Sold, Stolen, Stranger (Things).

The Weeknd is starting 2026 strong (understatement). By the end of 2025, Abel’s catalog was valued at $1 billion, and he closed a deal with Lyric Capital Group. He and his team retained creative control as shareholders, making it a first-of-its-kind partnership.

It involves both publishing rights and master recordings, but future releases are excluded from the deal. Neither side would comment on the deal's final value, but at a $1 billion valuation, it is the largest artist catalog transaction to date. Nice!

He also made history as 30 of his songs now have over a billion streams each on Spotify.

Next up, Anna’s Archive. Unfortunately, Anna’s Archive lost its .org domain a couple of days ago, though they say they don’t think it has anything to do with the enormous backup of Spotify data they recently performed.

Anna’s Archive has been around for a while, making written materials and books available via torrents. They turned to music piracy, scraped Spotify, and made a huge 300TB copy of the most-streamed songs and popular public playlists. (We said piracy was on the up a little while ago.) A list of their websites can be found on Anna’s Archive Wikipedia page and is kept up to date, should you wish to check them out.
Note: Some countries have completely blocked access to Anna’s Archive.

A new development in this news cycle is UMG partnering with NVIDIA to advance what they’re calling “responsible AI” in music. In practice, that means using AI to change how music is created, presented, and discovered, with a stated focus on enhancing human creativity while protecting artists and their rights. For most people, NVIDIA is associated with computer components, gaming, and little else. But they have made a deep shift into AI, which has been gradual since about 2006 and has been firmly considered an AI giant since 2023.

The concrete bet is on building systems that understand full songs, not just metadata, to make discovery more intelligent and interactive, while pulling artists into the product process rather than replacing them.

The real goal is to turn music catalogs into explorable worlds, not just slightly better recommendation engines. This is excellent positioning. But “responsible AI” is still a slogan (that everyone is throwing around) until we see whether it changes incentives, not just interfaces. This either becomes a genuine reset of how people find and engage with music, or it becomes another very expensive way to rearrange the same algorithmic furniture.

An odd coupling or a match that makes sense? To be determined by the outcome.

At the end of 2025, we sat in on some of the best names in music talking about what 2026 was going to bring. Clips, in-person, and tangible stuff were top of the list. In an unsurprising move, Gen-Z and Gen Alpha prefer tangible items and non-digital experiences. MP3 players are hot again, and some are going further with it. Analog Baby.

For old-skool music lovers, this is great, we’re gonna see more vinyl and CDs, but something else we called a while back was cassette tapes making a comeback. The highest UK sales since 2003 occurred in 2022 and have continued to rise. A 204% sales increase in the US was reported in 2025(63,288 units). If you haven’t got your deck yet, now is a great time. (yeah, we have a portable cassette player on order, and a box of tapes ready to go).

And, finally, the power of fans! The Best Babysitter in the world deserves it. Stranger Things fans have the power to put Kate Bush back in the charts a couple of times over the last few years, increase Prince’s song streams by over 300%, and, as of this week, knock T-Swift off the top spot. The coolest thing?

The Djo track ‘End of Beginning’ was released in 2022 and, years later, thanks to Stranger Things’ fan streams, is now firmly in the top spot. Djo is Joe Keery's side project.

Congratulations to Joe Keery, or should we say Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington?

Here is what that massive impact looks like in action, playlist change data from Music24.

Until next time,