Year-End Roundup: The Biggest Music Business Stories of 2024

What a year it’s been for the music business.

With 2024 drawing to a swift close, Billboard put together a series of year-end stories running down the biggest developments in the worlds of record labels, publishing companies, live music, music law, radio, AI and sustainability over the past 12 months. And we certainly weren’t lacking for content.

In technology news, the debate over AI companies’ scraping of copyrighted music to feed their algorithms became increasingly heated and even spawned multiple lawsuits. Speaking of legal action, the Mechanical Licensing Collective’s lawsuit against Spotify over its bundling practice made a big splash around mid-year, while on the live front, a Department of Justice lawsuit that aimed to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster dropped the same month.

Waves were also made with major restructures at both Universal and Warner Music Groups, while the year’s country music explosion saw coastal labels increasingly wanting in on the action happening in Nashville. On the deal-making front, the cycle of blockbuster catalog sales continued, while major deals for companies like Believe, Hipgnosis, BMI and Concord made headline news.

Meanwhile, radio continued to struggle with waves of layoffs and downsizing (not to mention a bankruptcy filing), and no less a superstar than Drake took unprecedented legal action against his own label over a culture-defining diss-track war. And in a story that exploded into public consciousness last year but has only continued to pick up steam over the past 12 months, a hip-hop superstar from an earlier era suffered a stunning downfall amid a seemingly unending raft of horrifying accusations.

See below for links to all of our year-end content.

Music Business Year In Review