Good morning. Did you hear any new music over the holidays? Do you know if it was made by a human? AI-generated songs are becoming more common in streaming and increasingly on the charts. Chances are your favorite musician will be furious about this. That’s what’s in focus today, along with a surprising market taking advantage of the Canadian TV show Passionate rivalry.
First
In the news
Mining: Rio Tinto is preparing to become the largest miner in the world by acquiring its rival Glencore in a buyout worth more than $70 billion.
Trade: Ontario Premier Doug Ford asks Premier Mark Carney do not reduce prices on Chinese electric vehicles.
Energy: Alberta defends its access to Montana electricity distributors against the claims of the American trade representative.
Prices: The United States has other pricing options if Trump loses Supreme Court casesays US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Chances are your favorite human musician doesn’t like the proliferation of AI in the industry.Illustration by Kyle Smart
To the point
What is the value of human creativity?
Hello, my name is Josh O’Kane, a journalist at Globe Arts covering the cultural industries. I’ve written about how new technologies are reshaping music before we can even use Spotify in Canada. I even wrote my final graduate project on the financial precariousness of the early streaming era – an excerpt of which was published in The Globe with a Metallica pun title written by your usual Business Brief maestro, Chris Wilson-Smith, years before we each became exhausted parents.
So, for the past three years, you can imagine that I have closely followed the generative nature of AI. reshaping the creative economyincluding in Hollywood, animation studiosTHE publishing world and music.
The recorded music industry responded to the first wave of consumer AI services the same way most creative businesses did: with lawsuits. But over the past few months, I’ve noticed that the dynamic between this industry and AI services is starting to shift. Quite quickly, actually.
I wrote about everything I learned in my most recent feature articlereleased today.
First, I saw that SOCAN, which collects and pays money for songwriting and composition royalties in Canada, announced that it would allow musicians to record partially AI-generated songs. Then I noticed that two of the world’s biggest music groups, Universal and Warner, had begun settling their lawsuits and entering into licensing deals with AI generation companies like Suno and Udio that allowed users to create songs with prompts. A third AI company, Klay Vision, has signed deals with the same majors, as well as Sony.
This was, in the spirit of bad musical puns, a big change of tone. So I started calling on musicians.
Most of those I spoke to were not happy. The king of Canadian slacker rock, Mac DeMarco, described the adoption of AI as transforming human creativity into mere input into a robot-run system: “Soon we’ll just be batteries, as in The matrix.”
Toronto’s Katie Stelmanis, who makes music under the name Austra, warned of AI’s failure to move culture forward. “If music is doing the work of creating culture and defining what is cool,” she told me, “I can tell you with absolute certainty that AI is not cool.”
And in one of the less terse comments in my conversation with Chad VanGaalen, the Calgary musician called AI “a cultural black hole for these people who never had a soul.” Oh, and “a bloodstain.”
GOOD. The music industry itself sees things differently. Its leaders believe that generative AI will reshape the economy and believe that music fans want to create their own music using these services.
Patrick Rogers, executive director of label lobby group Music Canada, pointed out that if all this AI-generated music was created, the companies with the biggest catalogs would have to be there to negotiate the best terms for their inevitable use. SOCAN CEO Jennifer Brown described her organization’s acceptance of partially AI-created songs as recognition that AI is becoming an increasingly common writing tool.
Executives argue that we are only in the early days of licensing AI and that starting with a licensed legal framework is a good start. In fact, they both compared this moment to the early days of streaming – to make another bad Metallica reference, The memory remains of this era.
During the 2010s, streaming services went from a shocking technology to a new type of normal. At first, the industry and musicians feared what would happen when lucrative CD and download sales were exchanged for fractions of a cent per stream.
Today, Canadians stream three billion songs a week, and music piracy – Metallica’s former nemesis – it seems like a thing of the past. The music industry is delighted with the rebound in revenues.
On the other hand, working musicians? GOOD, They’re not very happy about that either. There has always been a gulf between artists and the industry. It may only get wider.
Mapped
Calling all consumers
Mobile wireless plans could become more expensive according to Statistics Canada data. But the recent rise in the consumer price index, which Statistics Canada attributes to less intense seasonal reductions in the fall compared to the previous year, could be “the start of a change in trend“said spokesperson Taylor Mitchell.
Quoted
Ice hockey is a very divisive sport, and pairing that with a gay romance creates a strong and really interesting contrast.
— Mu Zi, 27-year-old vocal coach in Shanghai
Canada’s favorite sport may not be popular in China — the Chinese men’s hockey team lost all of its games and placed last in the Olympics — but one of its most popular TV shows is. Passionate rivalry is a hit (hacked) in the Asian country despite a crackdown on LGBTQ content.
To be continued
More files we track
A view: Shopify is poised for a wave of growth thanks to agentic AI, a new trend in e-commerce which analysts say could reshape the retail industry.
A take: THE The United States shamelessly profits previously sanctioned Venezuelan oil, writes Rita Trichur.
Look : We’ll have our eyes on the December jobs report for more on employment data, the first major Canadian release of 2026.
Morning update
Global markets were higher ahead of crucial jobs reports in Canada and the United States, as investors scrutinized the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the legality of President Donald Trump’s draconian global tariffs.
Wall Street futures were muted, while TSX futures were in the red.
Overseas, the pan-European STOXX 600 index rose 0.62 percent in morning trading. Britain’s FTSE 100 index rose 0.54 percent, Germany’s DAX 0.39 percent and France’s CAC 40 0.9 percent.
In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei closed 1.61 percent higher, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose 0.32 percent.
The Canadian dollar was trading at 72.09 US cents.