Con Raso of Tuned Global Shares His 2026 Music Predictions
Hypebot’s Future Predictions series is back. Join us as we ask the music industry’s expert analysts what they think might unfold in the world of music in 2026.
Con Raso is the Managing Director and Co-Founder of Tuned Global. An entrepreneur passionate about innovation, new technologies, and start-ups, he has focused on creating innovative mobile and online distribution models within the B2C entertainment market, enabling brands to utilize music as a marketing tool via unique customer engagement strategies. Being inherently well-versed in both technology and music, Con ensures our solutions are aesthetically pleasing, engaging and disruptive.
We asked Con if he had any predictions for the music industry in 2026. Here’s what he had to say:
1. Music, Fraud and AI: A Billion-Dollar Problem
Streaming fraud represents one of the industry’s most pressing challenges. It is “industrialized” now and no longer just bedroom hackers. There are networks exploiting loopholes in ways that mirror organized cybercrime.
“Experts in music fraud estimate streaming fraud at over a billion dollars a year, with 80% of that fraud being executed by sophisticated actors. The goal of fraudsters is to get artificially generated or fraudulent tracks, sometimes made using unlicensed content, played repeatedly, often by hijacking a user’s account. The royalties from those plays flow into the general pool and are then paid out to the perpetrators through rights ownership, just like legitimate artists. That’s primarily how it’s monetized. In a pro‑rata model, every fraudulent stream takes money away from real artists. It’s not extra money, it’s just unfairly dividing the same pie.”
AI in general is creating other challenges especially when it comes to impersonating artists’ voices, videos, imagery and likenesses. Even though several companies claim to have detection tools, they’re still in their nascent forms, and so we’d expect a lot of emerging technologies to assist with this situation. That said, AI also gives us the ability to analyse deep behavioural patterns. Sophisticated fraud isn’t easy to catch manually but with AI, it becomes possible.”
2. New Music Fan Engagement Models Will Expand
Raso sees real momentum building behind alternative payment models that give fans a direct line of support to artists, beyond the limitations of the current system. Payment models that reward actual listening behaviour will continue to evolve, creating new opportunities for fan engagement.
“Becoming more user-centric, in a basic sense, means that if someone listens to only one artist all month, and $5 of their subscription goes towards royalties, that artist should get the whole $5. In a pool-based model, it doesn’t work like that. The money gets divided up across the market and mostly ends up with the biggest names. That’s not rewarding fandom; it’s reinforcing dominance.
“With our social radio, fans can tip the artists they love directly, and that money flows to the artists they’ve picked. Super fans want to show their support, not just stream passively. Japan is a great example. Fans will buy five versions of the same CD just to demonstrate their loyalty. There’s real passion there, and we should build more ways to honour it.”
3. AI Music Infrastructure Overhaul
Raso expects that as AI agents grow in sophistication, a lot of music infrastructure will shift to serve AI systems directly as it will be AI doing the interfacing.
“We’re seeing that in the future, it will more likely be AIs that are querying our systems than developers directly. That’s called MCP (Model Context Protocol), which is the technology that allows AI systems like OpenAI to use our APIs as though it was just an extension of itself. Developers could go to something like OpenAI and say, ‘Here’s what I’m building, I’m using Tuned Global, here are some credentials’, and it would actually just use our infrastructure to actually build out a full end solution for them. It won’t remove the developer but it will remove the plumbing.”
4. Gaming Will Adopt Real-Time Music Adaptation
Looking to gaming, Raso believes games will move beyond sync licensing to dynamic, gameplay-responsive soundtracks.
“That could be as simple as an AI bot looking at the people that are in the gameplay and adapting the music style and the music itself to actually align with the gameplay itself. That’s much more instant and transient than being programmed at the time the game is created. Those opportunities exist because technology is allowing us to actually do these things in real time at the moment, whereas 12 months ago, it wasn’t possible.”
5. Flood AI-Generated Music to Prompt Tighter Curation Standards
To manage an anticipated flood of AI-generated music, Raso expects platforms will increasingly tighten curation standards. DSPs will raise the bar on what gets in and what stays.
“The challenge will be how you separate that noise on your data suggestion pipeline, and that’s where data starts becoming really key and critical. I think DSPs will become harsher with respect to what they store and serve, because I don’t think a DSP wants to store a billion tracks. I think it’ll be very much a case that you’ll need to perhaps make a pitch why your track should be part of a DSP itself. Spotify’s already started trimming; reportedly removing around 75 million spammy, AI-generated or low-quality tracks over the last year. That’s just the beginning.”
Tuned Global is the leading data-driven cloud and software platform that empowers businesses to integrate commercial music into their apps or launch complete streaming experiences using advanced APIs, real-time analytics, licensing solutions, and customisable white-label apps. Our turnkey solutions for music, audio, and video — coupled with a broad ecosystem of third-party music tech integrations — make us the most comprehensive platform for powering any digital music project. We streamline complexities in licensing, rights management, and content delivery, enabling rapid innovation and bringing new ideas to life.
