New Survey Reveals Major AI Authenticity Gap Between Indie Creators and Fans
Jason English, host of the independent music podcast Curious Goldfish, published a Hypebot piece on May 13, 2026 summarizing the headline findings from his independent research report, The State of Music in the Age of AI & Streaming, built from a 573-respondent survey distributed through the Curious Goldfish audience, music communities, and word of mouth (419 fans, 127 creators with 94% identifying as independent, and 27 industry professionals), which English describes as the first-ever grassroots independent survey about AI and streaming conducted outside the major-label, streaming-platform, and PR-firm research pipeline that has produced most of the published research on the topic to date. The headline structural finding is what English calls the "AI Optimism Blind Spot": independent creators using AI tools are convinced their fans don't care about AI in music, and the fans, including the ones who have actually heard AI-generated music, say they do. Among creators in the sample who don't use AI tools, 67% say fans care a lot whether the music they love was made by a person; among creators who use AI frequently, only 14% say the same, a 4.7x drop. The fans aren't divided about it: 81% say AI music isn't authentic, and 75% of the fans who have actually listened to AI-generated music still reject it. The thriving-creator subgroup (23 respondents who say it has gotten easier to make a living from music, a signal-not-verdict-sized sample English explicitly flags) reads the fan position at 70% saying fans care a lot about AI authenticity, versus 57% in the cohort that says it has gotten harder, meaning that the creators who are operating with less economic pressure are reading the fan position more accurately than the creators operating under heavier economic strain. The structural significance for the independent music sector is that the first independent quantification of this perception gap lands at the same operational moment that Believe and Google have launched Flow Music on Lyria 3 Pro and ProducerAI as the legitimate-AI-music creation environment, that Suno is fighting to keep its Warner Music settlement terms confidential from UMG and Sony, that the Recognition Music Group catalog has been formally absorbed by Sony Music Publishing in the $3.5-4B confirmation of the consolidation deal first reported as a $2B rumor a week earlier, and that the indie-tier discovery-and-engagement infrastructure (Bandcamp, Stationhead, SoundCloud Artist Pro, PassPass, the broader superfan stack) is being built into the same operating environment where the working independent artist is being pulled toward AI tooling by the content-treadmill pressure documented across the spring 2026 indie-touring economics disclosures and the Ditto Music burnout survey. The operational ask English makes, and the one the indie sector should read most carefully, is that managers, labels, and anyone helping artists make AI tooling decisions actually ask their most committed fans what they think about the tool stack before assuming the audience read is correct, and that "human authorship" be treated as a brand asset rather than as marketing copy.
The Independent Music Brief | May 14, 2026
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The structural read of the Curious Goldfish survey is that the first independent quantification of the AI-perception gap inside the indie-creator sector confirms what indie-rights advocates and artist-development practitioners have been saying anecdotally since the Suno/Udio settlement cycle began in late 2025, the heavy-AI-using indie creator is operating with a measurably different model of fan sentiment than the working fan-base of indie listeners is actually expressing. English's framing of the finding is precise and structurally important for how the indie sector should read what the data is saying: the question is not whether AI tools work as tools, the question is what fans are reading when they listen to music they suspect or know to have been built with AI tooling, and the survey data argues that the AI-using indie creator and the indie fan are answering meaningfully different questions about the same listening encounter. The fan-side data is the cleaner half of the survey because the sample size (419 fans) is large enough to support inference, and the answer pattern is consistent across the fans-who-have-heard-AI-music subgroup (75% still reject it) and the fans-overall sample (81% say AI music isn't authentic), meaning that exposure to AI-generated music does not flip the fan position in the way the AI-using creator population implicitly believes it will.
The 4.7x gap between non-AI-using creators (67% say fans care a lot) and heavy-AI-using creators (14% say the same) is the most operationally significant number in the survey because it quantifies the perception drift that English diagnoses in the article, the more time a creator spends inside the AI-tooling workflow, the lower their estimate of how much their audience cares about AI authenticity. English's analysis of why that drift exists is structurally correct in a way the indie sector should take seriously: it is not really about the tools, it is about cognitive dissonance reduction under economic pressure. The 88% of indie creators in the survey who earn less than 10% of their income from streaming are operating with a forced choice, either keep up with the content-velocity-and-platform-engagement demands that the algorithmic discovery environment requires, which is impossible to do at the rate the platforms reward without tool acceleration, or fall behind in the engagement-and-discovery race while preserving the indie-aligned creative model that the working fan-base says it wants. The drift in fan-care estimates is the cognitive accommodation that resolves that forced choice, once a creator has decided to use AI tools, the brain rationalizes the decision by downgrading the estimated cost to fan relationship that the decision carries.
What the Thriving-Creator Subgroup Tells the Indie Sector About How the Blind Spot Tracks Economic Pressure Rather Than Tool Use Per Se
The most analytically useful section of the Curious Goldfish data, and the section English explicitly flags as signal-not-verdict-sized due to the 23-respondent subgroup size, is the cohort comparison between creators who say it has gotten easier to make a living from music (70% say fans care a lot about AI authenticity) and creators who say it has gotten harder (57% say fans care a lot). The structural read of that comparison is that the perception drift English calls the AI Optimism Blind Spot tracks economic pressure more than it tracks tool familiarity per se, the thriving cohort is reading fan opinion more accurately not because they don't use AI tools, but because they are operating with the bandwidth to keep listening to their audience rather than committing fully to the content-velocity treadmill that the struggling cohort is committing to in survival mode. English's framing, "survival narrows perception and when you're not under economic pressure, you have the bandwidth to keep listening; when you are, you commit, and the commitment is what produces the blind spot", is the structural diagnosis the indie sector should treat as the working model for understanding what is happening inside the indie-creator population's relationship with AI tooling.
The operational implication for the indie-development infrastructure, managers, labels, artist services, advocacy groups, is that the perception gap is most acute in the same indie-creator subpopulation that is least equipped to absorb a fan-relationship mistake that the AI tooling decision might create. Working artists who are barely making the indie-tier streaming-and-touring economics work in the current environment are the same artists who are most under pressure to use AI tools to keep up with the platform-engagement demands, and they are also the most exposed to a fan-relationship cost if the assumption that "fans don't care about AI" turns out to be wrong. The thriving-cohort data point, 70% reading fan opinion as caring a lot, is meaningful because it suggests that the indie creators who are doing well are doing well in part because they are still reading their audience accurately, which is the structural skill the indie sector has historically depended on for differentiation against the major-label-marketing engine.
The corollary structural read is that the indie-rights and artist-development institutional layer has an immediate operational opening to do a different kind of work with the struggling-creator cohort than the AI-tool-evangelism narrative is currently doing. The dominant narrative the struggling indie creator is hearing, from streaming platforms, AI music platforms, social-media platform tutorials, content-creator-tooling marketers, and the broader "use the new tools or fall behind" content-marketing pipeline, is that AI tooling is the answer to the content-velocity problem that the engagement economy creates. The Curious Goldfish data argues that the alternative operational positioning, "human-first" as a brand asset, direct-to-fan relationship development, smaller and more engaged audiences that pay more per fan, is being read accurately by the thriving cohort and missed by the struggling cohort, and the institutional work the indie-development infrastructure needs to do is to surface that alternative more visibly to the creators who are currently committing to the content-velocity strategy and producing the perception drift the survey is measuring.
Where the Survey Data Says Indie Creators Are Getting Their Audience Feedback From, and Why It's Producing the Wrong Read
The second structural insight in the Curious Goldfish article, and one the indie sector should track carefully across the rest of 2026, is English's diagnosis of where the AI-heavy creators are getting their audience feedback from and why that feedback channel is structurally distorting their model of fan sentiment. The platforms that reward content volume, TikTok, Reels, Shorts, playlist algorithms, are built for distribution rather than relationships, and the creators using AI tools most heavily are largely creators trying to keep up with the content-velocity demands those platforms reward. English's read of the resulting feedback distortion is precise: the further a creator optimizes for the platforms, the less direct signal they get from the actual people listening, and the more they end up reading the algorithm rather than reading the room. The most engaged fans in the survey, those spending $500 a year or more on live music, find new artists through word of mouth, trusted curators, and live shows rather than through the platforms where AI content velocity is the winning strategy, which means the creators leaning hardest on AI tools are getting feedback from a tier of fans that is already disengaging from the platform-discovery layer while the fans whose opinion would change their business never make it into the feedback loop.
The structural read of that feedback-channel diagnosis for the indie sector is that the engagement metrics the AI-heavy indie creator is using to validate the AI tooling decision, view counts, like counts, follow growth, algorithmic placement, are systematically biased toward the audience tier that is least engaged with the indie artist's actual revenue-driving fan base and most engaged with the algorithmic-discovery surface that any AI-content creator can compete on. The indie creator is reading platform metrics as audience sentiment, but the platform metrics are reading platform optimization rather than audience taste, and the gap between the two is the structural source of the perception drift the Curious Goldfish data is documenting. The operational implication is that the indie creator who wants to read fan sentiment accurately needs to be measuring direct-to-fan engagement (mailing list opens, Bandcamp sales conversion rates, live show attendance growth, subscriber retention, merch sell-through) rather than platform engagement (TikTok views, Spotify monthly listeners, playlist placement velocity), and the indie-development infrastructure needs to be supporting that measurement shift as the working operational counter to the platform-metric-feedback distortion that is producing the AI Optimism Blind Spot.
The other structural piece English diagnoses is the framing-as-tool problem. Once AI is called a tool, the question becomes whether the tool works (does it cut editing time, does it speed up social content creation, does it produce an acceptable demo mix), which are valid operational questions the AI-using indie creator can answer with internal-process metrics. But the question fans are asking, does this music feel like it was made by a person who is reaching me through it, is a different question that the tool-effectiveness frame is not designed to answer. English's framing is that creators end up answering one question while their audience is asking another, and that's most of what the blind spot is. The operational implication for indie creators evaluating AI tooling is that the right question to ask is not whether the tool works, the right question is whether the use of the tool changes what the audience reads in the resulting work, and the only way to answer that question is to ask the most committed fans directly rather than inferring from platform metrics.
What the "Human-First" Brand Positioning Tells the Indie Sector About How the Market Is Responding to the Blind Spot
The third structural finding the indie sector should read carefully from English's piece is the diagnosis of the "Human-First" label emerging across independent artists and labels as a market response to the blind spot working in reverse. The structural read is that the indie artists who are positioning their work explicitly as "human-authored", explicit statements that the songs were written, performed, and sung by real people, that no AI tools were used in the composition or production, that the working artist's hand is visible in every step of the creative chain, are gaining audience ground that their AI-heavy peers think is being given away. The structural significance of the Human-First positioning emerging at the indie-tier brand layer is that it confirms the fan-side data from the survey at the market-revealed-preference level, the indie creators who are explicitly marketing the human-authorship dimension of their work are seeing audience growth and engagement returns that the AI-heavy creators are not, which is the working operational data point that confirms the survey's headline finding.
The institutional implication for indie labels, distributors, managers, and PR/marketing infrastructure is that the Human-First brand positioning is becoming a marketable indie-tier differentiator at the same operational moment that the major-label-and-major-distribution layer is institutionalizing its AI-music partnership architecture (Universal-Suno settlement, Believe-Google Flow Music, Kobalt-Udio, Merlin-Udio, Merlin-ElevenLabs, the broader major-AI licensing framework). The structural opening for the indie sector is that the "human-first" positioning is a credible counter-brand to the major-label-AI integration that is happening at the licensing-and-distribution layer, and the indie-tier marketing infrastructure has an opportunity to operationalize the Human-First framing as a roster-wide brand asset across the indie-label, indie-distributor, and indie-artist-services layers rather than leaving it to individual artists to develop ad hoc. The historical reference point is the way "independent" itself became a marketable brand positioning in the late-1980s and 1990s in response to major-label consolidation, and the operational template the indie sector should be reading from the Curious Goldfish data is that Human-First is functioning as the same kind of brand-positioning counter to the major-label-AI integration that "independent" was to major-label consolidation in the prior era.
The structural question for the indie-rights and artist-advocacy community is whether the Human-First positioning gets institutionalized as a coordinated brand-and-policy framework at the indie-sector level, the same way that A2IM, the European indie federations, and Merlin coordinate institutional positions on issues like streaming royalty rates, AI training transparency, and copyright termination rights, or whether it remains as a fragmented brand-positioning move at the individual-artist level. The Curious Goldfish data is the working evidence base that the Human-First positioning is responding to a real and measurable audience preference, and the institutional work the indie-rights community could do to operationalize that evidence into a coordinated brand-and-policy framework is the longer-horizon strategic opening the survey results expose.
The Operational Ask English Makes for Managers, Labels, and Anyone Helping Indie Artists Make AI Tooling Decisions
The most actionable structural element in the Curious Goldfish piece is the two-step operational ask English makes of the managers, labels, and artist-services infrastructure that is helping indie creators make AI tooling decisions. First: ask the question the platform metrics don't give you, what would your most committed fans actually say about your tool stack if you laid it out for them, and would they actually care. Most artists have never asked, most managers haven't either, and the survey data argues that the answer matters more than the platform-metric feedback is suggesting. Second: treat human authorship as a brand asset rather than as marketing copy. The Human-First label emerging across the indie creator and label layer is a market response to the audience-reading-correctly problem, and the artists who are explicitly stating that the songs were written, performed, and sung by real people are gaining ground that their AI-heavy peers think is being given away.
The operational read for the indie-development infrastructure is that the AI Optimism Blind Spot is a measurable perception drift that can be corrected with direct fan inquiry, and the institutional work the indie-sector infrastructure could do over the rest of 2026 is to build the direct-fan-inquiry tooling and process into the standard indie-artist-development workflow rather than leaving it as ad hoc work that individual managers and artists do unevenly. The historical reference point is the way "audience research" became an institutionalized part of the major-label-marketing playbook in the 2010s, focus groups, fan-club surveys, listening panel research, and the operational opportunity for the indie sector is to build the equivalent infrastructure at the indie-tier scale, using the direct-to-fan channels (Bandcamp messaging, email lists, fan-club portals, direct-engagement platforms) that the indie sector already has institutional access to.
The structural question for the indie sector is whether the Curious Goldfish research, and the 106-page full report English has published at curiousgoldfish.com for $24, gets institutional uptake from the indie-rights and artist-development community in a way that translates the findings into operational practice across the indie-label, indie-distributor, indie-manager, and indie-artist-services layers. The independent-researcher positioning of the Curious Goldfish project, explicitly not funded by major labels or streaming platforms, distributed through grassroots channels rather than through institutional research-pipeline channels, is the structural asset that makes the research credible to the indie-creator audience it most needs to reach, and the institutional work the indie-development community could do to amplify and operationalize the findings is the strategic question the survey publication is implicitly raising for the indie sector at large.
How the Curious Goldfish Findings Fit Into the Broader May 2026 Indie-Sector Operating Environment
The Curious Goldfish survey publication lands at a structurally meaningful operational moment for the indie sector across multiple converging vectors. On the AI-music-platform side, Believe and Google launched Flow Music on Lyria 3 Pro with ProducerAI as the legitimate-AI-music creation environment for the post-Believe-Tunecore-blocks-Suno operating environment, Suno is fighting in court to keep its Warner Music settlement terms confidential from UMG and Sony, and the broader major-label-AI licensing framework (Universal-Suno, Kobalt-Udio, Merlin-Udio, Merlin-ElevenLabs) has continued to consolidate the licensed-AI-music tier inside the major-label corporate architecture. On the indie-distribution-and-publishing side, Sony Music Publishing has now formally confirmed its acquisition of Blackstone's Recognition Music Group catalog at $3.5-4B, the Believe-Concord-BMG consolidation continues, the Primary Wave-Kobalt acquisition is moving toward Q3 2026 close, and the indie-tier label-services landscape is being reshaped by the Believe LAS US launch, the CD Baby Stages Selects program, and the Kobalt-LAA Music partnership the Kobalt deal pipeline keeps producing. On the indie-discovery-and-engagement side, the PassPass seed-round close, the Merlin-led indie membership infrastructure under Charlie Lexton's CEO leadership, the AWAL Creator Fund cohort, and the broader superfan-platform buildout are operationalizing the direct-to-fan engagement architecture the Curious Goldfish data argues is the right place for indie creators to be reading audience sentiment.
The combined operational picture is that the indie sector is going through the most significant simultaneous reshaping of its infrastructure stack in many years, and the Curious Goldfish research is positioned as the audience-reading data point that should inform how indie creators, labels, managers, and advocates navigate the choices the reshaping is forcing onto the operational layer. The institutional question is whether the indie-development community treats the survey as the working evidence base for the brand-positioning, tooling-decision, and audience-engagement work the sector needs to do across the rest of 2026 and into 2027, or whether it gets read as a one-off independent research project that doesn't translate into operational practice at the institutional scale. The Hypebot publication of the headline findings is the working signal that the indie-trade-press infrastructure is reading the research seriously, and the operational work the indie sector should do is to surface the findings through the additional channels (Bandcamp newsletters, A2IM communications, indie-label rosters, indie-distributor artist services) that would put the survey data in front of the indie creator population that needs to read it most.
Key Questions for Independent Songwriters, Producers, Labels, and Publishers
Have you asked your most committed fans, your mailing-list openers, your Bandcamp paying buyers, your live-show repeat attendees, your direct-engagement subscribers, what they actually think about AI tooling in your work, in plain language, with the tool stack laid out clearly so they can give you an informed answer? The Curious Goldfish data argues that most artists have never asked, that most managers haven't either, and that the platform metrics the indie creator is using to validate AI tooling decisions are systematically biased toward the audience tier that is least engaged with the indie artist's actual revenue-driving fan base.
For indie artists who are using AI tools in any capacity, composition, production, mixing, social content, marketing, are you tracking direct-to-fan engagement metrics (Bandcamp conversion, mailing list opens, live-show attendance growth, subscriber retention, merch sell-through) as the working signal of audience sentiment, rather than relying on platform engagement metrics (TikTok views, Spotify monthly listeners, playlist placement velocity) that the Curious Goldfish data argues are reading platform optimization rather than audience taste? The structural read is that platform metrics are biased toward the algorithmic-discovery audience tier that any AI-content creator can compete on, and the direct-to-fan engagement metrics are the working signal of whether the AI tooling decision is producing the audience-relationship effect the heavy-AI creator population is implicitly assuming it is.
For indie labels managing rosters where one or more artists are using AI tools in any capacity, have you developed a "Human-First" brand positioning framework that the roster artists who are not using AI tools can be marketed under, and an operational decision-tree about which artists should be developed under that framework versus which should be developed under a different brand position? The Human-First positioning is functioning as a market-revealed counter-brand to the major-label-AI integration architecture, and the indie-label infrastructure has an institutional opportunity to operationalize the positioning as a roster-wide brand asset rather than leaving it to individual artists to develop ad hoc.
For indie managers, A&Rs, and artist-services professionals who are advising independent creators on tooling decisions, have you reviewed the Curious Goldfish data with your roster, and have you built a direct-fan-inquiry process into the standard artist-development workflow you use to validate tooling choices before they get committed to as part of the artist's working operational stack? The institutional opportunity is to build the direct-fan-inquiry tooling and process into the indie-artist-development workflow rather than leaving it as ad hoc work, using the direct-to-fan channels (Bandcamp messaging, email lists, fan-club portals) the indie sector already has institutional access to.
For the broader indie-rights advocacy community, A2IM, the European indie federations, Merlin, the songwriter rights organizations, the indie touring associations, does the Curious Goldfish research warrant a coordinated institutional response that operationalizes the survey findings into a sector-wide brand-and-policy framework, the way "independent" itself became a coordinated brand positioning in response to major-label consolidation in the late-1980s and 1990s? The strategic opening the survey data exposes is the institutional opportunity to coordinate the Human-First positioning at the indie-sector level rather than leaving it as a fragmented brand-positioning move at the individual-artist level, and the longer-horizon institutional work is to translate the working evidence base the survey produces into a sector-wide framework.
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Today's Indie Radar
MNRK Music Group promoted Dan Hawie to Managing Director of Last Gang Records effective immediately on May 11, 2026, expanding the Toronto-based executive's remit to full label P&L responsibility along with expanded leadership across A&R and brand strategy.
Hawie will report to Randy Derebegian, MNRK's VP of Artist Development, and Chris Moncada, COO of MNRK Music Group, and the promotion arrives days after Bella Poarch's May 1 release of Ribcage marked the start of her Last Gang partnership ahead of her debut album Picnic at the Cemetery this fall. The structural significance for the indie sector is that Last Gang, co-founded by Chris Taylor in 2003 to release Metric's debut album Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, acquired by Entertainment One in 2016, then absorbed into MNRK when eOne's parent acquired the music business from Hasbro for $385M in 2021 (with MNRK now controlled by Blackstone-managed PE funds), has been the operational home for two-plus decades of Canadian-indie rock-and-electronic culture (Death From Above 1979, Metric, Mother Mother, Chromeo, Keys N Krates, Kathleen Edwards, Stars, Bella Poarch, Ho99o9, Loving, Mondo Cozmo, The Lumineers' Canadian operations, Dualtone's Canadian campaigns), and Hawie's elevation from Director of Marketing and A&R to MD operationalizes the next phase of the label's institutional continuity inside the MNRK-Blackstone corporate architecture. Hawie's positioning, "I'm grateful to help preserve that independent spirit, and especially proud to champion such incredible art with the same passion and belief as the artists creating it", is structurally aligned with the same indie-aligned brand positioning the broader major-PE-owned indie-label landscape (Last Gang inside MNRK-Blackstone, AWAL inside Sony, CD Baby inside UMG-via-Virgin-via-Downtown, The Orchard inside Sony, Concord-BMG, the Primary-Wave-Kobalt-Brookfield architecture moving toward Q3 close) is using to maintain indie-tier credibility while operating inside major-corporate ownership, and the indie sector should read Last Gang as one of the working operational tests of whether the PE-owned-indie-label model continues to deliver on the indie-aligned brand positioning the platforms have built around. The historical anchor, MNRK's 70,000-track catalog across divisions, the June 2025 acquisition of LA-headquartered metal label Prosthetic Records now operating under the MNRK Heavy umbrella, and the underlying Last Gang twenty-one-year operational history, gives Hawie an institutional platform to operate from that few indie-label MD roles offer at the same scale, and the indie sector should track the Bella Poarch debut-album rollout this fall as the first major operational test of Hawie's new remit.
Guy Moot, Co-Chair and CEO of Warner Chappell Music, the global publishing arm of Warner Music Group, was named the recipient of the 2026 Music Industry Trusts Award (MITS) on May 12, 2026, becoming the first music publisher to receive the 34-year-old recognition in its history.
The award will be presented at Grosvenor House Hotel in London on November 9, with proceeds benefiting The BRIT Trust (core funder of The BRIT School) and Nordoff & Robbins music therapy charity. Moot, who started in record shops before moving into A&R at ATV Music and Chrysalis Records in 1984, joined SBK Music Publishing in 1987 (which later merged with EMI), and built EMI into Music Week's Publisher of the Year for 14 consecutive years through signings including Amy Winehouse, Arctic Monkeys, Calvin Harris, Deadmau5, Jamiroquai, Lana Del Rey, Mark Ronson, Paul Epworth, and Scissor Sisters before the Sony-EMI merger in Europe in 2012 and full Sony acquisition in 2018, was appointed Co-Chair and CEO of Warner Chappell Music in April 2019 alongside Co-Chair and COO Carianne Marshall, with the publisher doubling its business under their leadership (quarterly revenues up 9.6% YoY at constant currency to $353M in calendar Q1 2026). The structural significance for the indie sector is that the MITS Award recognition of the publishing function for the first time in its 34-year history operationalizes the institutional argument the songwriter-and-publisher advocacy community has been making across 2025 and 2026 that the publishing layer of the music industry, historically positioned as the secondary tier behind the recorded-music side in industry recognition and institutional weight, is now the structurally critical layer where the long-term economic value of music is being accumulated through the streaming-and-AI-licensing revenue framework. Moot's "songwriter-first" philosophy, his decades of signing and developing the artist-and-songwriter roster that built Warner Chappell into a credible competitor to Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing Group, and his explicit framing of the MITS recognition as "a celebration of songwriters and the extraordinary value of their music" are the institutional signals the indie songwriter-and-publisher community should read as the working evidence base that publishing-side advocacy work is starting to land at the senior industry-recognition level. The structural opening for the indie songwriting and publishing community is to use the MITS recognition as the institutional anchor for the broader argument that songwriter rights, termination rights, AI training licensing, MLC distribution mechanics, performance royalty transparency, the Texas AG payola investigation, the Spotify Discovery Mode debate, need the same level of institutional weight in the music industry's advocacy and policy infrastructure that the recorded-music side has historically commanded.