What a year it's been for the music industry.
With 2024 fast approaching its close, Bulletin board put together a series of year-end stories outlining the biggest developments in the worlds of record labels, publishing companies, live music, music law, radio, artificial intelligence and sustainability over the past 12 months. And we certainly didn't lack for content.
In tech news, the debate over AI companies scraping copyrighted music to feed their algorithms has grown increasingly heated and even spawned multiple lawsuits. Speaking of legal action, the Mechanical Licensing Collective's lawsuit against Spotify over its bundling practice made a big splash around mid-year, while on the live front, a Justice Department lawsuit meant to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster fell through the same month.
The Waves also saw major restructuring at both Universal and Warner Music Groups, while the country music boom of the year saw coastal labels increasingly wanting the action happening in Nashville. On the deal-making front, the cycle of blockbuster catalog sales continued, with major deals for the likes of Believe, Hipgnosis, BMI and Concord making headlines.
Meanwhile, radio continued to struggle with waves of layoffs and cutbacks (not to mention a bankruptcy filing), and a superstar in Drake took unprecedented legal action against his label over a culture-defining war. And in a story that exploded into the public consciousness last year but only continued to rise in the past 12 months, a hip-hop superstar from an earlier era suffered a stunning fall amid a seemingly endless string of scares categories.
See below for links to all of our year-end content.
Music Business Year in Review
