[Chris Castle says: If you have concerns about protecting your recordings, scores, tapes, hard drives, consider contacting Iron Mountain’s Media and Entertainment Services and see if they can help you.)

Los Angeles Wildfires

Los Angeles wildfire survivors can apply for federal aid today, new website launched to help Californians (Governor of California)

Social Media/Litigation

‘It’s About How Power Works’: Author Liz Pelly On Her New Spotify Book, ‘Mood Machine’ (Rolling Stone/Jonathan Bernstein)

Social Media Addiction Multidistrict Litigation–the Return of Joe Camel in the Sleeper Case That Could Break Silicon Valley (Music Technology Policy/Chris Castle)

Revisiting Litigation Alleging Google Discovery Violations (Ben Edelman)

TikTok at Supreme Court

TikTok v. Garland, SCOTUS Transcript

TikTok Final Appeal to Supreme Court Didn’t Go Well (New York Magazine/John Herrman)

Supreme Court seems likely to uphold a law that could ban TikTok in the U.S. on Jan. 19 (AP/Mark Sherman)

Ticketing

Avenged Sevenfold’s M. Shadows Unmasks Truth Behind ‘Dynamic’ Ticket Pricing: ‘Artists Love to Hide Behind Live Nation and Ticketmaster and Go, ‘Oh. We Had No Clue” (Ultimate Guitar/Staff)

AZ lawmaker calling out ticket scalpers, resellers for apparently flouting new state law (ABC15/Josh Kristianto)

Streaming

Apple Music Statistics By Demographics, Revenue, Users and Facts (Coolest Gadgets/Rohan Jambhale)

‘It’s About How Power Works’: Author Liz Pelly On Her New Spotify Book, ‘Mood Machine’ (Rolling Stone/Jonathan Bernstein)

Artificial Intelligence

AI Lawsuit Developments in 2024: A Year in Review (Copyright Alliance/Kevin Madigan)

4 in 10 companies planning job cuts due to AI: Survey (The Hill/Tara Super)

Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal (Wired/Kate Knibbs)

Congressman Issa Introduces Landmark Legislation to Stop the Misuse of AI-Generated Digital Replicas (Press Release) Bill summary here.

Machine Failing: The Linkage Between Software Development And Military Accidents (War on the Rocks/Jeffrey Ding And Rick Landgraf)

C Castle 1/6/25 C Castle 1/6/25

Newsletter, January 6

Music Business

It’s Getting Harder to Deny that Payola 2.0 Is Alive and Well in The Music Streaming Era (Headphone Honesty/Andy G.)

Canadian Court Pauses So-Called ‘Streaming Tax’ on Companies Like Spotify, Amazon and Apple (Billboard/Richard Trapunski)

What the Algocrats Want You to Believe (MusicTech Solutions/Chris Castle)

Is Vivid Seats Selling? Ticketing Platform Reportedly Attracts Private Equity Takeover Interest Amid Continued Live-Sector Enthusiasm (Digital Music News/Dylan Smith)

No Bots, No Billionaires: StubHub’s Grotesque IPO Demonstrates Another Artist Ripoff By Our Tech Oligarchs (MusicTechPolicy/Chris Castle)

Jay Gilbert and Rob Abelow discuss music’s biggest problems (Your Morning Coffee Podcast)

Inside The Portfolio Of Businesses Owned By Downtown Music – The Company Universal Is Buying For $775m (Music Business Worldwide/Murray Stassen)

Artificial Intelligence

Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models (Harvard Data Science Review/Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence) (Conversational AI agents may develop the ability to covertly influence our intentions, creating a new commercial frontier that researchers call the “intention economy”.)

Meta scrambles to delete its own AI accounts after backlash intensifies (CNN/Allison Morrow) (Reaction to Facebook AI created fake user profiles)

The Human Cost Of Our AI-Driven Future (Noema Magazine/Adio Dinika)

AI vs. Copyright: A Legal Showdown Shaking the Foundations (OpenTools/Mackenzie Ferguson)

AI Still Lacks Common Sense 70 Years Later (Marcus on AI/Gary Marcus & Ernest Davis)

Social Media

Mass tort litigation to watch in 2025 (Reuters/Brendon Pierson) Social media addiction multidistrict litigation against YouTube, Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snapchat.

Meta’s Zuckerberg not liable in lawsuits over social media harm to children (Reuters/Jonathan Stemple)

World News

Trudeau expected to announce exit as party leader before national caucus meeting Wednesday (subscription) (Globe and Mail/Robert Fife & Marieke Walsh)

Will Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resign or prorogue parliament? What it means and how it impacts Canadians (Inside Halston/Staff Reporters)

Books (New or New to You)

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly

The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury

Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge by Jean Noël Jeanneney