Good morning.
This Week’s Highlights:
In the world of creativity and AI, this week, a crowd of the AI companies made moves to label or ID what’s synthetic. Spotify will tag AI “personas” and pull them from recommendations (TechCrunch). Anthropic says everything its models produce now carries a watermark (TechCrunch). And Suno, facing lawsuits, added watermarks too — then opened a waitlist to press AI songs onto vinyl (MusicBusinessWorldwide). (Vinyl? Really?)
That last one is the tell. The AI company isn’t selling the song — it’s buying the ritual, the scarcity, something you can hold. It has understood something that those rushing to label AI haven’t: people want something they can hold. The physical. The real.
Audience numbers point the same direction. Time now expects to earn half its revenue from live events, up from 28% in 2023 (The Wrap). Public radio’s combined audience is up 9.6% in two years (InsideRadio) after Trump’s funding crisis caused a panic. Poetry is booming through live performance (The Guardian), and neuroscientists keep finding that collective effervescence requires bodies in a room (The Guardian).
Which makes it worth noticing who is buying what. Ari Emanuel’s Mari acquired ATG — seven Broadway theatres, ten in London — for a rumored $6 billion (The Hollywood Reporter). Meanwhile the poor National Symphony is likely to earn half the ticket revenue it had budgeted (if lucky) (Washington Post).
Presence is the scarce good now. Now a rush to consolidate and own what’s making culture.
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.