Good morning producers 👋🏼

With summer in full swing, it feels like the entire industry has shifted its focus outside. It's peak festival season, which means this month we're talking a lot about the wild, chaotic reality of live music right now. Moe has been fully buried in code optimizing the latest v1.4.0 for the entire dime[bundle] (as well as maybe something more ;), but we have still been able to make it out for a concert or two – including the amazing Angine de Poitrine that just performed a record breaking concert at the Montreal Jazz Fest. But they might be the outliers this summer, as the rest of the industry seems to be struggling with "blue dot fever" alongside ongoing AI lawsuits (I'm honestly losing track. The AI lawsuits are essentially just a Spider-Man meme of everyone pointing fingers at one another at this point). We have a lot to unpack while you take a quick break from that mixing session.

Tours are getting cancelled because of "blue dot fever"

As everyone is aware, concert tickets are more expensive than ever. However, this profit-chasing tactic is turning the concert-going experience into a luxury purchase, meaning that fans are needing to be more selective with the concerts they attend. So if you're Bruno Mars, one of the biggest pop stars of our generation, you are breaking records selling out arenas across the globe. Other artists however, are catching "blue dot fever", named after the quantity of blue dots (unsold seats) on Ticketmaster's website. Although not confirmed to be correlated, multiple artists and specific cities are being cancelled outright, and fans are drawing conclusions.

The culprit seems to date back to the pandemic. After being isolated for such a long time, fans across the world were yearning for the live concert experience once more. As the industry opened up again, fans were willing to pay a premium to go see a show – this phenomenon was well known and got coined as revenge spending. This post-pandemic boom seems to be on the way out as people struggle with inflation, record credit card debt, and ongoing international conflicts which are having huge global financial impacts.

Artists such as Post Malone, Jelly Roll, Meghan Trainor, Zayn, Demi Lovato, and the Pussycat Dolls have all cancelled tour dates in the past few months. Post Malone cancelled 6 tour dates citing the completion of his double-album as the priority. Meghan Trainor cancelled her entire Get In Girl tour citing the completion of her album and upcoming newborn as the reason. The Pussycat Dolls on the other hand were a bit more direct with their statement and called out their concerts "after taking an honest look at the North American run."

Naturally, Live Nation wants us to look past the doom-scrolling headlines. In a recent corporate memo titled "The Summer Concert Story Nobody Is Telling," the live music giant stood firm that these cancellations are all normal, stating, "while a handful of shows inevitably shift or fall off the calendar each year—less than 1% of scheduled shows have been canceled—the overall picture hasn't changed: demand remains strong across artists, venue sizes and markets."

According to their internal metrics, overall concert ticket sales are actually up 11% this year, and global festival sales are pacing 8% ahead of last year. Live Nation's President of Global Touring, Omar Al-joulani, argues that consumers aren't stepping away from live music; they are just making more deliberate, budget-conscious decisions. The company claims the live space is scaling to fit varying wallet sizes, pointing out that nearly 60% of tickets sold in the U.S. are priced under $100, backed by aggressive promos like $30 get-in deals and $99 lawn four-packs.

So, is it an industry-wide crisis, or just a few high-profile tours cancelling a few dates? Let us know your thoughts.

Who's suing who? The gen AI lawsuit hellscape.

The music industry's relationship with generative AI has dissolved into a complete courtroom hellscape. It seems like every week a new entity is filing a multi-million dollar suit, while previous combatants are either also suing one another or quietly joining forces behind closed doors.

Here's a quick rundown on the timeline so far:

• June 24, 2024: The RIAA, acting on behalf of the "Big Three" labels (Sony, Universal, and Warner), drops bombshell lawsuits against AI generators Suno (in Boston) and Udio (in New York). The charge being copyright infringement, claiming the tech startups illegally stream-ripped millions of tracks from YouTube and Spotify to train their models.
• October/November 2025: Universal Music Group quietly breaks away and signs a closed-door settlement with Udio, securing a perpetual per-generation royalty framework. Weeks later, Warner Music followed suit, settling with both Udio and Suno. As of right now, Sony Music is refusing to play ball, aggressively pushing forward with its active litigation against both platforms.
• June 5, 2026: The American Federation of Musicians sues Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group over the labels' recent moves to settle their lawsuits with AI music generators Suno and Udio, arguing that the settlements' benefits aren't reaching the musicians themselves.
• June 22, 2026: Hagens Berman, famous for taking on the tobacco industry and winning $250 billion, joins forces with Delgado Entertainment law to represent independent artists whose recordings were allegedly copied without permission.

So what will come of all this? As of right now it's difficult to tell. From an AI training perspective, unless it was well-documented, it's hard to know what material these models were trained on. The hope is that artists will either be compensated fairly or have the choice to opt out entirely. But for the time being the lawsuits will continue to pile and we hope that the outcome is one that benefits musicians and producers alike.

Angine de Poitrine: the independent duo defying the corporate machine

In an era dominated by hyper-optimized algorithm bait and text-to-prompt music models, the independent Saguenay duo Angine de Poitrine might have just broken a Montreal Jazz Festival record. If you've been living under a rock, Angine de Poitrine is a microtonal math rock duo that exploded onto the scene a few months back thanks largely to a KEXP video that went viral following multiple reaction videos across several social media platforms. On June 27th, they headlined the Montreal Jazz Fest, the largest jazz festival in the world, and drew a record-breaking crowd. The exact number is unknown because it is a free concert, but is estimated around 150,000 – 200,000 people were in attendance. The only other concert to draw a similar crowd was in 2009 when the Place des Festivals was inaugurated and Stevie Wonder performed just a few days following Michael Jackson's death.

The sheer density of the crowd caused absolute gridlock throughout the surrounding downtown streets. Eager fans were spotted climbing structural walls, scaling outdoor restaurants, and balancing on merch stands just to catch a glance of the stage. The intensity of the summer heatwave and crowd compression resulted in emergency services responding to numerous medical calls, with six attendees ultimately hospitalized.

So what is driving this level of fanatical devotion? Visually and musically, they represent the absolute furthest point from generic corporate gen AI and streaming fodder. Their sound is an aggressive blend of microtonal polyrhythmic math rock.

But more than that, they are a massive breath of fresh air in a world that feels incredibly divided right now. While the rest of the internet is constantly bickering over political affiliations and culture wars, Angine de Poitrine has managed to bypass the noise entirely. That's because they are intergalactic aliens and don't really understand what's going on in the world of humans aside from their only true documented love: hot dogs.

Because of that, everyone can stand behind them. There is no political agenda to dissect, no localized language barrier to fight over, and no corporate stance to question. When you strip all of that away, the only thing that actually matters is the music. In a hyper-fractured landscape, they've given the community a rare, chaotic moment of pure, unified focus. It turns out that a shared love for complex time signatures and hot dogs is exactly what we needed to bring 200,000 humans together.

Honourable mentions

• Backstreet Boys, Taylor Swift, and Lionel Richie battle against AI deepfakes
• Corus wants music discovery to be led by people, not algorithms

Thanks for taking the time, and as always, feel free to reach out via email or Discord for any questions or feedback!