Universal Settled Its Fake-Artist Lawsuit. We Still Don't Know What Changed.

Last year, Universal Music Group sued Believe and its subsidiary TuneCore over what they called a flood of fake artists exploiting the platform — accounts uploading music under names like "Kendrik Laamar" and "Arriana Gramde," tapping streams from the actual artists those names were imitating. UMG claimed damages at half a billion dollars.

The case settled. The terms are sealed. And neither side is saying what changed, what was paid, or what either party agreed to do differently going forward.

Here's what's worth paying attention to: TuneCore is one of the largest DIY distributors in the world. It's the kind of service most independent artists use to get music onto Spotify and Apple Music. The reason fake artists could flood the platform in the first place is the exact reason DIY distribution works at all — open access, low friction, open to anyone. The settlement doesn't undo that trade-off. It just puts a price tag on it.

If you're using a DIY distributor, this isn't a reason to panic. It is a reason to understand the model you're operating inside. The same platform that lets you in without permission also lets in everyone else without permission. It's the same door.

Pop Music Is Disappearing From the Charts

Chartmetric data from January 2026 shows that current-year tracks made up only 3.5% of Spotify's Global Top 50. A year earlier, that number was 26%.

Translation: the songs people are streaming the most right now are mostly old. Catalog music — anything two years or older — is eating the Top 50.

There are a few ways to interpret this. Some of it is the post-pandemic comfort effect: people retreating to music they already trust. Some of it is TikTok pulling old songs back into circulation. Some of it is that major-label pop, the genre most engineered for chart performance, is producing fewer breakthrough records than it used to.

For independent artists, this is a mixed signal. The bar to crack the Top 50 with a brand-new song is higher than it has been in years. But the catalog effect also means a record you put out today can keep working for you in 2027, 2028, 2029. Long tails are getting longer. Front-loaded release strategies — hit the algorithm hard in week one or die — are aging badly.

Instagram Will Boost Your Streams. For a Price.

A joint study from Instagram and Luminate found that artists using Instagram's Activation program see a streaming lift of roughly 10%. The same study reported that Instagram's most engaged music users spend an average of $55 per month on non-live music — merch, vinyl, downloads, paid subscriptions.

If you read the structure carefully, you begin to understand that Meta is sitting on data showing that the people who follow you on Instagram are the same people most likely to spend money on your music. Then, they sell you a paid program to reach those people more effectively.

This is the modern platform deal in a single sentence: the audience you built on a free platform is now an audience you have to pay to talk to.

If you're going to spend on this, spend with eyes fully open. A 10% lift on a base of 500 monthly listeners is 50 listeners. A 10% lift on a base of 50,000 is 5,000. The program rewards artists who already have momentum. It is not a fix for cold-start problems.

Deezer Is Receiving 60,000 AI-Generated Tracks Per Day

We covered this briefly last issue but it's worth coming back to with the actual number in the headline.

Sixty thousand. Per day. On one platform.

Deezer has been transparent about this in a way the larger platforms have not — they've publicly confirmed the volume, and they've started flagging AI-generated content in their catalog. Spotify and Apple Music have not disclosed equivalent numbers. The reasonable assumption is that the volumes on those platforms are higher, not lower.

This matters for two reasons. First, every fake stream is a real royalty pulled from a real artist's pool. The math of streaming payouts is zero-sum at the share level. Second, and more importantly, the platforms are losing the ability to tell what is human-made and what isn't — and they don't have an obvious incentive to fix it, because more uploads means more inventory, and more inventory means more stickiness.

The fraud isn't a bug in the system. It's a side effect the system is willing to live with.

We've been here before, almost.

In the late '90s, Napster broke the music industry's distribution model and the labels spent the next decade trying to combat piracy. The threat was real. The response was clumsy. By the time anyone figured out what to do, Apple had already done it for them.

What's happening now is different in one important way. The threat isn't piracy. It's the opposite of piracy. The threat is that there is now too much music, made by too many things — some of them human, some of them not — and the platforms we use to listen have no way to tell us which is which. They probably don't want to.

Sixty thousand AI tracks a day on one platform. Fake artists pulling streams from real ones until somebody big enough to sue notices. A pop chart where the freshest sound is from 2022. A 10% streaming bump available to anyone with a credit card. The systems built to deliver music to listeners are still working — there is more music available to more people than at any point in human history. But the systems built to tell us what's real, what's worth our time, who actually made the thing we're listening to — those systems are gone, or were never really there.

This is the part most music writing gets wrong. The takes that go viral are about the AI itself, or about the labels, or about the platforms. They miss the actual cost. The cost is paid by the artist who spent two years on a record that now competes for attention with sixty thousand pieces of computer output uploaded that same day. The cost is paid by the listener who can't trust the playlist anymore because the playlist might not even contain people. The cost is the slow erasure of the simple fact that on the other end of every song, there used to be a person.

Music is a form of art — or at least it used to be. Akin to sculpture, painting, poetry, acting. Imagine if the authenticity, access and soul of those artforms were to disappear overnight. What value could you find in an AI-generated Mona Lisa, or the questionable origins of the Statue of David?

Authenticity used to be assumed. You didn't need to verify a musician was a musician. The economics of recording — the studio time, the gear, the band, the years — did the verification for you. If something existed, somebody had bled to make it. That's gone. Anyone can upload anything from anywhere, named whatever they want, and it sits in the same library as a record someone spent their twenties making. The platform treats them identically. To the platform, they are identical. Both are content. Both generate streams. Both pay out the same per play.

So what does it mean to be a real artist now? More importantly — what does it mean to be a real listener?

I think it means something it hasn't had to mean in a long time. It means knowing. Actually knowing. Knowing the names of the people who made the things you love. Knowing the friend who put you onto the record. Knowing what someone listens to and trusting their taste enough to listen when they tell you about something new. The platforms can't verify any of that for you. They never could. We just used to not need them to, because the music industry's old infrastructure — the radio stations, the record stores, the magazines, the people you'd argue with at a show — did the verifying through human relationships. That layer got removed. Nothing replaced it. The algorithm tried, and we are now living through the long aftermath of finding out the algorithm couldn't do the job.

The answer to "who's real?" was never going to come from the platform. The platform is the problem. A better algorithm, a stricter upload policy, an AI-detection tool — these are all attempts to fix authenticity from the top down, and they will all fail for the same reason: authenticity is not a property of files. It's a property of relationships. You don't trust a song because Spotify told you to. You trust it because someone you respect told you to. Or because you found it yourself, late at night, and it changed something in you. Those are human acts. They do not scale. That is the whole point.

The systems that used to do the work of telling us what's real are broken. Some of them were never built right to begin with, and likely intentionally. The thing that replaces them isn't going to be a smarter version of the same thing. It's going to be smaller. Slower. Harder to fake. Built around people who already know each other and the music they actually care about. It's going to look less like a feed and more like a conversation again. The middle man has to go.

That's not nostalgia. That's just the only thing that has ever worked.

For the aspiring artist, the real artist, the question used to be: can I get my music heard?

Then it became: can I get paid for it?

Now it's: can anyone tell I'm even here?

The answer is yes. But not from the platform. From the people.

The Forum is a weekly publication from 3 Lions Media Group, a subsidiary of Triumvirate Group Inc. We're also building something called Verdikt — a taste identity network for people who believe music is more than background noise. We'll keep you posted…

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