if AI had been used. Okay. 33 % are neutral. And then 28 % said they'd be more interested. So 17 % would be slightly more interested in music if they knew it would be made using AI. 11 % would be much more interested. Like, give it to me that. And I don't know what to think about this, but I did have a think about it. They broke the results out by age group here. So for each group, they covered like sort of 15 to 18, 24-year-olds, 13, 17-year-olds, up to pensioners. And it turned out that for 13 to 17-year-olds, they were 19 % positives and more positive than negative on AI music.

1:51Stu:And that swung to minus 29 % for 18 to 24-year-olds. So where you might think of all people under 25 think the same thing, actually there's two very different groups of people here. One who thinks... So, yeah. Cynical teens and not down with AI. I've got a hot take on this. Yeah, please. So I think 18 to 24-year-olds, they're the most fiercely kind of anti-AI demographic in this until you get to really older people. And I think that's because when you're that age, music is a real big pillar of your personal identity and your kind of your social brand. And also, these people have grown up with creators as a really important thing, whether it's TikTok or whoever.

2:33Stu:But they understand that idea that the people who do the things they like need to get paid, I think. So I felt maybe that's one reason why that age group of age, whereas 13 to 17 year olds, I don't think they want like AI pop stars, but I think they think of Gen AI as like generating memes or making toys or games. So for them, I think it's kind of quite an exciting creative thing but I wonder when they get to 1824 and they start getting into music and going to gigs and buying vinyl whatever it's doing maybe they'll then flip and maybe that is the thing you get to the age where music becomes significant to you in terms of the people making it and that's when you flip into I don't want yeah it sort of makes sense isn't it when you get to the age where you start paying rent and having to pay for stuff you realize the connection between doing and earning and all that means it does sort of make sense and it does tally with you know i have a uh class of students that i i lecture to uh and i apologize to them um but you know these are you know that age bracket of sort of 18 to 24 year olds and and they i mean okay this is these are students who are choosing to study music business so they have a specific perspective perhaps but they are all a very anti-generative ai um when it comes to music not so much when it comes to cheating on their uh essays um but um sorry using them as a research tool for their essays but um like when it comes to music they're really anti it and they really there's very few voices saying oh well i kind of think this is okay i mean when it comes to producers you know they they're a bit more interested in it they will say well i spin up some samples and you know spin up some music and sample it and then use it myself but yeah there's It's interesting how they see perhaps opportunity being taken away from them through generative AI.

4:23Anyway, speaking of AI, let's move on to the big stories this week. Last week, we spoke about, this sounds boring, but it's fascinating, a data breach at the generative music AI platform, Suno. We lost everyone at data breach. Sorry, come back. Someone sort of managed to wheedle some code out of the Suno platform, and it seemed to, or gave the appearance of giving the game away on what kind of music the platform had used to train its models on. There has been a development, Stu. Will you be using the word allegedly a lot this week?

5:00Stu:Possibly so. Well, so when this happened, originally the story was, oh, Suno trained its stuff on YouTube and Deezer and these other places because it was found in its source code that a hacker got. And at the time it said, but no sensitive personal information was compromised here. And there's this site, which people might know, and this is my lesson of the week, this week I learned it's called Have I Been Pwned? I thought it was Have I Been Pwned. That's a different website tracking different abuses of you. To type carefully, folks. Yeah. Have I Been Pwned, it tracks all these breaches. It's where you go to find out, okay, have my details been compromised on any kind of website?

5:35Stu:And it's said that this attack, which happened last November, so some hackers hacked into Suna last November, It claimed it exposed more than 55 million email addresses, phone numbers if they'd been used to sign up, and then tens of thousands of records from Stripe, the payment service for people who actually subscribe to Suno, with names, addresses, and partial credit card details. So not the whole credit card numbers, but partial data. The last four digits or something. Yeah. And all Suno said so far, so this was reported in the press, and Suno's response was, it confirmed there was an incident, and it did not disagree with the figures.

6:10Stu:the 55 million aim addresses. So it hasn't said anything else other than that, but it basically hasn't disagreed with the core claim here. So this basically, well, one thing this is, is like Suno is now big enough to become a target for hackers because where there is a bunch of users, I think it's 100 million people have used it, it said. And for a hacker, that's like, you know, right, let's go and try and get their details. There's 100 million paying users, right? No, no, no. People have used it. I think it was about 2 million paying users last time they announced it. And it kind of raises questions about, okay, well, how good was its security?

6:44Stu:There is a, I mean, this is a more general point, just so you know, because I don't have any information, inside information. But in AI, the whole point is you rush to scale, don't you? You've got to scale up really quickly. You've got to raise a VC. You've got to become bigger than all your rivals quickly to become the leader. does that mean that cyber security is maybe lagging behind? I mean, that's the kind of question this sort of event sparks. You know, how good was their security when they were growing to be on the biggest AI music service? But yeah, on a personal level, if you registered for Suno, especially if you paid for it, like now is a good time to change your password.

7:24Stu:Change your password, yes. If you use that password for other services, change those and don't do that again. because that's and it's just I mean this has happened regularly I mean I can't I've lost count of which services I use that suddenly had a big data breach and had to go and change my password and worry for days and we're at that moment in AI music now where the biggest popular platform has become a target for hackers a lot of stuff there isn't there I mean okay first of all folks use a password manager but also haveibeenpwned.com and that's P-W-N-E-D I think spelt like that it is a great service and it is legit and it is supported by major players online.

8:01And basically you give it your email address. And then if your email address is ever found in any leagues, you will get an email saying, change your password. It's really very good, so please do that. But yes, like you say, Suno obviously is now big enough and has enough paying subscribers for it to be worth going and trying to uncover this data. They've apparently accidentally also uncovered a bit of a smoking gun around training. and you know I mean it says something about our sort of current system around how tech works which I mean has for a long time been move fast and break things famously but like you say AI is accelerating that it's also accelerating hacking must be a great time to be a hacker with all these code-based code generating AIs and of course you know it does raise the question of like do does when you apply it to a creative thing like music do we want this you know do we want more as fast as possible and and it i wonder when we go back to that first thing we're talking about about the slight cynicism amongst certain people is you know why is there an assumption why are we going along with the assumption that we want more of it faster cheaper when we've already got so

9:17Stu:much music in the first place and so it sort of ties together with that doesn't it yeah and the The other thing here, I think, is transparency. When you have been subject to a data breach, when you're a company, when you're a company, I mean, not the individual, I mean, in many countries, there are literal legal requirements of what you have to do. So in the UK, if you had data breach, you have to tell people about it. Otherwise, you get the data watched on you. So for now, I think what happens now is people will be expecting to come out and say, right, this is what happened. This is how many people were affected.

9:48Stu:We're going to be emailing all the people affected, telling them what to do now. Like, you can't kick this stuff under the carpet. You have to do right by your users. And it may be they're still trying to figure out what was breached and what was lost. So you don't want to come out before time when you don't know exactly. But that is the next step, I think, for CUNO to not just not disagree with the numbers put to them, but actually come out and say, this is what happened, this is what we're doing about it. And this is how we can, if you're using us, this is how we're going to make you feel safe.

10:17I guess rule number one, if you're a hyperscaling startup, is move fast and break things. But rule number two is make sure you don't break your own things, which is what it looks like they might have done here. Let's move on to story number two. Talking about perception and adding things to services, we've, since day one for 20 years, thought of Spotify as a music and audio service. But in recent years, they've allowed uploads of video, and it's becoming a lot more visual if you use the platform. It doesn't have to be, but it can be. So Spotify has a brand new daily music videos chart, which sounds very YouTube-y.

10:58Is it now officially the new MTV? And what does it mean about full-length music videos, which for context, they're about three minutes long, but we're sort of so used to seeing TikTok 10-second videos, we assume they might have been killed off. So what is this new chart? What does it mean about music videos? And is Spotify pivoting to TV?

11:24Stu:Pivoting to video, yeah. Well, do you know, it's funny. There's been this series of phases for Spotify and video. I remember the very first time it said, we're going to add video, it was kind of YouTubers. And there was this press conference with this excruciating segment where they had, I think it was Broad City, which is a really good sitcom that started on YouTube with two really clever leads. And they were on stage making jokes and it fell flat as a kind of flat thing. And then they shifted to like, we're going to be VH1 and we're going to make good, serious music documentaries. I can't do the voice you do.

11:56Stu:Good, serious music documentaries. Yeah, that one. And then they went to, and now, right now, they're back into music videos, full-length music videos. Right. So there's a global chart. So every day, it's refreshed every day, a top 50 music videos on Spotify by their stream counts. and alongside that they've got pitching tools so that artists and labels can pitch their videos in and say we'd like to be on these video playlists please in the same way you pitch in to be on today's top hits or and this comes a couple of months or maybe less than that after Spotify launches things saying actually as an artist you can now directly upload your full length music videos to Spotify you don't have to go through a label just so you can put your own videos in there it wants everyone to be putting lots of music videos on there and so yeah it kind of looks like well it's two things it's a it's an attempt to directly go up against youtube which is the home of music videos online and has been for so long but it's also a kind of a sort of against tiktok and saying yeah actually you can watch full music videos here it's not just 15 second clips you can get the full there's this there's this thing happening with spotify they're talking about time well spent like it's become a mantra for executives and And they're positioning themselves against places like TikTok.

13:09Stu:They criticize the idea of just flipping through a scrolling feed. They want to be somewhere you come to watch and go deeper into things. And music videos are kind of part of that pitch too. As much as I sort of agree with that in the sense of, I find platforms where you sort of relentlessly skip through things to be exhausting and not what I want to do. There is something extremely snobbish about saying, one of our metrics is time well spent. as opposed to time badly spent. This podcast is about time badly spent. You come out for half an hour going, why did I listen to those two? That's right, yes.

13:45We aim to make sure that when you finish listening to this podcast, you've learned nothing. But I will say for context as well, the first person I heard use this as a metric was Elon Musk. So that tells you everything you need to know. Why are Spotify doing this? Because Spotify is really interesting in a sense, because every other major music streaming platform is part of something else. Okay, so YouTube is part of Google, Amazon Music, part of Amazon, Apple Music, part of Apple. They're sort of standing alone, and that's kind of amazing in the modern environment of monopolies and duolopolies.

14:25But they've made their name around, okay, music and music videos are connected to music, but they're going up against YouTube, which is the biggest, not only the biggest streaming platform in the world, it's the biggest music streaming platform in the world. What is in it for them?

14:40Stu:Yeah, well, partly it's about keeping you on Spotify. They don't want you to have to go to YouTube to watch a video. They want you to stay by there. It's partly about that positioning against TikTok. TikTok, the whole thing, endless short clips, big discovery of music, a debate about whether that discovery turns into actual streaming the full songs, going deeper into the artist. So Spotlight Position says, actually, here, you can come and watch the artist's visual, their vision for their song in full, and it's not a clip. So again, it's like that whole positioning thing of saying we are the place you want to come and spend time with music.

15:19Stu:And I think it's just video. I mean, everyone, I wrote the other day a story about Facebook saying we're going to actually test a version of our app now that's going to go straight into full screen video. So there is a sense of video is becoming the lead kind of format for so many different things, social networks. And Spotify, I think, wants to be there. And what's the obvious thing? Music videos, because that's rights holders it deals with already, artists it deals with already. It's an easy thing to bolt on while it figures out whether it wants to also become Netflix or also become TikTok or also become any number of other video things.

15:55This is one of the fascinating things about merging technologies. When you look at it over a period of time, We're used to very fast changes and all this stuff happening. But eventually, everything just sort of goes back to how it was before. So we're moving back to a place where all this technology and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and all this stuff is basically becoming network TV again. It's all about putting videos in front of people and getting people watching it. Netflix used to be revolutionary because you paid a small amount of money and got access to all this stuff. And now, really, everyone has multiple subscriptions like in the old days when they used to have a cable subscription or whatever.

16:33It's plus a change, isn't it? Rit large.

16:36Stu:I do think one worry I have about this. There's no evidence of this yet, but it's still quite... I like speculation. Go on. It's expensive to make. Well, it can be really cheap to make a music video. Yeah. But it can be expensive too. If Spotify is pushing the video, leads it to start prioritizing tracks that do have full-length videos attached. But you can imagine it would say, right, well, we're going to bump these up in the recommendations. We want everyone to be watching music videos. I worry that's going to favor the biggest labels and the biggest artists over the independent labels and smaller artists, who are already figuring out recording and touring costs, and music videos are an extra cost.

17:14Stu:So that would be my worry, that Spotify pushing into music video, if it leads it to start prioritizing stuff that has music videos, is that going to be a disadvantage for indies and DIY artists? So it's a little bit mirroring that concern of indie artists who, well, they are sort of deprioritized in terms of earnings if they don't produce an Atmos mix on Apple Music, for instance. Okay, let's segue to politics. The UK has a new prime minister. He's a northerner. He's a New Order stan. and one of his first moves was focused on helping grassroots music venues and clubs. And when we heard this news, we thought immediately of one Steve Lemack, formerly of this parish, who had sort of been asking for a lot of these things at a political level for a long time.

18:04And it looks like he might be starting to get them. What's going on?

18:07Stu:It is. And so Andy Burnham, for people outside the UK, he was before, he's a longtime politician, but he was the mayor of Manchester or the Manchester area. So he has been involved in local music policy for the last few years. So he has actually been active in the area. And yeah, one of his first, literally, I think it's day three, was it, of his being Prime Minister of the whole country? He announces 20 % cut in business rates, which I know Steve used to talk about on this podcast a lot. So that's the tax you pay if you are a music venue, a nightclub, a pub, or any high street business. So grassroots music venues, nightclubs and pubs, are getting 20 % cut in these business rates, which could save typical local pub around 1 ,100 quid in the next year.

18:48Stu:That was the kind of stat given by the government. I don't know if it's the same for venues. It may be different, but that's the wrong thing. And it excludes the biggest live music venues. It's not the biggest venues. It's independent grassroots venues. And then there was a fun bit where the government said, this will cost about 100 million quid, and there's a big pressure on them to say how they're going to raise this money. And they said, we're going to scrap rate relief businesses that don't make a positive community contribution. And they just named one kind of business, which is vape shops.

19:17Stu:So vape shops pay more tax, venues get a cut. And this has been generally warmly welcomed, I think, hasn't it? It has been warmly welcomed. It feels like the thin end of hopefully a wedge in the sense of making a rates cut that helps on average places like that, £1 ,000 per year, which is better to have£1 ,000 than not, but it's not an enormous amount of money when we know the facts and figures of how hard it is to run a small venue. But it is sort of a little, it's throwing them a bone, isn't it? And it's a signal from Andy Burnham to say, look, we're sort of open to looking at other things to do and making things better.

19:58Of course, Andy Burnham, as mayor of Manchester, made a lot of moves that were sort of with normal working people in Manchester in mind. He cut prices for local buses. He re-nationalized things. He is a famous music fan. Although I did find an old tweet of his where he praised the Stone Roses comeback single from about 10 years ago. No, no, the one from 10 years ago when they reformed. I mean, but everyone makes mistakes. It's fine. And, you know, it's going to be interesting to see what happens next because, you know, we've spoken about this a lot on the podcast. with Steve and with guests, and they're asking for very similar simple things.

20:42Can you cut the VAT for live venues? Can you give us a break on certain other nighttime rates and things like that? Highlighting their community-oriented benefits of having these venues still going. And it sort of feels like he may be much more inclined to nudge those things along.

21:04Stu:Yeah. And there's been a couple of criticisms. One comes from music industry bodies. The other comes from my barber. The music industry bodies one. There have been some nervousness, I think, about excluding larger venues. And you might think, oh, great, yeah, of course, the O2 shouldn't be part of. This is massive. But people have been saying, actually, this is all interconnected. And the big venues do support the smaller venues in terms of the way the whole ecosystem works. So they subsidized some of the financial risks in the grassroots. They trained some of the infrastructure and the crew. So some people were saying, actually, we're not sure about excluding large venues from this.

21:41Stu:And that's a topical point that we'll see what happens. As for my barber, I was talking to him about it. And he was saying, well, it's no good having tax cuts for the venues if none of the rest of us can afford to go to them. And so he was kind of, I think he was coming from a point of view of a different kind of high street business, saying, well, why can't we have a business belief cut? but he was also saying this stuff only matters if people have money in their pockets to go to gigs, which to be fair is a big part of the whole this new government is talking about putting more money in people's pockets, helping but that was a two-christened fair, one is like yeah, well we don't it's not just one thing I can act alone and yeah bigger venues should be part of this as ever with any political decision making there's a gesture element to this And like you say, this idea of excluding the big venues will have gone down very well in certain circles because it's a clear, even though the real impact of this is actually fairly small, but it's meaningful.

22:41the exclusion of those bigger venues, it does subtly suggest a priority shift down towards smaller businesses, working people, and helping those as a priority over helping large multinationals. And depending on your politics, that's a really good thing or it isn't. That's a branding positioning thing. It's definitely a positioning thing. So it will be very interesting to see how this develops because I'm sure that the major venues are lobbying hard for everything that they want. And we will see how that is navigated. But what we've got as well is a lot of organizations around the nighttime industries, especially with small venues, who have very clear argument points ready to go around cuts and changes and help.

23:31And let's see how that happens. It'd be interesting. Okay, any other business?

23:38Stu, what's the latest big music trend in Mexico?

23:42Stu:Well, if I was going to ask you to guess, you might come up with another regional Mexican genre, perhaps. For sure. Or a version of trap. It's not, it's emo. Emo. Emo. Emo and pop punk. Emo and pop punk. So, I mean, I know that the younger generation have had a longstanding classination with the 90s, but this is hopping forward sort of... Y2K nostalgia. Y2K nostalgia. We have exhausted the 90s seam of fashion and trends, and we're now moving on to the decade that tastes sort of forgot immediately at the time, didn't it, of those weirdly ironed fringes and wearing ties as belts. And there we lost a young audience too.

24:30Stu:If I didn't go with data. Well, yeah, so this is actually data from Spotify that says that between 2019 and 2025, streams for emo and pop punk in Mexico nearly doubled and monthly listeners for the genre jumped by 66%. And this is, it was very keen to say, this is not just about Mexicans streaming My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy. Right. It's actually been driven by domestic Mexican bands. So there's one. Now, the name of this band, I should have checked this out, is PXNDX. It's probably something like Panda, isn't it? Oh, I see. Yes. They've got like three and a half million monthly listeners and they've got the most streamed emo song in Mexican history.