Week of October 18–24, 2026

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Welcome to The Unlimited Brief, the weekly roundup of independent music and music industry news from Unlimited Sounds Radio. We start with the music: five independent artists from this week’s coverage at Indie Music Discovery, including a hard rock album shaped by New York nightlife and a jazz-pop single inspired by the memoir of a polar winter. Then the business: a publisher takes both Suno and Anthropic to court, Spotify posts a big third quarter, and John Mayer is heading back to a major label.

Missed last week? Here’s the Oct 11–17 edition.

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Indie Discoveries

From Indie Music Discovery, part of the Unlimited Sounds family.

From Pacific’s student-run label. Pac Ave Records released two projects this week: Mj Ward’s full-length album Myself to Celebrate, and Best of Pacific Vol. Jazz, featuring the Pacific Jazz Ensemble, Aimee MacDonald, and Bergen Finley. Both albums are now available on streaming services. Visit pacaverecords.com for videos, links, and more info.

Body Stuff, Body Stuff 5. Body Stuff is the solo project of Curran Reynolds, and the new album came out October 16. It’s eight songs of hard rock, post-punk and industrial, shaped by years in New York City’s music, art and nightlife scenes. Even when the songs go to dark places like pain and mortality, they turn toward love and connection. Andee Blacksugar of Blondie plays guitar.

Brit Drozda, “Flowers From Heaven”. The Palm Beach, Florida, artist’s pop-folk song is a tribute to her late brother and longtime collaborator, Virgil Price. It builds on an unfinished song and piano part he left behind. She finished it after flowers washed up on a beach the two of them used to visit, and she calls it their final collaboration.

Shane Pendergast, “Jack Pine”. The Prince Edward Island songwriter’s title track from his fifth album, out October 23, uses the bent, adaptable shape of the jack pine tree as a metaphor for resilience. It draws on the work of island poet Milton Acorn. Most of it was recorded live, with backing vocals from Catherine MacLellan.

JoJo Worthington, “Ever Ender Star Infinity”. The Montreal producer, songwriter and composer frames love in cosmic terms, with distorted guitars and production from William Crann. It’s the first single from her EP BAPTIZED II, due November 6, part of a concept project she’s been building for six years.

Kate Schutt, “Moonsick”. The jazz-pop single is inspired by Christiane Ritter’s 1934 memoir A Woman in the Polar Night. It’s about a night when a full moon rises over the snow and ice of Svalbard, where Ritter spent a winter. Schutt has visited Svalbard herself, in 2016 and 2024.

More new music this week: Scribe, “Soul Climb” · da nang, “IYKYK” · CHASE THE BEAR, “This Is What You Wanted” · Libby Ember, “Shoes” · Allegories, “Pure Comedy”

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Fine Print: Rights, Law and Policy

AI training is back in court

Reservoir has filed lawsuits in federal court in Northern California against both Suno and Anthropic. Against Suno, it alleges willful infringement of 1,050 songs, plus circumventing access controls and removing copyright management information. Against Anthropic, it names 853 works and says Claude “has created infringing output for all 853” of them. Across the two suits, Reservoir is seeking nearly $340 million in damages. These are allegations, and the coverage doesn’t report responses from either company (Digital Music News; also Music Business Worldwide).

Suno also filed its answer in UMG and Sony’s second lawsuit against it. On Tuesday, October 20, in Massachusetts, Suno admitted it has not deleted all of the recordings it used to train its models, which it says is consistent with the labels’ own 2024 demand that it retain its training data. It argues that any copying is fair use, and it denies the labels’ claim that its latest model “launders” infringement by training on the outputs of earlier ones (Music Business Worldwide).

A Supreme Court case ends without an answer

In a case over worldwide copyright termination, involving songwriter Cyril Vetter and the 1962 song “Double Shot,” four of the nine justices didn’t participate. That left the Court without the six it needs for a quorum, so it affirmed the lower court’s judgment without deciding the central question. The Fifth Circuit’s January ruling, that a termination could restore worldwide copyright interests, stands, but it binds only the Fifth Circuit. The major music companies had asked the Court to take the case. The issue could return if other circuits disagree (IPWatchdog).

A guilty plea in an Eminem leak case

Joseph Strange, 48, a former Eminem employee, pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement in federal court in Michigan. Prosecutors say he worked at Eminem’s Ferndale studio and copied unreleased music from password-protected drives. In summer 2024, they say, he sold at least ten files online for about $50,000. Streaming data as of November 2025 showed the files accessed more than eight million times, and prosecutors put the infringement at no less than $750,000. Sentencing is set for January 27, 2027, and the maximum is five years (Digital Music News).

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Royalty Check: Following the Money

Spotify’s big third quarter

Spotify reported 306 million premium subscribers, up 6 million and a million above its own guidance, and 788 million monthly users. Revenue was 4.97 billion euros, up 16 percent, and operating income was 672 million euros, up 15 percent. For the fourth quarter it’s guiding to 316 million subscribers and 820 million euros in operating income. Music Business Worldwide calculates that puts Spotify on course for around $3.3 billion in operating profit this year, which is MBW’s math, not Spotify’s guidance (Music Business Worldwide). The stock rose about nine percent on the day (Digital Music News).

Separately, DMN Pro says early third-quarter data shows Spotify giving its U.S. premium subscriber lead back to Apple Music after regaining it in the first half (DMN Pro, paywalled).

John Mayer returns to a major label

Mayer is launching his own label, Sob Rock Records, named for his latest album, in partnership with UMG’s Mercury Records. He left Columbia in 2022. Financial terms and rights splits weren’t disclosed. His single “Tom and Jerry” is due Friday, October 23, and he has Sphere dates in Las Vegas starting in April (Digital Music News).

A catalog deal from the same company that’s suing Suno

Reservoir has acquired a stake in José Feliciano’s recorded music catalog, along with non-exclusive rights to his name, image and likeness. That’s the catalog behind “Feliz Navidad.” Terms weren’t disclosed (Music Business Worldwide).

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Headlines

Spotify wants proof you live together. Some Premium Family members now have to prove they live with the plan manager. The manager opens a QR code in the app, and the member scans it with their own phone, in person. Members who fail, or don’t complete it within seven days, can’t join another Family or Duo plan for 12 months. A Goldman Sachs report earlier this month estimated that a meaningful share of Family plan users aren’t actual household members (Music Business Worldwide).

UMG licenses an AI gaming music service. UMG is the first major to license TYGER, which adapts music to live gameplay. It’s in beta on PC across more than 20 games, with a library of over 400,000 songs, mostly from independent artists. How artists and rights holders are paid hasn’t been reported (Music Business Worldwide).

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Quick Hits

• Neptunes lawsuit: Chad Hugo is fighting Pharrell Williams’s motion to dismiss. Hugo says the two split publishing 50/50 on roughly 50 sessions between 2019 and 2021. Williams says the complaint lacks specifics. These are allegations (Music Business Worldwide).
• StubHub: Rep. Robert Garcia of California has written to StubHub CEO Eric Baker about Andro Capital, a hedge fund where Baker is managing director that buys tickets in bulk and resells them, citing a conflict of interest (Digital Music News).
• Spotify in the car: Spotify has launched a native in-car app in select Audi models, built for Android Automotive (Music Business Worldwide).
• LEGO and Daft Punk: The two announced a partnership that grew out of a fan-designed set of the duo’s 2007 ALIVE Tour pyramid stage, which will become an official set. No release date yet (Digital Music News).
• John Anderson (1954–2026): The Country Music Hall of Famer has died at 71, according to his family, in his sleep at home in Tennessee. He was behind “Straight Tequila Night” and “Seminole Wind,” and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2024.

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On This Day in Music History

• October 20, 1977: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crashes. A chartered plane carrying the band ran out of fuel and crashed in a forest near Gillsburg, Mississippi, killing six people, including singer Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Steve Gaines. The band’s album Street Survivors had come out three days earlier, and its original cover was pulled afterward (Wikipedia).
• October 23, 2001: Apple unveils the first iPod. Steve Jobs described it as putting “1,000 songs in your pocket.” It had a 5-gigabyte hard drive and went on sale that November. Twenty-five years later, the fight over who owns the listener is Spotify against Apple Music, as this week’s subscriber numbers show (Wikipedia).

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Dates to Watch

• October 23: Shane Pendergast’s album Jack Pine and John Mayer’s “Tom and Jerry” are due
• November 6: JoJo Worthington’s EP BAPTIZED II
• January 27, 2027: Sentencing in the Eminem leak case
• April 2027: John Mayer’s Sphere dates in Las Vegas begin

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The Unlimited Brief is a weekly production of Unlimited Sounds Radio. Indie Music Discovery is part of the Unlimited Sounds family.

Sources: Music Business Worldwide, Digital Music News, IPWatchdog, Wikipedia, Indie Music Discovery, Pac Ave Records.