The music industry vs. AI (rerun)
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2025
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hey smarties! We’re taking a short break for the holidays. So today, we’re revisiting one of our favorite episodes from 2025. Enjoy!
Today we’re diving into the business of music. Trapital founder Dan Runcie joins Kimberly to explain what Anthropic’s recent copyright settlement with authors could mean for record labels who’ve sued AI companies, the “fair use” debates dominating the music industry, and why even the biggest stars are struggling to create chart-toppers these days. Plus, we’ll celebrate a win from one of our listeners.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey Smarties, it's Kimberly. |
| 0:02.2 | Make Me Smart is taking some time off for the holidays. |
| 0:05.0 | Hope you are, too. |
| 0:06.0 | But we're going to be back in the new year. |
| 0:07.8 | In the meantime, we're sharing some of our favorite episodes of 2025 |
| 0:11.3 | and some amazing work from our friends at other Marketplace shows. |
| 0:15.5 | Here's one of my favorite Make Me Smart episodes of the year. |
| 0:18.6 | Enjoy. |
| 0:26.8 | Music. Make Me Smart episodes of the year. Enjoy. Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as |
| 0:31.7 | smart as all of us. Today, we're going to take a look at the music business, and there is a lot |
| 0:37.2 | going down in that |
| 0:38.1 | industry, both with big artists and behind the scenes. You may have heard recently that the AI |
| 0:44.0 | company Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle an AI copyright case. And while, yes, |
| 0:52.5 | this has big implications for the news and the book publishing industries, |
| 0:56.6 | we wanted to talk about what this might mean for the music business, |
| 1:00.6 | where there are a bunch of copyright fights happening right now. |
| 1:04.5 | And for that, we are joined now by Dan Runcie, who is the founder of Trappital, |
| 1:09.3 | a music and entertainment research group. And Dan is here to make us smart about this industry and other industry news. Dan, welcome to the show. |
| 1:18.0 | Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here. So what does this anthropic settlement mean for the music industry? |
| 1:25.4 | The anthropic settlement was big. And I think a lot of people in the music industry, |
| 1:30.1 | specifically on the legal side, opened their eyes up because they saw a pathway for what |
| 1:35.2 | the future could look like, especially with some of the ongoing legal disputes going on. |
... |
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