Musonomics

For the past decade, success in music rights investing has largely been measured by one thing: how many great catalogs you could acquire before everyone else did. But every gold rush eventually matures. Capital floods in. Competition intensifies. The biggest players start buying each other instead of buying songs. The question is no longer who owns the most music. It's who can build the best business around it.

In this special crossover episode of Musonomics and Music Moneyball, Larry Miller is joined by Tom Mullen, CEO and Co-Founder of Standard Innovation, to explore what the next chapter of the music investment industry might look like. Together, they trace how streaming transformed music into an institutional asset class, why mergers and acquisitions are accelerating across the sector, and what history can teach us about competing in markets increasingly dominated by giants. Looking beyond music, they turn to A24's rise in the film industry as an unlikely blueprint for how smaller, more focused companies can outperform far larger competitors by embracing specialization instead of scale. Along the way, they examine why platform businesses are replacing simple catalog acquisition, where investors should be looking for untapped opportunities, and why the biggest competitive advantage may no longer be having the most capital, but knowing exactly where not to compete.

Artificial intelligence is doing to music what the printing press did to books and what the mp3 did to the album. But as the tools multiply and the investment pours in, a harder question is starting to surface. Who exactly are these systems built for?

On this episode, Larry talks with Drew Thurlow, former senior executive at Sony Music, Pandora, and Warner Music, and author of Machine Music, the most clear-eyed account yet of what is actually happening at the intersection of AI and the music industry. Then Rithvik Kundu, music technology researcher and co-founder of the NYU Gen Audio AI group, and Jad Al Masri, violinist, composer, and founder of Motif, join the conversation fresh off winning the Berklee College of Music AI Hackathon. Their work asks a question the major AI music platforms have largely ignored: what about the five billion people whose musical traditions, modal systems, and microtonal instruments don't fit neatly into the Western tonal framework these models were built on?

Most conversations about AI and music collapse into two camps: fear that it will replace artists, or excitement about how much money there is to be made. Lucas Cantor sits outside both.

Lucas is a venture investor at Mindset Ventures and an Emmy-winning composer who got his start at Hans Zimmer's studio before going on to finish Schubert's Unfinished Symphony using AI, a project that became a live orchestral premiere in London. He's also the author of Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Larry talks with Lucas about what it actually took to complete a 200-year-old symphony with machine learning, why he thinks Suno's multi-billion dollar valuation rests on a fundamentally wrong premise about what music is, and why, after spending a career building tools that make creation easier, he remains convinced that the hardest and most valuable skill in music has never been technical at all.

With apologies to cyberpunk author William Gibson, the technology is out in the wild. The lawsuits are filed. The licensing deals are being signed. The future of the music industry is already here. It's just not evenly distributed.

This is the third episode in Musonomics' AI series, and it's the one that looks forward -- beyond the fear and hype to what's already taking shape. When content becomes infinitely abundant, what gets more valuable? And who wins?

Larry sits down with Cherie Hu, founder of Water and Music, and Daniel Rowland, VP of Strategy and Partnerships at LANDR to map where things actually stand -- and where they're heading.

They cover why professional AI adoption is far higher than anyone publicly admits, how major labels are quietly re-centralizing by buying up indie distributors, what the "DAWification of everything" means for the line between assistive and generative tools, and why the music company of the future might look like a label, a tech company, and a data company all at once.

One thread runs through all of it: authenticity is still the industry's most fragile -- and most valuable -- asset.

Artificial intelligence is the force reshaping the music industry's future. And the legal battle over who gets paid, and for what, is just getting started.

In 2024, the major labels sued AI music companies Suno and Udio. Music publishers sued Anthropic this year for $3 billion. The AI companies say training on copyrighted music is transformative, and protected by fair use. Rightsholders say if you're building a business on music, you have to pay for it. The courts haven't settled it. Congress hasn't touched it. But the marketplace is already moving.

Larry talks with David Israelite of the National Music Publishers Association and Judge David Strickler of the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board, both adjunct professors at NYU Steinhardt, about fair use, the shadow of litigation, why voluntary licensing deals are quietly multiplying, and whether greed, fear, or good old-fashioned bargaining theory will ultimately draw the line between innovation and compensation.

In this episode:

- Why the fair use argument is the central legal battleground, and what the courts have said so far

- How settlements with Suno and Udio are reshaping the landscape before any landmark ruling arrives

- Why voluntary licensing deals are multiplying, and what the YouTube era teaches us about where this is headed

- Whether Congress will step in, and why the best-case scenario is that it doesn't

- What the next three to five years look like for creators, rights holders, and the AI companies caught in between

Artificial intelligence is no longer on the horizon for the music industry. It's here, and it's moving fast. But is AI the next great instrument in a long line of tools that musicians learn and master? Or is it something fundamentally different, a technology that doesn't extend what artists do, but replaces it?

In the first episode of a three-part series, Larry sits down with Cherie Hu, founder of Water & Music, and Grammy Award-winning producer and AI analyst Yung Spielberg to map the current landscape: where the tools are, what's actually working, where value is concentrating, and what it all means for the next generation of artists.

What you'll hear:

- The modern history of AI in music and why music has lagged behind other creative fields in adopting it.

- How Suno and Udio differ, and what Udio's shift to a closed, licensed platform means for creators.

- Assistive vs. generative AI tools, and why those two worlds are increasingly colliding.

- Where value is concentrating: platforms winning, major labels racing to deal, artists largely left out.

- Should a 20-year-old artist be excited or worried? The case for live music and human connection as the safest bets

Superfan is a strong contender for Music Industry Buzzword of 2025-26. But what does it mean, exactly? And what does it mean for the industry?

On this episode, Larry talks with Olivia Jones from MIDIA research who is watching the space closely, and Musonomics correspondent Mariel Darling sits down with Mag Rodriguez, founder of EVEN, one of the leading platforms doing the heavy lifting to talk about the challenges and rewards of superfan engagement.

In this episode, we take a look back at the first half of 2025. Larry sits down with Tatiana Cirisano of MIDIA research to discuss underlying industry trends across the globe, including where music meets audiences. Larry also talks with Paul Sipio of Apollo Global Management, which has invested billions in the industry over the past few years, about why music catalog has been, and continues to be, an attractive investment on Wall Street and beyond.

It is presidential election season and music is back in the thick of it. In 2016 we spoke with Ben Sisario of the New York Times, Professor Chris Sprigman of NYU Law School and music industry lawyer Joel Schoenfeld about the historical and then current role of music in Presidential politics. In this episode, we revisit that episode and provide a 2024 update.

In this episode, Larry and Lynn discuss a streaming fraud bust, music meets presidential politics yet again, Kendrick spikes the ball, and protect those copyrights!