IMS has a way of compressing a year's worth of industry conversation into a few days. Here's what cut through for us in 2026.
With Rising Revenues In Electronic music, Where Is The Money Actually Going?
The IMS Business Report points to another year of growth for electronic music. The numbers are compelling. But spend any time talking to people on the ground at IMS and a persistent, uncomfortable question keeps surfacing: if the industry is growing, who exactly is it growing for?
The anecdotal evidence is hard to ignore. Clubs are closing, and costs are spiralling. A ticket to a show in Ibiza this summer will set you back more than ever, with a ticket to Pacha last Friday costing from 250 Euros. Accommodation costs are also massive, with people preferring tents or camper vans to stay on the island. None of this is unique to Ibiza, either - it's felt more broadly.
And yet the headline revenue figures continue to climb year on year. Something doesn't add up, or at least doesn't feel like it does.
The honest answer is probably that growth at scale and health at ground level are two very different things. The money exists – but it is concentrated. A smaller number of larger players, bigger festivals, superstar bookings and corporate-backed venues are capturing an ever greater share of the pie, while the grassroots infrastructure that has historically been the breeding ground for electronic music's next wave quietly struggles. The mid-tier, in particular, seems to be getting squeezed from both ends.
It's a tension the industry needs to reckon with more honestly than it currently does. A business report that shows growth is genuinely useful – but the follow-up question has to be: growth on whose terms, and sustainable for whom?
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Artificial Intelligence
Not since the sceptical rush of energy behind NFTs has a conference been so dominated by a single topic. At IMS Ibiza this year, that topic was AI – and the range of opinions on it was about as wide as you'll find anywhere in the industry.
Deezer CMO Maria Garrido set out the scale of the challenge with one arresting statistic: the platform is currently receiving 75,000 AI-generated uploads every single day. What's notable is what Deezer is doing about it. They are currently the only major streaming platform labelling tracks as AI-generated, and through active curation have reduced the presence of AI content in their playlists from 80% down to 3%.
Perhaps more interesting than the numbers, though, is what the listener data is suggesting: audiences may not object to AI music as instinctively as producers and DJs do – but they do want to know. Transparency, it turns out, might be the most important variable in this debate.
Whether this is the future of how platforms handle AI is unclear, and many questions remain unanswered. What threshold of AI involvement qualifies a track as AI-generated? How often are human artists being incorrectly flagged? Is an AI-generated drum track acceptable if everything else was made conventionally? The potential for uncertainty is enormous, and the industry is nowhere near consensus.
Another perspective on AI's potential came from Read more