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IQ Artist Management, 71-75 Shelton Street, London (2026)

17/08/2026

Suno's new Spark grant comes with a clause called "Good Vibes Only."

Sign up, and you agree never to say anything that portrays Suno or its products "in a negative light." Not just during the grant. During the term "and thereafter." So, there is no end date on the silence.

A non-disparagement clause that never sunsets isn't exactly the standard for a music grant from a label, a publisher or a PRO. It belongs in the tech world and to employment settlements, both of which are under growing legal scrutiny in the UK over what people can be silenced about, especially on matters of public interest.

AI training data, is currently the subject of active class action lawsuits, and we'd wager that is public interest.

Music Business Worldwide pulled the fine print: that silence clause, a name and likeness grant that outlives the term, a class action waiver sitting in Suno's standard terms. The Verge found a "limited exclusivity" clause . Billboard put a $500m figure on the case Universal and Sony are still pursuing, with GEMA and Koda now also joined as plaintiffs.

Three days before Spark launched, 29 music bodies signed an open letter setting out three basic principles for AI deals: consent, fair compensation and transparency. The MMF UK, the FAC, the Ivors Academy and AIM Ireland all signed. As it currently stands, Spark fails all three points.

And what about the money? Well, a grant in the thousands to low tens of thousands of dollars will go a long way for a self-releasing artist. It's useful, not life changing and certainly worth asking oneself if agreeing to the terms is worth the amounts being offered.

Hagens Berman, the law firm that won a quarter of a trillion dollars from big to***co, joined the Suno case in the same week Spark launched. If you apply for Spark, you accept an arbitration clause that could shut you out of that case. Whether it actually does is still an open legal question, but the timing of all this is surely no accident.

So if Spark or anything like it lands in your inbox, read the full terms page, not the blog post or press release. The binding clauses is in those terms. Get a music lawyer on it if you can, and ask three things. What rights survive the term? What does the arbitration clause does to you under your local consumer law? And, what does the silence clause means for your right to ever speak publicly about training data, ethics, or your own experience of the company?

Spark is only the first of these 'deals'. Others will copy it, so the same clauses are worth learning to spot now.

Links to all five sources in the first comment.

17/06/2026

Something to note before your next conversation about streaming.

One artist in our wider network earned £412 from 500,000 streams last year. That's the actual number after all splits at £0.003 per stream. Another artist generated £8,000 in a single quarter from 400 dedicated Bandcamp fans. Same industry. Completely different revenue model.

This article is about music piracy in 2026. More specifically, why it's still growing despite widespread streaming adoption, and what the data says about where the income sits.

26% of UK consumers admitted that they pirated music in 2024. The same year, UK household streaming spend grew by around 13%. These things can happen at the same time because many people are simply doing both. They subscribe to streaming for convenience and download from other sources because they no longer trust platforms to keep their content available.

The article also covers why enforcement never keeps pace with piracy developments. The RIAA sued 35,000 Napster users. Piracy still increased. DRM was introduced across the industry. Piracy was adapted. Italy now runs automated blocking systems. The traffic then moved to mobile apps and messaging platforms that generate no trackable web visits.

What's useful for artists is the income model we breakdown. Roughly 40% from direct to fan sales, 30% from live and merch, 20% from sync, 10% from streaming. A 500 copy vinyl run at £25 generates £12,500. To earn that amount on Spotify would take 4.2 million streams.

What's your experience been with direct to fan versus streaming income? Has anything changed for you in the past year?

15/06/2026

97% of The BPI members surveyed in a recent report say the existing copyright framework works for AI licensing. Given the well publicised direction of travel, it's hard to argue with the findings at face value, but, the detail underneath is where the picture gets more complicated though.

WPI Economics built the report on a survey of 31 BPI member companies, eight interviews with them, and a poll of 3,000 members of the public. BPI itself represents around 500 UK record labels and music companies.

On the consumer poll, 39% of those polled said they had used "general-purpose AI" in the past three months. 13% said they had used "music-generating AI". Most consumer AI use in the data is autocomplete, search summaries and phone features, not generative music. The headline "AI users support licensing" figure rests on a broader sample than just music users.

The market data tells its own story too. 274 commercial AI licensing agreements have been struck across creative sectors as of 2026. The three majors (around 70% of UK music consumption) have multiple deals. By company size, 25% of medium-sized music companies have completed an AI licensing deal. Only 5% of small ones have.

"Brave New World? Justice for Creators in the Age of Gen AI" is an interesting recent report in partnership between ISM, the Society of Authors, the Association of Illustrators, the Association of Photographers and Equity. Between them the five organisations represent around 80,000 creators. The report draws on surveys of more than 10,000 of them across writing, illustration, music, photography and performance, including 501 ISM musicians.

The artist position is also on record in another prominent place: the May 2025 open letter to the Prime Minister about generative AI, signed by 400+ UK artists including Paul McCartney and Elton John.

The BPI report and the ISM coalition report do not reach the same conclusions.
The artists we speak to are mostly asking far simpler questions about consent, permission and payment. Two questions we'd ask are: is licensing the right policy direction here? And if it is, will it reach working artists who sit outside the major labels and aggregators?

What are you seeing out there?

11/06/2026

Ron Perry, who runs Columbia Records , said something bluntly in Billboard recently. TikTok "made things go faster for a small period of time," and the industry is "back to how things have always been." Peter Edge at RCA said the same. Lyor Cohen at YouTube has been making the same case for over a year. The people whose careers were built on chart positions are publicly stepping back from chart positions as a measure of who has an audience.

There are two reasons.
The first is fraud. Deezer first reported in January 2026 that 60,000+ AI-generated tracks were landing on its platform every single day. By April that figure was 75,000, and AI-generated tracks accounted for 44% of every upload. Eighty-five percent of the streams on those tracks were fraudulent. Apple Music alone blocked roughly $17 million from reaching fraudsters in 2025. When you can fake an audience at industrial scale, the numbers stop being trustworthy. A&R departments know that. Investors know that. The artist looking at their dashboard are the last to find out.

The second is conversion. MIDiA Research surveyed over 10,000 consumers in September 2025. Of those who discovered an artist through TikTok, only 20% followed them. Only 26% went on to listen to more music by that artist. One in three ever pressed "Add to Music App." Reach was high but sustained relationship was rare. The industry has been watching that conversion gap widen for two years.

What is gaining weight is community evidence. SoundCloud's 2026 Music Intelligence Report found that listeners discovering tracks through the "Liked By" feature, meaning fans actively recommending to other fans, engaged three times more than those served by algorithm. SoundCloud listeners also spent 43% of their listening time on new music, against 24% for the wider industry. Two of the names sitting near the top of hip-hop right now, EsDeeKid and fakemink, came up that way. Fans recommending to other fans, with major-label promotional spend played little part in the rise.

That changes who carries the cost of artist development. Labels used to fund community building. Now they want artists to arrive with the community already built, and before the cheque gets written. A quiet but significant repositioning of how the business operates, and it is hitting hardest the artists who did exactly what they were told to do four years ago.

If you're working in the industry, are you seeing the same change in how A&R is making signing decisions? And if you're an artist, what does this look like from where you are sitting?

Full breakdown below

09/06/2026

We get asked a lot of questions about royalties and royalty payments all the time and, they always centre on the amounts received.

Metadata errors. Missed registrations. Reciprocal agreement delays. These can all lead to royalties being differential and contributes to discrepancies. But there is something beneath all of that which the Loewenthal case has now put in plain language, and it deserves to be said clearly.

The system that pays your royalties was not designed to verify them.

Johan Loewenthal is an Australian musician who spent years filing privacy law data requests with collecting societies across 12 territories. He documented 51 German TV placements across major shows including Love Island Germany, The Bachelor Germany, and others. Over 2,000 radio plays. A decade of touring German venues up to 7,000 capacity. His lifetime payment from GEMA, the German collecting society, was €8,510.

When he filed a formal Subject Access Request, APRA sent back the usage records. Forensic analysis found over 100,000 duplicate lines in the data, identical play counts appearing across three platforms in the same month. This wasn't a minor inconsistency. It was evidence that the underlying data used to calculate royalty distributions may not reflect actual usage at all.

The more significant disclosure came in APRA's written response. They stated formally: "We cannot supply further datasets including transaction-level records. In many cases, we neither hold such information nor hold the authority to obtain it."

The organisation responsible for distributing royalties is admitting, in writing, that it does not hold the data to justify the payments it makes. Royalties are distributed through reciprocal agreements using aggregated, pooled data. Individual usage cannot be independently verified. That is the admission, in writing, from the collecting society itself.

It gets even more revealing. When Loewenthal pushed SOCAN (the Canadian society) for further disclosure, internal emails came to light. On 10 November 2025, APRA wrote to SOCAN suggesting they redirect him back to APRA to prevent further disclosure. Two days later, SOCAN replied warning that a Privacy Commissioner complaint was coming, and promised to keep APRA informed of the process.

That's two international collecting societies emailing each other to manage one musician's legal data request. That is what coordination looks like when the system is under pressure.

This problem has been identified before. The EU Commission commissioned the Global Repertoire Database in 2008, a cross-territory tracking system designed to create the infrastructure this case proves was missing. £8 million was spent on it. The project collapsed in July 2014, six years in, under funding disputes, data ownership deadlock, and incompatible technical standards.

None of this should be taken to mean every PRO is acting in bad faith. The collecting society model is the infrastructure the industry runs on, and dismantling it is not the argument here. What the Loewenthal case does is remove the excuse that the opacity of the system makes individual accountability impossible to pursue.

The full case analysis, including the APRA and SOCAN emails in full, the forensic data breakdown, the collapse of the Global Repertoire Database, and a guide to filing your own SAR, is in the article.

01/06/2026

Spotify have launched their verified badge for artists. Most coverage treated it as a meaningful step toward addressing AI music flooding streaming platforms. Looking at the actual qualification requirements and the underlying mechanics, the picture is far more limited than the headlines suggested.

The badge appears in search results and confirms an account belongs to a human creator rather than a bot network. That's useful for listeners who want confidence they're streaming the real artist. For the artists themselves, the question is what it does for their earnings, and the short answer is considerably less than the launch coverage implied.

AI music's financial damage to streaming isn't primarily happening in search. It's in the algorithmic playlists and background listening environments that account for 38% of all streams. That's where AI generated tracks compete with human work for fractions of the royalty pool. Spotify's badge has no reach there. It addresses listener trust in an active search context while the income damage continues somewhere else entirely.

Spotify runs a pro rata model. Every track uploaded to the platform claims a fraction of total revenue generated in a given period. When the number of tracks increases without a ceiling, each individual track's fractional share shrinks. Deezer confirmed in April 2026 that 44% of its daily uploads are now AI generated. Separately, it flagged in January 2026 that 85% of streams from fully AI generated content are fraudulent. identified and demonetised 2 billion fraudulent streams in 2025, redirecting approximately $17 million to legitimate creators. The badge is a completely different mechanism. Identity verification and fraud prevention are not the same thing.

The qualification threshold tells you who the badge was built for. 10,000 monthly active listeners across three consecutive months, plus 1,000 followers. Spotify says this covers 99% of artists listeners actively search for. In 2025, 0.62% of Spotify's 13 million artists earned £10,000 or more. The badge threshold roughly correlates with that group, artists who already have meaningful audience scale and who, in most cases, are already protected through visibility or label relationships. The 99.38% earning less than £10,000 are not artists listeners don't search for. They're working artists, gigging artists, artists releasing music to genuine fan communities. They don't qualify for the one protection mechanism Spotify deployed this year.

CISAC projects €10 billion in cumulative losses to music creators from AI by 2028, with 24% of creator revenues at risk. MIDiA Research also reported that streaming revenue growth slowed from 10.3% in 2023 to 6.2% in 2024. When growth slows and the number of tracks claiming the pool increases, the arithmetic gets worse for human creators every quarter. Those projections land on the long tail, not the established names who already have badges and the audience scale to match.

The comparison that really matters is Deezer's payment approach. Launched in France in 2024 and extended to publishing rights in January 2025 through a partnership with Sacem, it pays double the standard rate for artists with 1,000 or more monthly listeners drawn from at least 500 unique listeners. Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group both adopted it. The model rewards genuine listening rather than just volume of streams. Spotify retains approximately 30% of platform revenue regardless of what artists earn per stream. There's no financial incentive to restructure how royalties flow. A verification badge costs considerably less to deploy than changing royalty mechanics, and it generates better coverage.

The full article covers the threshold arithmetic, the passive versus active listening distinction, and the structural comparison with Deezer's approach in more detail.

We would be interested to hear from other managers or artists, particularly those working in AI adjacent genres like electronic or ambient, where the upload volume is probably hitting harder than in most. Are you seeing it in the streaming data?

25/05/2026

Something caught our attention in January. A story appeared about DistroKid exploring a sale at around $2 billion, with Goldman Sachs and Raine advising the deal. DistroKid handles somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of all new music releases globally. That's a significant portion of everything being released right now, potentially moving into new ownership.

So we did what I usually do when something catches my eye. I sat down and mapped it out properly. Who actually owns all the main distribution platforms right now? Not who owned them when you first signed up, but who sits above them today.

CD Baby was founded in 1998. If you were around in the early days of digital distribution, you'll remember what CD Baby represented. It was the original DIY option. Scrappy, affordable, built for artists releasing music themselves at a time when the majors had no interest in that market. Choosing CD Baby felt like a deliberate decision to stay outside the system. Since February 2026, CD Baby has been a Universal Music Group asset, sitting inside Virgin Music Group, acquired as part of a $775 million deal. For anyone who chose it precisely because they wanted nothing to do with the major label structure, the situation has changed.

Sony has two distribution entities. AWAL targets developing artists with label-type services and has functioned as a pathway to a full Sony signing for certain artists. The Orchard serves established independent labels and generates over $1 billion annually. Same parent company, different products.

TuneCore is owned by Believe, a publicly listed company on Euronext Paris. Believe acquired a publishing administration service called Sentric Music for €47 million in 2023 and launched a full publishing arm in October 2025. A single company now handles distribution, publishing registration, and royalty collection for artists who signed up, in many cases, just to upload their music. Most TuneCore users are entirely unaware of the structure they're sitting inside.

Warner owns ADA, its distribution and label services arm. A deal to acquire Revelator, a rights and royalty platform, was announced in April 2026 and is expected to close later this year.

There are still some genuinely independent platforms. Symphonic, Ditto Music, RouteNote, ONErpm, Amuse, and ALERA all remain independently owned as of April 2026. But Symphonic acquired Distro Nation in March 2026.

Why are the major labels buying distribution infrastructure in the first place? The revenue logic is straightforward. Distribution fees are recurring and scale automatically as more artists upload more music. But, the deeper reason is the data. Every upload sends live signals: streaming numbers, audience demographics, territory data. Owning the distribution layer means knowing which artists are gaining momentum before those artists have a manager, a lawyer, or any negotiating position. documented this dynamic as far back as 2018.

The second is that terms change quite often after acquisitions, often quietly. Most platforms notify users by email before new terms take effect. Those emails can get archived as unread. A continued use of the platform generally counts as acceptance in most jurisdictions. So an artist who hasn't read a terms of service email in two years may be operating under materially different terms without realising it.

We moved a client's catalogue from Symphonic to AWAL not long ago. AWAL flagged the tracks as already owned by someone else. We had to pull together full release documentation, original release dates, and ISRC codes before AWAL would accept the files. Then we ran two versions of every track simultaneously while the new distribution settled in, then went back to take down the originals. This was a managed move. It still took weeks. For an artist doing it alone, on principle, because they've decided they're not comfortable with who now owns their platform? Most of them will get halfway through and give up. Not because they weighed the cost and rejected it, but because the friction is enough.

The article covers the full ownership map as of April 2026, the reasoning behind why major labels are buying distribution infrastructure, and four specific questions worth running through before your next release. The questions are practical: who actually owns your distributor right now, what does the live agreement say about data sharing, is there a change of control clause, and when did you last read an email from your distributor?

08/05/2026

Since the BMG and Concord merger was announced on 28 April 2026 there have been more than a few questions on our mind.

BMG has had a specific identity in the music business for close to two decades. After it was reborn in 2008 under Bertelsmann, it positioned itself as the genuine alternative to Universal, Sony, and Warner with shorter contracts, better royalty terms, more transparency, and a stated commitment to treating artists as partners rather than a product. That pitch worked. A lot of artists signed to BMG specifically because they believed it operated differently.

Now, with the merger formally announced, the combined company projects $2.2 billion in revenue for 2026, with EBITDA of $730 million and a long-term target of $1.2 billion. The deal carries a valuation of approximately $14 billion. The incoming CEO, Bob Valentine, has described the goal as "using scale to strengthen independence." That phrase is worth examining carefully, because it is doing a significant amount of work.

What does independence actually mean at $2.2 billion in revenue?

For context: Warner Music Group posted $6.4 billion in 2024. The merged entity isn't approaching that figure, but at $2.2 billion it now enters negotiations with Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music from a position neither company held separately. That weight creates advantages for the combined catalogue, better streaming terms, more standing in AI licensing conversations that are currently reshaping the entire industry.

But the same scale creates investor expectations and commercial pressures that weren't present when BMG was positioning itself as the scrappy alternative. The company's interests in those streaming conversations, at $2.2 billion, are not identical to the interests of an individual artist on the roster.

BMG already held more than three million songs and recordings before this deal was announced. Concord's roster includes James Taylor, Soccer Mommy, The Avett Brothers, Common, Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, St Vincent, and Elvis Costello. Earlier acquisitions brought Boosey and Hawkes, the classical publisher whose catalogue includes Stravinsky, Bartók, Britten, and Prokofiev. Round Hill Music was acquired in 2023 for $468.8 million, adding 150,000 songs.

This is a seriously massive company catalogue now. And catalogue companies at this scale are central figures in the AI licensing conversations happening between music rights holders and AI developers. If your existing BMG contract has vague or outdated AI rights language, a structural change of this magnitude is precisely the moment that language starts to matter in ways it didn't before.

This pattern is worth seeing in its broader context. What's happening at the catalogue company level mirrors what's been happening at the distribution level for some years. Ownership structures across the sector are more complex than the branding typically makes visible. None of that makes these companies bad partners. But the structural context belongs in your decision-making alongside the deal terms.

If you are signed to BMG:

Locate your change of control clauses. These clauses exist in most serious music contracts and specify what happens to your agreement when ownership or management control changes hands. A merger announcement is exactly the trigger these clauses are written for.

Review your AI rights language. What does your contract say about how your music can be used in AI training datasets? What consent rights do you hold, and what notification requirements does the label carry?

Verify that your PRO and neighbouring rights registrations are fully documented and up to date independently of any internal label system. If the company's infrastructure changes during a transition period, you want your registrations to be verifiable regardless of what happens internally.

For anyone in active negotiations with BMG: these aren't hostile questions. They're standard due diligence at a moment when the company's structure is visibly changing. Any label worth signing with will have answers.

The new article walks through it all. BMG's history including the Sony BMG joint venture period that many people in the industry don't know about, what Concord brings to the deal in detail, the financial structure of the merged entity, and a practical breakdown of the specific contract clauses you need to check.

30/04/2026

When managing artists, developing income streams relies on understanding where the money in UK recorded music actually goes, and whether the headline figures translate to anything meaningful at the artist level. The BPI 's 47th annual report is compulsory reading. This year's data confirmed patterns we have been watching develop for the past 18 months. It also surfaced a story we don'tthink is getting nearly enough attention.

The BPI publishes this report every year and it is one of the most reliable primary data sources on UK recorded music. The figures come from the BPI's own data and this is not modelling or estimation. When BPI reports £1.57bn in UK recorded music revenue for 2025, that is as authoritative as it gets on UK industry figures.

UK recorded music generated £1.57bn in 2025, a 5% increase on the year before, the 11th consecutive year of growth. Total audio streams passed 210.3 billion for the first time. Vinyl revenue reached £174.7m, its highest level in over 30 years. Paid subscriptions totalled £902.2m. UK music also ranked as Britain's biggest source of cultural pride in a BPI survey, with 27% of respondents choosing music above every other cultural form.

By any reasonable measure, those are record numbers.

However, streaming revenue grew 4.6% in 2025, down from 5.7% the year before. Stream volume grew 5.5%, versus 12.8% in 2023. And paid subscriptions, the £902.2m pool that most artists depend on for their streaming income, grew just 3.1%. Two years ago, the same pool was growing at more than four times that rate.
Meanwhile, ad supported streaming, the free tier, the one with the lowest per stream rates, grew 21.8%.

We have had essentially the same conversation with artists we manage at least a dozen times over the past 18 months. Stream counts are up. Revenue is up less. One artist grew their streams 8% last year. Their streaming income grew 1.4% and that is not unusual. That is what a maturing paid subscription market, with a faster growing free tier, produces at the individual artist level. The BPI data confirms it at industry scale. The numbers just took a while to catch up to what artists were already feeling.

Vinyl amounted to £174.7m in revenue. Up 19.9% in a single year. The 18th consecutive year of growth and the highest level in over 30 years. That is a format most industry conversations in 2015 and 2016 were writing off as a niche product for collectors. It is now outperforming streaming revenue growth by a significant margin, in a format where artists can price their own work, sell direct to the people who love it, and build something tangible with an audience that chooses to spend real money.

The BPI represents the recorded music industry, labels, distributors, the infrastructure. The £1.57bn is real. Whether it flows equitably to the people who made the music is the question the report does not ask, and probably cannot answer within its scope.

The vinyl figure has the same gap. Eighteen years of growth and a 30-year revenue high, but who is capturing it? Catalogue heavy major label releases dominate the vinyl charts. Whether artists building direct fan relationships are taking their share of that £174.7m is worth looking at properly if you are making release decisions in 2026.

The industry growth story is real. Eleven consecutive years of growth is not a fluke. But the channel distributing most of that growth, paid streaming subscriptions, is showing clear signs of maturation. The faster growing part is ad supported audio, which pays less per play.

Format strategy in 2026 is a revenue question as much as a creative one. If vinyl is at a 30-year high and growing faster than streaming revenue, and you have not seriously considered a physical product as part of your release plan, that conversation is now overdue.

For artists and managers in this community, is streaming income keeping pace with streaming volume? And has vinyl entered your planning conversations in a way it had not a few years ago?

24/04/2026

UK Music 's Black Music Means Business report was published recently in March 2026. It makes for some pretty stark reading.

The headline figure is particularly striking: £24.5bn out of a total £30bn UK music market over the past 30 years. Thats roughl;y 80% of all value. UK Music describes Black music as the central force powering UK music.

UK Music classifies Black music across 138 genres divided into three tiers. The first
two cover specifically Black British genres and core Black music traditions with £6.07bn
between them. The third tier is the largest: 72 genres that originate from Black music,
accounting for £11.94bn. That Tier 3 includes a substantial portion of what most people
would call mainstream popular music. Rock, pop, drum and bass, and electronic music, genres whose cultural roots trace to Black music traditions but which are now created and consumed across every community

The 80% figure measures cultural origin over the last 30 years. It does not measure where the money actually ends up.

It is what the secondary data addresses directly, and it is not a criticism of the report.

Additionally, 80% of Black music creators and professionals have reported experiencing persistent inequity and barriers to progression. There's also a reported 20% pay gap. and, just 22% of senior industry positions are held by Black or global majority professionals. After £24.5bn of economic contribution, those figures are quite extraordinary.

The gap between what Black musical culture generates and what Black artists and
professionals receive is not a pipeline problem. It appears to be a structural one. More entry points do not fix a 20% pay gap at every career stage. The report's eight
recommendations seem to understand that distinction. They focus on institutional
funding, equitable contracting, educational integration, and government investment,
not only on increasing entry-level access.

This is the first study of this kind in Europe. The data comes from the largest volume
of commercially robust music industry information ever compiled for this purpose. The questions it raises are the right ones, and the evidence base is solid.

The report asks the right questions. Whether the industry has the appetite to act on the answers is a different matter entirely.

IQ Artist Management

17/08/2026

17/06/2026

15/06/2026

11/06/2026

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