Music Lawyer Chris Castle 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.

Chris Castle is an entertainment lawyer and the founder of Christian Castle Attorneys. He founded his firm in Los Angeles in 2005 and moved the firm to Austin in 2011. He works on a variety of transactional matters in the nexus of music, technology, and policy. Chris is a frequent speaker at professional conferences and was the director of the Texas Entertainment Law Institute. He has testified against speculative ticketing at the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and on artist rights issues at the UK Parliament. Chris is a frequent contributor to Hypebot.

We asked Chris if he had any predictions for the music industry in 2026. Here’s what he had to say:

My predictions are probably going to read negative but then there’s no drama in happiness.  We’ll skip over the more obvious stuff like the coming disaster in Phonorecords V streaming mechanical negotiations, criminal copyright infringement prosecutions of the frontier AI labs, and revisiting the willful infringement statutory damages maximums which were set in 1999 in response to CD ripping (and on an inflation-adjusted basis would be about double today anyway). 

So there’s that. And here’s this:

1. Fan Lawsuits Over AI

“The next round of AI copyright litigation will come from fans: As more deals are done with AI like the Disney/Sora deal, fans who use Sora or other AI to create separatable rights with AI (like new characters, new story lines) or even new universes with old story lines (like maybe new versions of the Luke/Darth/Hans/Leia arc in the Old West) will start to get the idea that their IP is…well…their IP. If it’s used without compensating them or getting their permission, that whole copyright thing is going to start to get real for them.

2. Environmental Harms of AI Become a Core Climate Issue

“We will start to see the AI labs normalize the concept of private energy generation on a massive scale to support data centers built in current green spaces.  If they build or buy electric plants they do not intend to share.  This whole thing about they will build small nuclear reactors and sell excess back to the local grid is crazy—there won’t be any excess and what about their behavior over the last 25 years makes you think they’ll share a thing?

So some time after Los Angeles rezones Griffith Park commercial and sells the Greek Theater to Google for a new data center and private nuclear reactor and Facebook buys the Diablo Canyon reactor, the Music Industry Climate Collective will formally integrate AI’s ecological footprint into their national and international policy agendas. After mounting evidence of data‑center water depletion, aquifer stress, and grid destabilization — particularly in drought‑prone regions — climate coalitions will conceptually reclassify AI infrastructure as a high‑impact industrial activity.

This will become acute after people realize they cannot expect the state or federal government to require new state permitting regimes because of the overwhelming political influence of Big Tech in the form of AI Viceroy-for-Life David Sacks. (He’s not going anywhere in a post-Trump era.). This will lead to environmental‑justice litigation over siting decisions and pressure to require reporting of AI‑related energy, water, and land use.

3. Criminal RICO Case Against StubHub and Affiliated Resale Networks

“By late 2026, the Department of Justice brings a landmark criminal RICO indictment targeting StubHub‑linked reseller networks and individual reseller financiers for systemic ticketing fraud and money laundering. The enterprise theory alleges that major resellers, platform intermediaries, lenders, and bot‑operators coordinated to engage in wire fraud, market manipulation, speculative ticketing, and deceptive consumer practices at international scale. Prosecutors present evidence of an organized structure that used bots, fabricated scarcity, misrepresentation of seat availability, and price‑fixing algorithms to inflate profits.

This becomes the first major criminal RICO prosecution in the secondary‑ticketing economy and triggers parallel state‑level investigations and civil RICO suits. Public resellers like StubHub will face shareholder lawsuits and securities fraud allegations.

4. Streaming Payola Investigation Targets Spotify’s Algorithmic Manipulation

“US antitrust agencies and European competition authorities open coordinated actions into Spotify’s alleged algorithmic payola and discriminatory monetization rules. Investigators focus on whether Spotify’s monetization thresholds, auto‑playlisting behavior, and private deals with distributors constitute illegal market‑allocation and self‑preferencing practices. Regulators treat algorithmic recommendation systems as potential economic gatekeepers capable of simulating pay‑for‑play. The resulting enforcement actions reshape digital‑music economics, force transparency reforms, and dramatically increase the bargaining leverage of independent artists and songwriters.

Just another bright sunshiny day.”