@ArtistRights Newsletter 8/11/25: @DavidCLowery on Streaming, SX v. Sirius, AI the Cult and “Dual Use AI” Culture is Upstream of War

Save the Date! September 18 Artist Rights Roundtable in Washington produced by Artist Rights Institute/American University Kogod Business & Entertainment Program. Details at this link!

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Save the Date! September 18 Artist Rights Roundtable in Washington produced by Artist Rights Institute/American University Kogod Business & Entertainment Program. Details at this link!

Streaming Economics

@nickgillespie and @davidclowery: Streaming is a Regulated Monopoly (Reason Magazine/Nick Gillespie)

Spotify’s Royalty Threshold Is Conscious Parallelism Reshaping the Music Business—But Not in a Good Way (The Trichordist/Chris Castle)

SoundExchange v. SiriusXM

Did the Court Misread Congress? Rethinking SoundExchange v. SiriusXM Through the Lens of Legislative Design

Copyright Terminations Vetter v. Resnik

Controversial ruling on US termination right fulfills the intention of Congress, say creators (Complete Music Update/Chris Cooke)

Amicus Brief Supporting Cyril Vetter of Artist Rights Institute (David Lowery, Nikki Rowling), Blake Morgan, Abby North, and Angela Rose White (Chris Castle)

Cult of the AI Singularity

AI Frontier Labs and the Singularity as a Modern Prophetic Cult (MusicTech.Solutions/Chris Castle)

AI Czar David Sacks Shortcut to Nowhere: How the Seven Deadly Since Keep Him From Licensing Solutions

Dual Use AI

America Isn’t Ready for the Wars of the Future (Foreign Affairs/GEN Mark Milley and Eric Schmidt)

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Named Chairman of Military AI Firm Following 600M Investment (Playy Magazine)

Eric Schmidt Is Building the Perfect AI War-Fighting Machine (Wired/Will Knight)

Souls for Sale: The Long Con Behind AI Weapons and Cultural Complicity (MusicTechPolicy/Chris Castle)

Eric Schmidt-led panel pushing for new defense experimentation unit to drive military adoption of generative AI(Defense Scoop/Brandi Vincent)

The Lords of War: Daniel Ek, Eric Schmidt and the Militarization of Tech (MusicTechPolicy/Chris Castle)

Record Producer Agreements, a practical guide

By Chris Castle

[Editor Charlie sez this post first appeared on MusicTechPolicy]

Over the years I have had a number of posts about negotiating record producer agreements. These posts were based on topics, so one would be on royalties, another on recording costs, recoupment, credits, and so on. Readers have asked that I combine these into one topic and I finally did it for the Copyright Alliance and now am posting the combined article here–all 30 pages of it. The last page is a sample producer agreement check list which could be converted into a deal memo.

I’d encourage you to see if there’s anything important to you that I’ve left out, because when you write these things there’s almost always something you leave out. Since the business is changing rapidly, as soon as you sit down to write one of these things there’s some new configuration that becomes all the rage, so there will be some topics not included because you have to draw the line somewhere.

Feel free to post any comments. You can download the article here.

record-producer-agreements-v-3Download