Looking ahead to 2026: Live music's pivotal year; More reunion tours; How influential is the UK record industry now?; And Oasis: Knebworth in 2026 – or 2027?

0:02Steve:Hello and welcome to the Price of Music brought to you by Music Ally, the show that both looks at the finances of the music industry while also bringing you stories and comments about the past week in the pop business. I'm Steve Lemack, he's Stuart Dredge. If you want an easy guide to what's going on in the music industry and how it all works, then here we are. A happy new year, everybody. We hope you're in a decent place come the start of the new year. and thank you very much for listening. We have got a lot planned for the coming weeks responding to some of the feedback you've sent us. So thank you to everyone who's been in touch.

0:35Steve:But this week, because the music biz, well, basically went on a holiday about two and a half weeks ago and is only just now returning to its desk. This week, we thought it might be an opportunity to look ahead at some of the matters which we think will arise this year. What are going to be the big stories and themes of 2026? We both, don't we, We both wrote down some ideas, and I think we're pretty much in agreement over what some of the key issues will be. So we've narrowed them down to three or four main headlines. I guess we have to start with AI. I mean, I know some of you might already be rolling your eyes thinking, oh, I'm not AI again.

1:17Steve:But I am, as you probably know, increasingly of the opinion that for all the helpful things AI can do, it also I think carries you know it carries a risk of making things much worse for the music industry and potentially musicians as well I don't know what what are you thinking Stuart as we look down the barrel the next 12 months where are we up to what might happen this year yeah god it's

1:43Stu:going to be it's weird because it was a big story last year I think it's going to carry on this year like you say I mean I think one thing on my mind is that this is we've seen some actual licensing deals haven't we we talked about them in recent months that some labels have done some deals with the air companies it's the first time that's happened which means like the bottom line for artists is in theory if a musical ai is being trained on your stuff now you will get paid um but we don't know how much you'll get paid or how it'll be calculated or what right you'll have to say no thanks i don't want to be part of this even if i'm getting paid those are the conversations that are happening now between labels and artists and publishers and songwriters talking about well oh, this is how this deal will work.

2:22Stu:This is how we'll get paid. But it is a kind of little positive spot to start the year that this principle of if you're an AI company training your model on people's music, human's music, they should get paid for it. And I think we found our way to this point where pretty much all the big companies in that space are trying to do licensing deals rather than just saying, we don't need to do that. We can just take it all at once. So that's my slight optimism before we get into the negative stuff.

2:50Steve:Well, I was going to say, though, those conversations, who should be involved? Because does it feel to you as if the record industry, the big, certainly the big three major labels are having the conversations with the AI companies, but are they involving managers or artists or anyone else down the line who will be directly affected by this?

3:16Stu:i mean as i understand it the deals have been signed and now the conversations are happening with with the kind of musicians and their representatives which i kind of i'm kind of

3:26Steve:sympathetic to how that has to happen because i think they there was an urgency to try and get

3:31Stu:deals done quickly i suppose try and get these companies to the table and say you have to pay for music um and but yeah it just means there's so many unknowns and i think a lot of the the the bodies representing managers and artists have been saying, look, we, here are our concerns about these deals because we don't, we simply don't know what's going to happen. So I don't think it's that the major labels are trying not to discuss it with the artists. I think that that's, what's going to happen. That's the first part of this year is like, right, we've got this agreement with these companies. This is what we see it means.

4:01Stu:And there is going to be a process because I think, and again, this is, this is all up in the air, but as I understand it, the noises coming out of the announcements of these deals have been that artists will have the right and songwriters have the right to say, we don't want to take part in this. That has been the general thing. But how that process works is just completely unknown. And it could be the big complication because, I mean, think about songwriting, for example. Think about a song that's had maybe four or five songwriters, probably more in areas like pop. And those songwriters are assigned to different publishers.

4:34Stu:So if one of those songwriters says, I don't want to have my work used to train in AI, does that mean that song can't be used and all the recordings of it? It could get very, very complicated in terms of actually what music can be used. But it's important. It's important that every songwriter and artist does get to say, actually, I'm not comfortable with this. So that's the real. I think what's going to happen is it's not just a case of the labels and the publishers saying, this is what's happening. It's going to have to be them really convincing musicians, saying, well, this is why we think this is a good thing to do.

5:04Stu:This is why you believe it is in your best interests. And this is why we want you to say yes to it. Like it's not a case of just saying, here's the deal. It's done. Accept it. There's going to have to be a real process, I guess, of convincing and persuading.

5:17Steve:I understand that. I just wonder how easy it will be to back fit the deal, particularly when it comes to the finances of it. If you've agreed a certain percentage of money will be, you know, will come from the people who are training the software on an artist music site. So you get X amount of money. But if that money is not enough for the artist or the artist thinks, actually, hang on a second, we're worth more than that. We should have a higher percentage of the royalties from this AI track. Then, well, we can't do it because we've already signed the deal for this. Do you see what I mean?

5:55Stu:Well, that's it. Yeah. And it's like it's almost you start breaking it down because there's three things. Like if an AI company is going to deal with a big record label, they might be giving them a big chunk of money, which is kind of just here's the money for the license. It's his and money to use your stuff. They might be giving them equity in the company. So a company like Suno, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, might give a label, you know, 1%, 2%, whatever it is with the company. So the label then has shares in this company that may at some point be sold or go public, and there may be loads of money.

6:24Stu:So there's a question there of, okay, how will that be shared with artists and songwriters? And then the really complicated thing, which is the, okay, what seems to be happening is these deals involve the AI companies building new models and new services and launching them this year so again they're almost saying we can't really backfit the finances to what we've had already we're going to build something new and then that's where you'll be like okay so how if i go and make an ai song on this new service and it's 0.5 ed sheeran 2 beyonce 1 you know little granddad um like how do they get paid for that and that's again that's going to be the thing that we don't know yet because it hasn't been set out.

7:04Stu:But those are the three ways money will be coming into the music industry from these companies. And I think in all three, you're right, the managers' bodies and the artists' bodies are saying, we want to understand exactly what's being paid, how it's being calculated, and then we can decide whether we think that's fair and whether we want to go with it.

7:22Steve:There's also the point, the thing I'm still waiting for is for someone to tell me or assure me that the money that AI companies will put into the industry through these licensing deals will make up for the money that some artists will effectively lose if pedestrian musical versions of what they do basically impersonations of their music start impinging on their you know the real thing and therefore musicians income is lost to some of the new ai creators now what you know because we already we've already had conversation we already know that there are some people who for instance write incidental music for tv shows who are already saying that they've been replaced by someone who just typed in i don't know scary music for a tense scene in a darkened room you know and and that's their work that's their monthly rent down the tube so you know as you say i mean my worry is that it does bring us back to what you were saying about you know it's a little bit like returning to the reaction that the industry had to Napster back in the day when they didn't know what to do about illegal downloads which led them to dashing into getting deals done with Apple and whoever and I don't think that was always especially beneficial to the artists if you see what I mean so it's um yeah it's as you say a lot of it a lot of this is up in the air because I just I just have this I mean also we have to approach the you know the problem that um with you know at the last count what did we say there was something like we calculated there was something like 30 000 ai aided tracks uh landing on streaming services every day oh it's now i'm 50 000 just let's what i saw there you go so it's 50 000 new ai tracks landing every day on the streaming services how on earth is that going to help the problem which we already have which is the new actual new human artists who've who are already finding it difficult more difficult than ever to make a noise to make a breakthrough how is this going to help because there's already so much music out there if you see what i mean and so yeah how do we compensate artists for for that or you know express our support for for genuine

9:43Stu:musicians yeah and i think there's two things there isn't there because one is the the practical what does this actually mean for musicians how how much money are they going to lose what does it mean but i think two is the and really equally important is you can just imagine musicians feeling ground down by all this ground down by the anxiety like what is the point of releasing music if all this is happening and i think there's that there's that confidence thing but on the other side yeah i mean i think this year is going to be a big year for the streaming service to decide exactly what they're going to do about all this music and i think i broke it down i've got five questions for this so the first question is can they detect it like can they tell what's fully agent and what's not and deezer says it can it's got technology to do it other services are working on this and the ai music companies could help them because a company like suno could watermark every track put in like a little uh put in a sort of a signature you can't here, but that says to a system like Spotify, this is AI generated.

10:40Steve:Right.

10:41Stu:So that's solvable. So in theory, they should know what's AI generated and what isn't. The second question is, do they let it on their services at all? Like, do they let people upload it and listen to it? Right now, they all do. And no one is saying at the moment, we're going to ban AI music from our platform. They're all saying, we're going to let it on there because we're not quite at the point where we think we should be banning it. The third question, though, is do they promote it? Do they put it in their playlist? Do they let their algorithm recommend it to people? Again, Deezer was very early in saying, we're not going to do that.

11:12Stu:It's not in our playlists. We're not recommending it. It's just on there. You can find it if you search for it.

11:16Steve:Otherwise, no.

11:18Stu:That's a question for Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, all the others, I think, this year. The fourth question is, do they pay the same royalties to AI music as the human tracks? Or do they pay it royalties at all? And that's a debate I think we're going to see more of this year. Like, do they maybe say, right, well, in the same way that there was a talk about noise music a while back, like white noise music and things. And they were saying, OK, we're going to pay that less. We don't think it's as valuable as human music, so we're going to pay it fewer artists. I think we'll see that debate this year about whether fully AI music.

11:49Stu:And then the fifth question, which is more simple, is if something is too close to real human artists, what do they do? And literally, so we've talked about some of the examples of AI music being uploaded to Spotify that pretends to be by a real artist. and the answer there is they take it down quickly they block the royalties being paid um there's probably some improvements they can make in detecting that quickly but that's but then the other thing we talk about is when when there's been an ai project that's like very very heavily inspired by a real artist so we talked about was it holding absence with a human band and bleeding verse was there and it hadn't done anything that you could you could say they're trying to clone they're pretending to be them but the human band certainly felt really put out that something so close to what they do is out and get more listeners.

12:36Stu:And again, that for a streaming service is quite a gray area. As a human, you might think, actually, they should be promoting the human band. They should be giving the human band, getting them in front of listeners. But that, again, is kind of, it's a very, very hard thing to have a hard and fast policy on if you are a Spotify. But those are the five questions. I think they're all mulling. And I think there is pressure on them to come out and say exactly how they're going to treat all these things this year.

13:02Steve:so we'll see that okay um i did there was one thing i wanted to talk actually one other thing

13:06Stu:well have you heard the song you know we talked about that song i run a few months ago it was the one with the vocals yeah yeah well that's a really interesting thing for me this year because that said to to just kind of go back quickly this song came out called i run the vocals sounded a lot like georgia smith and her label came out so this is unacceptable because they were ai-generated vocals but then the artist haven re-recorded it with a human singer someone called caitlin arrogant and we released it again and right now it's number 10 in the uk singles chart it's had like 62 million streams on spotify i think and it's it's a song that it's a pop hit because it was written by humans they just use ai to do the vocals and then when that was called out they got a human in so that says two things to me which we're going to see this year a lot of it says to me that the musicians do really feel cross and upset and anxious when they see ai being used to kind of clone their vocals or be too similar to them but it also says to me there's this new wave of like younger musicians who actually do want to use this technology and and they're talented people so in this case it's a good song from some talented songwriters who happen to use ai in a way people didn't like for the vocals and now it's a pop hit so i think the one thing this year i'm quite mindful of is not gravitating towards all human artists hate ai there's a lot of sensitivity to think but also there are a lot of young musicians who are starting to use it in interesting ways and there is a lot of human creativity there but there are going to be some ethical issues around it um but it's not it's not it's not it's not as simple as human artists hate ai generation technology i think there's there's some interesting stuff being done by creative people but i'm also sympathetic to people like georgia smith who are like hang on a minute

14:50Steve:that's my voice you're using there yeah yeah because i mean yeah it's not it's not that far away from sampling somebody at that point is it if you can just essentially impersonate the voice and you know taking a sample and not paying for that either but um you see that goes back to the point how much will some artists lose what do they gain and what do they lose in all of this um should we talk about live music as well i mean there is one place where potentially you know artists musicians can still make money where the whole live music industry can can make money uh as has been seen over the past year you know live music is still very successful but once again we always have to come back and i know i sound like a stuck record with this but we always have to come back to what's happening at the grassroots level because i mean i know i said i had a rant about the government's new um business rate policy um last month uh but really at a point where at a point where we really need in this country, I think, to be developing new talent.

15:53Steve:We might get to this later on in our place on the global stage, but these are the places where new artists take their first steps. And, you know, some of these places, particularly given the increased business rates which they face next year, on top of everything else we've already talked about, you know, which is energy costs and everything else in the supply chain. But, you know, they're really, I know people will probably think, it's just myself and somebody like Mark David at the Music Venue Trust. I know we're always saying there's a disaster around the corner and some people will probably think, yeah, but it never comes.

16:24Steve:They're all there. But they're not. It's already happening. Venues are continuing to shut. And as I say, it will only get worse unless the business rate increases are revoked or changed in some way or there is tax relief given. Otherwise, we really will see some sort of, I think, some kind of a raft event i was going to say a tire weight but raft of venues will be in genuine difficulty from may onwards and i think that's going to be a story this year i mean what do you

16:56Stu:do i mean this is this is my question for you because you're much more engaged in this than i am what do you do if you're a view the venue trust and when you when you see a government on the one hand saying we like grassroots venues and want them to be supported and doing some good things and then they do a tax thing that kind of could kill loads of them like what is there anything you can do to stop that from happening like like do governments listen when you say this thing you're doing over there is really bad or is it a case of just they're going to say nice things and then some other part of the government will do something economically it's difficult because

17:28Steve:the government doesn't think as one i think that's the problem you will find a lot of support for for the music industry in general and particularly there's a lot of people within parliament and obviously there's a select committee which is dedicated to grassroots venues grassroots music and a lot of those people are very supportive of the cause but then you know it's where where does the power lie and you need someone on your side who is bigger than the treasury and not much within government is bigger than the treasury and i think this whole you know The business rate thing is they just got themselves into an awful mess, I think, and didn't quite realise what the outcome was going to be.

18:12Steve:And now they're trying to find ways of probably trying to make things easier. But all you can do is continue to lobby your local MP and build the momentum behind change and support. obviously I mean on the plus side you know we had the creation of the live trust last year which is the charity that oversees the money which is coming in from the voluntary one pound contribution on tickets at arena and stadium gigs above 5 000 capacity and the live trust will not in the not too distant future I would say you know by spring hopefully the live trust will have paid out the first of the money which has come in to various people like you know who are involved in grass the whole grassroots ecosystem, whether that's venues or promoters or artists.

19:05Steve:The thing, though, we need next is we need more artists and promoters and venues at arena and festival level to buy into the concept of the pound donation so we can keep building the funds that then can be used to help smaller venues and promoters. And when it comes to coming back to government, we have to try and persuade them that they should be more supportive of music in the way of tax relief. in the same way that they already do for a lot of the other creative industries. There's loads of tax breaks for the film industry. So why don't we have it for the music industry or festivals or small venues?

19:39Steve:I think, as I say, it could be a difficult year ahead. The Music Venue Trust, by the way, will launch their annual report into grassroots music venues on January the 20th. I'm sure that will provide more insight into this. You were saying, though, Stuart, that these problems, they aren't just in the UK. It's not just a UK-based issue either. It's happening in other countries around the world.

20:02Stu:Yeah, and there's been some good news, really. I was just reading this morning about, I think Italy has just launched a fund for live music. I think it's only got a million and a half euros a year, but it's a start. We wrote about Germany doing a voluntary ticket levy, the same thing we're doing here. Australia has been putting in place government programs. It feels like this is not just a... It has been a UK story for quite a while, hasn't it? like it's been music venue trust has been talking about this for years but i feel like around the world people are looking to what's worked here what campaigning has worked and they're kind of mirroring that i know the music venue trust is doing it's helping people in australia do a similar thing that it does there but also i think governments have been following this and saying okay well i see the uk did this kind of thing maybe we can put that scheme in place so in a way it's positive i feel like this is a problem around the world but also programs are getting up and running because they can see what's been happening here and what's what's had a good kind of impact

20:57Steve:i mean i was gonna say the other end of the scale i mean we mentioned live you know live music as an industry uh it's never been bigger um so expect i'm expect more mega gigs more big gigs and tours this year more gigs at arena level coming this year although possibly not oasis uh just in case you've heard one of the not playing net worth no well this is the thing um obviously this was a it was a big rumor at the back end of last year that oasis were going to announce that they were playing net worth the current consensus though uh if there was a if you had a rumor aggravate um aggregator right which took all the rumors and then made one rumor out of it um then i think the word is Oasis to do Nebworth but not in 2026 but in 2027 that's currently uh that's the consensus rumor at the moment what is based on I don't know obviously not officially confirmed but sources within inside the music industry uh are whispering about Oasis at Nebworth 2027.

22:06Stu:I was looking at some of the rumors like I think so U2 and Harry Styles I've seen rumored they people are thinking you two might get back on the road this year. I thought My Chemical Romance doing three nights at Wembley Stadium,

22:18Steve:which is something I quietly miss,

22:21Stu:that My Chemical Romance can play three nights at Wembley, which is amazing.