Report
Planning reports and points of view for industry decision-makers.
Who Turns On the Lightstick You Paid For?
A fan pays 40,000 to 50,000 won for a lightstick; a Coldplay crowd gets an LED band on the way in. The picture in the stands looks the same, but a different party covers the hardware. Depending on the show you may also have to go through the chore of pairing your seat. Through a six-year lightstick patent fight and the Coldplay tour, let's look at who buys the device, who turns the LED on, and who pays for it.
The Fans Built It First
Fans made sped-up edits a trend, and the labels caught up by releasing them officially. Now the act of changing the music is itself becoming something fans pay for. What Hook, Suno and Spotify charge the fan, what they owe the rights holder and on what basis, and whose permission you need first to build the same thing in Korea.
A Sticker Counts as an Album Now
Starting with the October 2 tracking week, Billboard adds a sales format called the smart media album. It is the first new physical category since the CD, forty years ago. Two of the seven vendors Luminate approved are Korean companies. Here is how Circle Chart and Oricon have counted the same object, and what you have to lock down at the design stage if you want to build one.
Previz Comes After the Prompt
Three things landed in the first week of September. GPT-6 Astra built a house in Blender and moved it into Unreal, Higgsfield bolted a 3D workspace on top, and Images 2.5 got better at holding a reference image steady. String them together and the order of AI video production changes. Here is what is confirmed and what is still a vendor claim.
The AI That Never Leaves the Building
Unreleased masters, raw footage, next week's pitch deck. Plenty of companies stall on AI because those files cannot go up to somebody else's server. Here is what one machine in your own office can and cannot do today, and where it lands a year from now.
AI Music Is Getting Tagged. Nobody Can Answer the Question
The global recording industry agreed to tag tracks made with AI, and a declaration field showed up on distributor upload screens. It asks whether you sent the master to a web service and whether a chatbot wrote the first draft of the lyrics, and almost nobody remembers. Across five major Korean music services the question is asked three different ways, and three of them do not ask at all. We followed one checkbox down the distribution chain.