And The Update Is...Suno Loses Copyright Case, Spotify Hits 300M & YouTube Music Dominates

Welcome to And The Update Is, I am your host Ross Golan and this is the music industry news for the week of August 3rd, 2026. Let's get to the news. Last week we had just missed this update, but there are new developments. Here we go. Suno lost a copyright infringement case against Gemma. That's the performance rights organization out of Germany. That'd be like losing to ASCAP or BMI here in the United States. They lost and then they announced that they have an outline for responsible AI in principle, but I think we can all see what is about to happen. This is what happens when you build a company built without any ethics and you think you're going to get away with theft, but you don't. My guess is that this is only the first of many, many, many losses. Spotify is now the second most popular streaming service in South Korea. YouTube music is still in the top spot. Now, the reason why I'm bringing this up is because throughout the world, YouTube music is by far the biggest streaming service. I think we're used to assuming it's Spotify, either their premium or freemium product, but it is actually YouTube. So the only news here in this is to highlight that fact. Spotify, by the way, hits 300 million premium subscribers in quarter two. Total revenue. It grew 14%. That's good for everyone in the music business. Songwriters, congrats on that. SoundCloud launches weekly music discovery show, The Upload, if only people still use SoundCloud. In other news, Tom Corson, our friend over at Warner Music Group, is now the COO. So that's cool because we like Tom. He's very smart. Over on charts, Choose in Texas by Ella Langley is number one. For the 16th week, non-consecutive. Congrats, Luke Dick. If you want to go check out his episode, join our Patreon. It's great. And partly because he's great. I'm the Problem by Morgan Wallen is back at number one on the Billboard 200 chart. That is crazy considering that Ari's album came out this week. Die Die, the FIFA World Cup official song of 2026, is now the number one song on Billboard Global 200 for the fourth week in a row. Congrats to our friends who worked on that, Ed Sheeran and John Bellion. If you want to check out those episodes, they're all over the place. Global Spotify charts. Ariana Grande debuts at number one with Petal. Not a surprise. She also debuts at the Top Songs debut global chart. Congrats to our friends who are involved with that. Ilya, Max, Ari, good job. Olivia Rodrigo's number one on Spotify's Top Albums global chart for the seventh week in a row. She's very good. Very, very good. Okay, so that's the news. Not a lot of crazy stuff, but we had a great episode with Jesse Alexander last week, and we have a really special one coming out on this Tuesday. Again, we really appreciate all of you who've joined our Patreon because we launched a Patreon-exclusive podcast. We're going to be doing a Patreon-exclusive podcast with one of the best A&R people in the game, Mio Vukovic from Disney. He talks about his time with Geffen. It's fascinating. Go check out that episode. That's on our Patreon. Otherwise, we'll see you next Tuesday. That is not an intended pun. Thank you, Georgia Webush, for the excellent notes, as always. Bye! Bye!