Good morning producers 👋🏼

October had plenty to talk about. Taylor Swift broke like every chart record in sight, streaming platforms kept fighting over who owns the DJ crowd, and new AI tools started changing how music is tracked and protected. A little bit of chaos, a little bit of progress, and a lot to catch up on.

Our team has been hard at work testing dime[mb] and preparing for its release early next year. But as always, time off audio is about more than just plugins. It's about what's happening across the music world and how it shapes the way we create, listen, and work. This newsletter is where it all comes together.

Taylor Swift breaks records

We're going to put this in bullet-point format because otherwise we'll be here all day, and you've probably got a snare to fix or something:

Largest week by equivalent album units:

1. Taylor Swift, The Life of a Showgirl, 4.002 million, Oct 18, 2025
2. Adele, 25, 3.482 million, Dec 12, 2015
3. Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department, 2.610 million, May 4, 2024

We'd also like to point out that Taylor Swift currently occupies 6 of the top 10 of this list.

• Every single one of the 12 songs landed in the top 12 of the Billboard Hot 100 (never done before)
• Taylor Swift has now occupied the entire top 10 of the Hot 100 three separate times (never done before)
• Most No. 1 albums among soloists (previously tied with Drake and Jay-Z)
• All 15 of her full-length studio albums since her 2008 album Fearless have debuted at No. 1
• The only artists to surpass Taylor Swift are The Beatles, with 19 No. 1 albums
• Biggest sales week for a vinyl album in the modern era (since 1991)

In short, Taylor isn't just breaking records anymore, she's breaking her old records' records. And sure, people can criticize her and her team for "chart hacking" (for example, The Life of a Showgirl had 38 versions of the album over its first week):

• 16 CD editions
• 2 deluxe CD boxed sets with branded clothing
• 8 vinyl LPs
• 1 cassette
• 11 digital download editions

Honestly, we're surprised she didn't set a record for "most album editions" in a sales week… except she probably did. At this point, she's less an artist on the charts and more an artist defining how to structure the charts themselves.

Sources: Billboard and Billboard

The fight for DJs between Spotify, Twitch, and TikTok

TikTok changed its terms of service, restricting the use of remixes and altered tracks. Meanwhile, Spotify re-introduces third-party DJ apps (they had originally killed off this integration in 2020). As a reminder, Twitch introduced its DJ program back on August 8 of last year (808, get it?). Let's talk about it.

Despite the bad taste left in our mouths of watching never-ending live streams during the pandemic, the live streaming industry is still a powerhouse today. While Twitch's total hours have been slowly declining year after year, YouTube Live and TikTok Live, the two largest live streaming platforms, have seen continued growth. Combine this information with the fact that Live Nation's CEO says that concert ticket prices are not expensive enough, and it's no surprise that fans are going for the living room live music experience accompanied by Uber Eats and cheap beer.

It's perhaps Twitch's slow decline that prompted them to facilitate things for DJs back in August of last year. According to Twitch themselves, they are "proud to be the first service to have partnered with the music industry to build a long-term home for DJs".

It seems Spotify was watching some of their community move towards other platforms and wanted to make sure not to lose out on the action.

The difference now is that each platform is redefining what being a DJ online actually means. Twitch is focused on licensing, Spotify on tools, and TikTok on... well, losing the DJ crowd. Where creators choose to play will shape what digital music culture looks like next year.

AI's next gig? Policing your mixes

Late September saw Universal Music Group and Sony Music partner with a startup called SoundPatrol to launch a system called neural fingerprinting. It's designed to detect copyrighted or AI-generated music across the internet in real time. The goal is to give labels a way to track how music moves through the digital world, but the impact will reach far beyond them.

For producers, this could change how we think about sampling, remixing, and using AI tools. Neural fingerprinting doesn't just find full copies. It can pick up fragments of songs, partial stems, or even sounds that have been altered by AI. That means the casual habit of dragging a loop from a library, tweaking it, and calling it yours could start setting off alarms. Even AI-assisted tools that generate short melodic or rhythmic ideas might eventually fall under the same microscope.

This is a double-edged sword. It's easy to see it as another way for major labels to tighten control, but it could also help protect the industry from being flooded with AI-made clones and fake artists. Over the past year, we've seen platforms struggle to filter out AI music that imitates real people. SoundPatrol's system could give them a way to separate authentic recordings from algorithmic noise.

It's also a reminder that the future of music will rely as much on data tracking as it does on creativity. Everything we make leaves a fingerprint, and now those fingerprints are getting harder to hide. If it works the way the labels hope, it might keep human musicians at the center of the conversation, and that's worth protecting.

Honourable mentions

• Songwriters can't afford to stay in business
• You can now follow music venues on Spotify
• What's new in Pro Tools 2025.10?

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