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.
Jacob Varghese is a technology leader and founder of Noctil, a metadata management platform. With over 24 years of experience leading complex technology projects, Jacob started Noctil to fix the inefficient systems and processes that cause delayed or lost royalty revenue in the music and audiovisual industries. Jacob strives to ensure rightsholders are paid for their work, and make technological advancements and research accessible and affordable to the industry.
We asked Jacob if he had any predictions for the music industry in 2026. Here’s what he had to say:
“The rise of generative AI demands the industry move from discussing copyright concerns to mandating data-level enforcement in 2026. While major licensing deals are being secured with AI creation companies, the issue is no longer just about the commercial agreement; it’s about technological governance. With streaming services seeing up to 40,000 AI-generated tracks uploaded daily by late 2025, and 82% of listeners unable to distinguish them from human-made music, the volume of data is collapsing legacy systems. We must establish new, non-negotiable data fields, such as ‘AI-assisted’ and ‘fully AI-generated’ flags, to ensure transparent attribution and compensation, thereby transforming today’s crisis into a traceable and enforceable model.
“The failure to fully capture the value of micro-transactions in secondary usage, particularly across short video, gaming, and virtual worlds, represents the biggest leakage point in our industry’s revenue stream. This relies entirely on clean, standardised metadata. In 2026, the industry must industrialise this licensing process, leveraging error-free data matching to build seamless, efficient workflows that capture the full value of a track across these high-volume, multi-platform spaces.
“As global operations continue to expand, fragmented, siloed data will actively break global delivery workflows. The importance of rights metadata, data interoperability, and global delivery workflows is now a requirement for survival. We must drive industry-wide adoption of universal standards and connected systems to ensure that a track’s information travels seamlessly across borders, guaranteeing prompt and accurate payment.
“Music continues to play a major role as a tradable asset, attracting significant institutional investment. This trend underscores the critical need for absolute data clarity and transparency. For music to function as a mature financial asset in 2026, the underlying royalty and ownership data must be clean, granular and verifiable. Considering the estimated $2.5 billion in globally unclaimed royalties due to data issues, data integrity is the new security, and data governance is now a financial imperative.
“The challenge posed by growth in emerging markets across Africa, South America, and Asia is not simply market expansion; it is an integration challenge. With regions such as the Middle East & North Africa (+22.8%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (+22.6%) leading global growth in 2024, our global music infrastructure must be engineered to process diverse data sets and cater to the unique regional rights and payment structures of these high-growth areas, ensuring all revenue can be accurately collected and distributed.
“Finally, I predict AI’s most immediate and critical role in 2026 will be rescue, not creation. We will see the rise of AI tooling focused on workflow automation to address the massive data debt the industry faces. We must leverage SLM (Specialized Large Model), Agentic AI and plain Machine Learning for data validation, deduplication and reconciliation to streamline operations, accelerate royalty distributions and free up resources for creative endeavours.”