AI and ML

Datacenters tax utilities normally, so just imagine what they could do if workloads were designed to destroy

AI datacenters wreak havoc on the power grid under normal circumstances, so what happens if a bad actor controls all the GPUs and wants to cause harm? Cybersecurity researchers in China have devised a way for malicious tenants to attack their infrastructure provider, potentially causing blackouts or damaging equipment. 

The attack, dubbed Bit2Watt, imagines an adversary masquerading as a legitimate cloud tenant to launch GPU workloads that have the potential to damage datacenters and supporting electrical systems. It’s intended to demonstrate the need to extend cybersecurity defenses to datacenter workload scheduling.

The researchers, Zhouhao Ji, Kaikai Pan, and Wenyuan Xu, from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, describe their technique in a preprint paper titled “Bit2Watt: A Cyber-Physical Vulnerability Exploiting GPU Workloads Across Power and Computing Infrastructures.”

AI training workloads represent a known challenge for datacenter operators. As Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI noted in a 2025 research paper arguing the need for power stabilization during AI training, the transition from GPU computation to GPU data synchronization causes large power swings to occur. And if the frequency spectrum of these power swings is “harmonized with critical frequencies of utilities, [that] can cause physical damage to the power grid infrastructure.”

Meta’s paper on the training of Llama 3 also cites the risk AI training poses to the power grid.

It says, “During training, tens of thousands of GPUs may increase or decrease power consumption at the same time, for example, due to all GPUs waiting for checkpointing or collective communications to finish, or the startup or shutdown of the entire training job. When this happens, it can result in instant fluctuations of power consumption across the datacenter on the order of tens of megawatts, stretching the limits of the power grid.”

Bit2Watt weaponizes this scenario by proposing that an adversary could use malicious GPU workloads to destabilize the datacenters and electrical infrastructure.

“Our results indicate that GPU loads can reach modulation frequencies exceeding 6,000 Hz, compared with only a few hertz observed in conventional household loads such as air conditioners,” the Zhejiang University authors state in their paper. “Such high-frequency modulations can substantially induce voltage excursions, harmonic distortion, and damping degradation.”

The authors claim an attack on a 1-MW local power grid consisting mainly of distributed energy resources like photovoltaics could use 1,000 GPUs to create a total harmonic distortion of 46.8 percent, which would squander nearly half the electrical current on non-productive work and would throw off about 20 percent more heat than normal. 

“This not only threatens the availability of the computing equipment but also produces a negative damping ratio of -0.27, introducing an unstable mode into the system,” the authors contend. “Once the protections are triggered and computing loads are shed, it can trigger cascading failures, potentially leading to blackouts exceeding 80 percent in large-scale power systems.”

The attack is relatively covert, the authors argue, because it can be launched within authorized workload execution paths and would likely be missed by cloud-provider monitoring frameworks. Thus, they propose that infrastructure providers coordinate defenses across the cyber and physical layers to look for malicious computation patterns. They also emphasize the need for local energy buffering systems to handle power demand spikes.

Bit2Watt also potentially opens the door for a side-channel attack called Watt2Bit. The researchers note that the electrical and thermal stress on hardware from a malicious workload creates denial of service events and enables the covert exfiltration of data via power modulation. As a proof of concept, they showed they could recover a 50-bit test sequence using frequency-shift keying (FSK) encoding.

“These findings underscore a fundamental shift: as power and computing infrastructures converge, security must be addressed across domains, requiring coordinated defenses that consider workload behavior, power electronics, and grid dynamics,” the authors conclude. ®

Who’d have thought that the first big spinoff to come out of The Big Bang Theory (not including Young Sheldon and Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, as they’re Sheldon-adjacent) would focus on awkward comic store owner Stuart (Kevin Sussman)?

Our new heroic lead, on-off girlfriend Denise (Lauren Lapkus), as well as friends Kripke (John Ross Bowie) and Bert (Brian Posehn), are brought back together when Stuart triggers a multiverse Armageddon by accidentally breaking a device built by Sheldon (Jim Parsons) and Leonard (Johnny Galecki).

The drive-in movie theater was born in New Jersey on June 6, 1933, which feels exactly right. Only this state could give America Sinatra, The Sopranos, the Pine Barrens, the Taylor Ham versus pork roll blood feud, Wawa parking-lot diplomacy, Friday the 13th, and the drive-in, then look at the rest of the country like it needs to merge faster or get out of the left lane.

Richard Hollingshead Jr. tested the idea in his own driveway with a Kodak projector, a screen, some cars, and the very American belief that almost any activity can be improved if you don’t have to leave your vehicle. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, thousands of drive-ins were scattered across the country, glowing in weird places that eventually became strip malls, storage facilities, car washes, vape shops, and urgent-care centers with suspiciously cheerful signage.

Today, the surviving number is somewhere between “fewer than 300” and “roughly 330,” depending on who is counting, which theaters are still operating, and whether anyone picked up the phone. That is a long fall from the glory days, but maybe inevitable. Land became too valuable, multiplexes got bigger, VCRs happened, and eventually someone decided the drive-in needed gourmet snacks, $11 coffee, artisanal pretzels, and the kind of concession menu that uses the word “curated” without shame.

No.

The real drive-in was not about prestige. It was not about black levels, Dolby Atmos, recliner seats, or a lavender oat latte served by a man with a tiny hat and a screenplay. It was about monster movies, fast cars, biker gangs, radioactive insects, beach-party nonsense, slashers, revenge, bad science, worse decisions, and movies loud enough to survive the speaker bolted to your window.

And yes, that speaker sounded terrible. Nobody cared. You were in a car. The windshield was the screen. The audio was an afterthought. Sometimes the movie was too.

Unless you were a movie nerd, and some of us were already broken that way, the drive-in was also a place where teenagers discovered that privacy was relative, bench seats were a design miracle, and horniness was not a gendered activity. Some people came for the movie. Some came for the date. Some came in the trunk, which used to be called “sneaking in” and in 2026 is probably an ICE raid.

But the films mattered. Not always because they were “great” in the respectable sense. Many were too cheap, too lurid, too strange, too violent, too stupid, or too poorly supervised to survive inside polite cinema. Outside, under the stars, with bad popcorn and worse judgment, they became something else.

They became drive-in movies.

Not every great movie is a great drive-in movie. And not every great drive-in movie is technically good.

That is not a flaw.

That is the business model.

Midnight Movies and Cult Damage

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is less a movie now than a civic disturbance with fishnets, and Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter is the reason it still walks into the room before anyone else does.

It belongs here because it turned midnight screenings into participatory chaos: costumes, callbacks, rice, newspapers, toast, toilet paper, and behavior that would get you removed from most respectable theaters. At a drive-in, I’m still not sure how you hit the screen from your car with toast, but ambition deserves respect.

Scary? Not really. Essential? Absolutely.

Where to buy: $39.99 at Amazon

Pink Flamingos (1972)

John Waters did not make Pink Flamingos to win approval. He made it to contaminate the water supply.

Divine stars as Babs Johnson, competing for the title of “filthiest person alive,” which is not exactly AFI Top 100 material unless the AFI was having a breakdown. It is gross, funny, aggressive, and proudly allergic to good taste.

This belongs in the drive-in conversation because midnight movie culture needed films that felt dangerous, transgressive, and slightly illegal even when you paid for the ticket. Bring disinfectant. Maybe a priest.

Where to buy: $39.95 at Amazon

Eraserhead (1977)

David Lynch’s Eraserhead is what happens when anxiety gets pregnant and moves into an industrial apartment with no windows and worse plumbing.

It is not a monster movie, car movie, or exploitation picture in the usual drive-in sense, but midnight movie culture runs straight through it. The film is strange, funny in the way bad dreams are funny, and deeply unpleasant in ways that suggest your nervous system has filed a formal complaint.

This is not popcorn horror. This is “why is my soul making that noise?” horror.

Where to buy: $29.99 at Amazon

Monsters, Mutants and Bad Science

Them! (1954)

Before giant bug movies became easy punchlines, Them! did it properly.

Nuclear testing creates giant ants in the New Mexico desert, because apparently irradiating the planet had a few side effects. Imagine that. What makes Them! endure is that it plays the material straight. The ants are ridiculous if you are determined to be joyless, but the film treats the threat with real tension.

Personal favorite for a reason. Them! has legs. Six of them on the ants, and two rather memorable ones on Joan Weldon, who brings actual poise to a movie about irradiated insects eating their way through the Southwest.

And unlike Grease, which later turned the L.A. River basin into Thunder Road with leather jackets and hair product, Them! made better use of the city’s concrete nightmare fuel. The climax moves into the Los Angeles spillways and storm drain system, turning civic infrastructure into a giant ant colony. That is urban planning with mandibles.

Where to buy: $44.98 at Amazon

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

The Gill-man remains one of Universal’s great monsters because he is both ridiculous and elegant.

Creature from the Black Lagoon has everything the drive-in era needed: jungle atmosphere, underwater photography, scientists making poor choices, and a monster who clearly did not ask to be dragged into humanity’s nonsense. It is short, atmospheric, and visually strong enough to survive distance, bad projection, windshield glare, and someone walking back from the snack bar with fries.

A good drive-in monster needs a silhouette. The Gill-man has one.

Where to buy: $29.98 at Amazon

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

Roger Corman and Ray Milland give drive-in science fiction an unusually nasty philosophical edge.

Milland plays a doctor who develops eye drops that let him see beyond normal human vision. At first, it sounds useful. Then it becomes a curse, because in Corman’s world, knowledge is wonderful right up until it starts peeling your sanity like an onion.

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes has the title of a cheap exploitation picture, but it is smarter, stranger, and more unsettling than the poster suggests. Corman sold the sizzle and still delivered steak. Thin steak, but steak.

Where to buy: $43.98 at Amazon

The Blob (1958)

Before Steve McQueen became the Cooler King in The Great Escape and made a motorcycle, a baseball glove, and solitary confinement look cooler than most actors’ entire careers, he was here fighting space jelly in small-town Pennsylvania.

The Blob is classic drive-in marquee bait: a monster from outer space, adults who refuse to listen, teenagers forced to save the day, and a creature that looks like dessert fighting back. The fact that the climax ends up around a diner only makes it more perfect. Of course the Blob attacked a diner. Even alien goo understands that late-night pie is where America lets its guard down.

The genius is that nobody overcomplicates it. Blob lands. Blob eats. Town panics. McQueen squints heroically. The diner gets involved.

Where to buy: $25.99 at Amazon

The Scary Ones That Still Have Teeth

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Carnival of Souls is proof that you do not need money to make something deeply unsettling. You need atmosphere, patience, and a face in the dark that looks like it has been waiting for you since birth.

Herk Harvey’s low-budget horror film follows a woman who survives a car accident and becomes drawn to an abandoned carnival pavilion. The plot is simple. The mood is everything.

This is not loud drive-in monster business. It is a ghost story with freezer burn, and it still feels like something you found on late-night television after everyone else in the house went to bed.

Where to buy: $39.95 at Amazon

Messiah of Evil (1973)

Messiah of Evil is the kind of 1970s horror film that makes wallpaper feel suspicious.

A young woman travels to a coastal town looking for her missing father and finds locals who seem less like residents and more like people waiting for a signal from something awful. The film is dreamy, disjointed, and genuinely creepy, with a supermarket sequence that deserves more respect than it gets.

It feels like a nightmare taking place in a town that forgot to wake up. Explanation would only ruin it, and horror already has enough paperwork.

Where to buy: $22.16 at Amazon

Black Christmas (1974)

Before Halloween, before the slasher rules hardened into formula, there was Black Christmas.

Bob Clark’s film is still one of the creepiest slashers ever made because it does not over-explain its killer. The obscene phone calls are vile, the sorority-house setting is claustrophobic, and the ending remains brutally effective.

And yes, this is the same Bob Clark who later directed Porky’s and A Christmas Story, because apparently one career could contain obscene phone calls, shower peeping, and Ralphie nearly shooting his eye out without anyone in Hollywood asking for a wellness check.

Porky’s also gave Kim Cattrall her infamous “Lassie” moment, which is probably not the scene you want to use when evaluating Mark Levinson electronics unless you enjoy explaining things to your neighbors and local law enforcement.

Where to buy: $39.98 at Amazon

Phantasm (1979)

Phantasm does not explain itself.

Don Coscarelli’s cult horror classic has graveyards, alternate dimensions, flying silver spheres, Jawas from hell, and Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man, one of the great horror figures of the era. It operates on dream logic, which is a polite way of saying you may not know what is happening, but you will remember it.

A normal movie gives you plot. Phantasm gives you a chrome ball drilling into someone’s skull and dares you to complain.

Where to buy: $49.98 at Amazon

Cars, Bikers and Bad Decisions

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is not subtle, polite, or especially interested in behaving itself. Good. Drive-in movies were not built for manners.

Three go-go dancers tear across the desert in sports cars, leaving violence, seduction, and bad decisions in their wake. Tura Satana’s Varla remains one of exploitation cinema’s great screen presences: dangerous, stylish, and fully aware that everyone else in the movie is already losing.

Personal favorite. Obviously. The title alone has better posture than most actors.

Where to buy: $39.95 at Amazon

The Wild Angels (1966)

Roger Corman understood the biker movie before polite culture knew what to do with it.

The Wild Angels stars Peter Fonda as Heavenly Blues, leader of a motorcycle gang that tears through California with nihilism, noise, and a general disregard for anyone’s insurance premiums. It is crude, influential, and essential because it helped turn biker films into a full-blown exploitation lane.

This is not romantic outlaw nonsense. It is ugly, chaotic, and half in love with the very thing it claims to critique.

In other words, very drive-in.

Where to buy: $11.54 at Amazon

Vanishing Point (1971)

Barry Newman plays Kowalski, a former cop, race-car driver, and Vietnam veteran hired to deliver a white Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco, because apparently FedEx was too emotionally stable.

Newman was never a household name, unless your household had strong opinions about Vanishing Point or watched Petrocelli in the 1970s, but that helps the movie. He looks less like a star and more like a man who has already accepted that speed, drugs, bad decisions, and state troopers are now the same problem.

The open road is not freedom here. It is a trap with better scenery and worse gas mileage.

Where to buy: $29.99 at Amazon

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974)

That title sounds like three nicknames found on a police blotter, which is exactly the point.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is drive-in car-chase junk food: loud, greasy, fast, and probably terrible for you if consumed too often. Peter Fonda and Susan George play criminals on the run after a supermarket heist, with Adam Roarke along for the ride and Vic Morrow chasing them down.

Morrow, best known for Combat! and later as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s father, brings some gravel as the lawman in pursuit. He was killed in 1982 during the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie, along with two child actors, in one of Hollywood’s most infamous on-set disasters. Different helicopter tragedy than the one that killed Boris Sagal, Katey Sagal’s father, because apparently Hollywood needed two of those.

Where to buy: $34.28 at Amazon

Death Race 2000 (1975)

Roger Corman produced a movie about a future America where vehicular homicide is national entertainment, and somehow we still call it satire.

Death Race 2000 is cheap, nasty, funny, and smarter than it looks, which is the Corman sweet spot. David Carradine brings the cool as Frankenstein, Sylvester Stallone brings the volume as Machine Gun Joe, and the whole thing turns bloodsport into media spectacle with all the delicacy of a cinder block through a windshield.

Cars, violence, politics, jokes, and a title that screams poor citizenship.

Where to buy: $39.95 at Amazon

Trash, Revenge and Exploitation

The Toxic Avenger (1984)

Troma’s most famous creation is a mop-wielding mutant from New Jersey, because of course he is.

The Toxic Avenger is disgusting, juvenile, violent, and frequently indefensible. It is also weirdly sincere beneath the sludge. A bullied janitor falls into toxic waste, mutates into a hideous hero, and starts cleaning up Tromaville with a level of force that would make most municipal agencies nervous.

This is not polished cult cinema. This is radioactive garbage with a cape.

It belongs here because sometimes the drive-in needed a hero who looked like a lawsuit.

Where to buy: $39.99 at Amazon

Surf Nazis Must Die (1987)

Surf Nazis Must Die is not here because it is great.

It is here because the title alone could sell tickets to people who had already made several poor decisions that evening.

A post-apocalyptic California coastline is overrun by neo-Nazi surf gangs, and revenge eventually arrives in the form of a woman who has had enough. It is a Troma-distributed artifact of bad taste, cheap anger, and exploitation marketing so blunt it practically hits itself with a folding chair.

The movie is clumsy. The title is immortal.

Sometimes that is enough to earn a parking space.

Where to buy: $39.95 at Amazon

The Stuff (1985)

Larry Cohen’s The Stuff is one of the great junk-food horror satires.

A mysterious dessert-like substance bubbles out of the ground, gets marketed to the public, and becomes a national obsession. It is delicious, addictive, and possibly alive. Which, given the state of some supermarket shelves, feels less like fiction every year.

The film works because it turns consumer culture into a monster movie without losing the B-movie hook. The title is perfect. The premise is ridiculous. The satire has teeth.

If dessert climbs out of the earth, maybe do not build a brand around it.

Where to buy: $24.99 at Amazon

Coffy (1973)

Pam Grier did not enter exploitation cinema. She kicked the door open and made the room behave.

In Coffy, she plays a nurse who goes after the drug dealers and criminals responsible for destroying her sister’s life. The movie is violent, stylish, angry, and built around Grier’s charisma. She is not just the star. She is the engine, the steering wheel, and the brick through the windshield.

The film is very much of its era, with all the complications that brings, but it remains one of the essential revenge films of the drive-in and grindhouse circuit.

Where to buy: $32.40 at Amazon

Switchblade Sisters (1975)

Jack Hill’s Switchblade Sisters is teen-gang melodrama with knives, betrayal, power struggles, and the kind of leadership problems that would make a school board meeting look serene.

The film follows a girls’ gang navigating loyalty, violence, and internal politics, and it has far more energy than polish. That works in its favor. It feels dangerous, theatrical, and proudly overheated.

This is exploitation cinema with attitude. Not realistic. Not respectable. Not asking for either.

A proper drive-in movie should occasionally make you wonder who approved this and whether they were later promoted.

Where to buy: $17 at Amazon

The Bottom Line

The best drive-in movies were not trying to impress critics. They were trying to get cars through the gate.

They had titles you could read from the road, posters that lied with confidence, monsters that wobbled but still worked, cars that sounded better than the dialogue, and revenge plots that required neither nuance nor a therapist. They were loud, cheap, weird, horny, scary, and occasionally brilliant by accident.

Today, you can buy craft coffee and gourmet popcorn at a “reimagined outdoor cinema experience” where nachos apparently need a mission statement. Good for them. I hope the margins are excellent.

Give me the old version: giant ants, murderous surfers, toxic waste, biker scum, go-go dancers with bad intentions, radioactive dessert, and a movie title that sounds like it was shouted by a man selling fireworks out of a van.

That was the drive-in.

Not respectable.

Better.

Related Reading:

off-prem

An expired card, overzealous spam filter, and broken authenticator create havoc with a very clear moral 

Nothing can ruin the end of a week like finding out that all of the websites and hosted email you’re responsible for are offline, which is exactly what happened to Christopher Bradbury and his web design and development firm, Digital Takumi last week. AWS has since resolved the situation, but Bradbury’s mistakes can serve as a useful lesson to others of what not to do.

As Bradbury explained to The Register in an email, he noticed last Thursday, July 16, that all the websites and Google Workspace email accounts connected to domains he manages were offline. All of those sites are hosted through Route 53, AWS’ combined DNS/hosting service, and none of them were resolving. 

Bradbury went digging through his emails to figure out if there was anything to point to the failures, and sure enough: In his spam folder were numerous messages from AWS telling him a payment card on file had expired, and warning him that the account used to host all those customer websites through Route 53 was going to be suspended unless he took action. He didn’t obviously, because he didn’t realize there was an issue.

“AWS had been sending billing notifications, but unfortunately they had been filtered into a spam folder and, in some cases, were being delivered to an employee who had since left the business,” Bradbury told us. 

“I accept responsibility for missing those notifications,” he added, but that didn’t help his customers’ websites get back online. 

The situation could have been resolved sooner, but Bradbury had made some other mistakes as well:

“The root account had MFA enabled using a software authenticator that had been stored on an older laptop which has since suffered a motherboard failure,” Bradbury explained. Without access to that authentication code generator, he was unable to get into the account. Rather than getting the dead-laptop-with-a-critical-authenticator-on-it problem resolved, he was just relying on MFA emails instead – not the best idea.

“I’ve been bypassing the device key for quite a while by just using the recovery MFA via my email,” Bradbury told us. “It works, I get access. However if I just had my Passkey up to date it would have let me right in and I could have solved this.”

And then there was the email address where those MFA codes were going:

“The AWS recovery process required email verification using the registered root email address,” Bradbury told us. “That email address belonged to one of the domains whose DNS was hosted in the suspended AWS account, meaning I couldn’t receive the verification email.”

The account recovery tango

Bradbury’s next option was contacting AWS from a different email address, which didn’t go anywhere. He created another AWS account and purchased business support access on someone’s recommendation, but the support engineers he spoke to using that method wouldn’t discuss the other account until he verified he owned the one in question. 

“Over the following days I spoke with several AWS teams, including Billing and Account Recovery. I was transferred between teams multiple times, but nobody was able to complete the ownership verification or restore access to the account,” Bradbury told us.

He wanted to pay AWS, Bradbury told us, but it took a while for them to be able to take his money. “The practical consequence is that I cannot log into the AWS account, cannot receive email at the registered root address, cannot access the MFA device, cannot update the expired payment method, and therefore cannot pay the outstanding invoices from inside the account.” 

While we were working on this story, after speaking to both Amazon and Bradbury, he contacted us to say that access to the sites had been restored, and that he had logged in, paid the back invoices, updated his payment method, reset his MFA keys, and generally taken care of all the stuff he had been putting off until all this happened. 

It’s unfortunate that someone has to go through AWS billing hell to serve as an example to others, so let this be a warning to anyone else managing client websites through AWS.

“Firstly pay your AWS bills,” Bradbury said in an email, adding that anyone running an AWS hosting account also makes sure their emergency recovery email isn’t on the same domain as one of the sites they manage through that profile. That, and “stop using shortcuts” when it comes to MFA. 

“This isn’t a big infrastructure account, we run a single company marketing website and some domains through Route 53,” Bradbury explained. “It just shows that even the most modest instances of AWS can be absolutely business critical and you need to use proper practices and processes.” ®

Anthropic can finally start cutting checks to a group of authors and book publishers that sued the AI lab over copyright infringement. A federal judge gave final approval Monday of Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit, Reuters reported.

Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary approval of the settlement last year, after ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books.

Alsup has since retired and Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on the settlement on Monday.

The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them. While the settlement is believed to be the largest in the history of U.S. copyright law, many authors and creators still don’t view it as a win.

That’s because of how the legal question was resolved. Alsup sided with Anthropic on the core issue. He ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text counts as fair use — a decision widely seen as a turning point for the AI industry. But the ruling didn’t excuse how Anthropic obtained the books in the first place. Anthropic had built its training library from two sources: books it purchased and scanned (fine), and books it downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup found the second method illegal on its own terms and said that piracy question could go to trial; Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and whatever damages a jury might have awarded.

While the final approval closes out this case, it doesn’t settle the legal question industry-wide because Alsup’s ruling was a single district court decision, and Anthropic’s decision to settle means the case will never reach an appeals court to become binding precedent.

Other judges are still free to reach their own conclusions on their own facts, which is exactly what’s playing out elsewhere. There is still a string of copyright lawsuits against companies such as Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI over whether it’s legal to train AI models on copyrighted works. Just last week, a group of publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a class action lawsuit against Google over accusations that the company used their copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini.

Global consumer spending on recorded music increased 8.6% to $47.1 billion in 2025, with streaming accounting for 86% of the total, according to Futuresource Consulting’s latest industry outlook.

The number of paid music subscriptions worldwide reached 865 million, an increase of 71.5 million from the previous year. Those figures make the direction of the business difficult to misunderstand: streaming is no longer merely the largest part of the recorded music market. It has become the market’s central economic engine, with physical sales and downloads operating around it.

Futuresource expects global music spending to surpass $50 billion in 2026 and reach $60.2 billion by 2030, when subscription streaming could account for almost nine out of every ten dollars spent on recorded music.

That does not mean physical music is disappearing. Consumer spending on physical formats increased 7% during 2025, while global vinyl retail value rose 10% to $3.77 billion. Streaming may have taken over the largest bedroom and changed the Wi-Fi password, but records and CDs have not moved into the garage quite yet.

Subscriber Growth Is Moving Beyond Mature Markets

The addition of 71.5 million paid subscriptions during 2025 reflects continued growth in regions where streaming adoption still has considerable room to expand.

Latin American recorded music revenue increased 15%, while the Asia-Pacific region surpassed 400 million paid music subscriptions. China, India, Brazil and Mexico are expected to play increasingly important roles as subscription growth slows across North America and Western Europe.

That slowdown is one reason streaming services are focusing more heavily on higher-priced plans, bundled content, premium features and regular price increases. Most consumers in mature markets who are willing to pay for music streaming already subscribe to at least one service, which means future growth depends increasingly on charging existing users more rather than simply finding new ones.

Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, Qobuz, Amazon Music and other platforms have responded with higher monthly prices, additional subscription tiers, audiobooks, music videos, artificial-intelligence features and other additions designed to make the increases appear less like increases.

Some of those changes have created real value. Others have mostly improved the number printed on the credit-card statement.

Vinyl Remains the Physical Market’s Economic Engine

Vinyl continues to generate the largest share of physical music revenue, with global retail spending reaching $3.77 billion in 2025.

That figure is consistent with the broader trend eCoustics has followed throughout 2026. The RIAA reported that U.S. vinyl generated $1.043 billion in wholesale revenue during 2025, with 46.8 million records sold. Revenue increased 9.3%, while unit sales grew 7.9%.

It was the format’s 19th consecutive year of growth in the United States, which makes it increasingly difficult to dismiss vinyl as a short-lived revival driven entirely by aging collectors and Record Store Day releases. Fads generally do not survive four presidential administrations, multiple economic downturns, a pandemic and the arrival of $50 single-LP reissues bought by people who already own five other copies.

Vinyl now supports a substantial network of independent retailers, pressing plants, equipment manufacturers, distributors, labels and reissue companies. It has also evolved into something broader than an audio format, combining music ownership with collectibility, artwork, limited editions and physical merchandise.

That explains why buyers continue to spend money on colored vinyl, numbered editions, alternate covers and deluxe box sets, even when the same music is available instantly through a streaming subscription.

CDs Are Showing More Life Than Expected

Compact discs remain considerably smaller than vinyl in both revenue and cultural visibility, but the format has shown unexpected momentum during 2026.

Luminate reported that U.S. CD sales increased 16% to 16.3 million units during the first half of the year, while vinyl unit sales grew by only 2.4%. That gave CDs a growth rate almost seven times higher during the period.

K-pop releases contributed significantly through elaborate packaging, photo cards, alternate editions and fans purchasing multiple versions of the same album. However, Luminate found that CD sales would still have increased 6.7% after K-pop titles were removed from the data, suggesting that the improvement was not dependent on one unusually committed group of collectors.

Target, Walmart and other mass-market retailers now account for almost 30% of U.S. physical music sales, another indication that records and CDs are no longer confined to independent stores and specialist websites.

The figures do require some context. Futuresource measures global consumer spending, while the RIAA reports U.S. wholesale revenue net of returns and Luminate tracks retail consumption and unit activity. The numbers describe related trends, but they are not directly interchangeable.

The RIAA still reported that U.S. CD sales declined to 29.5 million units in 2025, with wholesale revenue falling to $312.4 million. Luminate’s stronger first-half results therefore suggest a possible change in direction rather than proof that compact discs have suddenly returned to their late-1990s commercial peak.

Nobody should start rebuilding Tower Records just yet.

Physical formats will remain much smaller than streaming, but the evidence does not support the idea that they are disappearing. Vinyl is a multibillion-dollar global business with nearly two decades of sustained U.S. growth, CD sales are showing renewed momentum in 2026, and manufacturers at both ends of the market continue introducing new players and transports.

Esoteric and Luxman still serve buyers who want disc playback treated as a precision instrument, while Denon, Yamaha, NAD, Audiolab, Mission, Quad, Topping and FiiO continue to develop products at more accessible prices. This is not an industry maintaining a format on life support; it is one still investing in it.

The turntable market is even more remarkable. There have not been this many new models available in at least 30 years, with hundreds of options from Rega, Pro-Ject, Thorens, Kuzma, VPI, Vertere, Linn, Luxman and far too many others to list without turning this article into a dealer catalog. Entry-level decks, premium belt-drive designs, direct-drive models, automatic turntables and statement products all continue to arrive because demand remains real.

Interest in physical music has not been this strong in a very long time. Listeners understand that well-mastered records and CDs can sound better than compressed or compromised streams, but sound quality is only part of the appeal. Physical media provides ownership, permanence and a sense of community among listeners, collectors, retailers and artists that no monthly subscription can reproduce.

There will never be a Streaming Store Day. Nobody is lining up outside at 6 a.m. to celebrate a licensing agreement that can disappear before lunch.

The music business often treats streaming and physical media as opposing formats, but consumers increasingly use them for different reasons.

Streaming provides access, convenience and discovery. It allows listeners to explore enormous catalogs, move between devices and hear new releases immediately without committing to a purchase.

Physical media provides ownership and permanence. A record or CD cannot disappear because a licensing agreement expired, an artist changed distributors or a streaming platform removed a specific version from a regional catalog.

CDs also provide an inexpensive route to creating lossless local files, while vinyl offers artwork, presentation and a physical connection to an album that streaming cannot reproduce. For many listeners, the most practical approach is to stream broadly and purchase selectively.

That is not a contradiction. It may be the most rational way to consume music in 2026: use streaming to discover, buy the albums that matter, rip the CDs and retain a library that does not depend on a monthly subscription or somebody else’s licensing agreement.

The cloud is convenient. It is not ownership.

AI Will Influence Where the Next Billions Go

Futuresource also identifies artificial intelligence as one of the major forces shaping the music business.

Streaming platforms are using AI for recommendations, playlists, search and engagement, while labels and rights holders explore licensing and content-management agreements. Services are also being forced to address the rapid growth of fully synthetic music and determine whether AI-generated recordings should compete directly with human artists for recommendations and royalty payments.

Deezer has taken one of the clearest positions by identifying fully AI-generated tracks and removing them from algorithmic recommendations. Other services are still developing their policies, even as synthetic content continues to increase.

The issue will become more significant as streaming controls a larger share of global music spending. Platforms do not merely deliver music; they influence what listeners discover, which artists receive exposure and how revenue is distributed.

There is a great deal of money attached to those decisions, which usually means the ethical discussion will continue immediately after the commercial agreements have been signed.

The Bottom Line

Global paid music subscriptions reached 865 million in 2025, while streaming captured 86% of recorded music spending and pushed the market to $47.1 billion. By 2030, that share could approach 90%, driven by higher prices, premium tiers, expansion in developing markets and the increasingly unavoidable arrival of AI inside every service.

Those numbers confirm that streaming has won the battle for access. It is fast, convenient and almost impossible to avoid. What it does not provide is ownership, permanence or any guarantee that the version of an album you love will still be available next year, in the same country, under the same licensing agreement.

Physical media remains much smaller, but it offers something streaming cannot: control. A record or CD belongs to the buyer, can be played without permission from a platform and often sounds better when the mastering is superior.

That combination of sound quality, ownership and community is why records and CDs continue to matter, even as streaming absorbs most of the money. The industry may prefer recurring monthly payments, but listeners still understand the difference between having access to music and actually owning it.

The industry appears perfectly willing to charge people for both, and a growing number of listeners appear willing to pay.

[Reference: futuresource-consulting.com (login required)]

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security

IC3 says any account claiming to represent it is fake

Real FBI agents won’t slide into your DMs and offer to help you recover stolen funds. The bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) updated an earlier warning on Monday about scammers impersonating the agency online, saying fraudsters continue to use the scheme “to deceive and revictimize individuals.”

According to IC3, there are two different schemes being used to target cybercrime victims, both directly and by soliciting them to report incidents. 

In the first scheme, IC3 said scammers create fraudulent social media profiles and pages impersonating FBI personnel or IC3. They may also infiltrate online groups for fraud victims or contact victims directly while claiming to represent the FBI or the complaint center.

In other cases, victims are being contacted by someone claiming to be an FBI agent after realizing they were approached by someone trying to scam them and saying they intended to report the incident to the FBI or file an IC3 complaint. The FBI said the impersonator then directs victims to a fake IC3 update page or continues communicating through messaging apps.

In the other instance, scammers are creating AI-generated videos on social media depicting senior FBI officials and directing users to a spoofed IC3 website to report cybercrimes they may have fallen victim to, with the scammers then collecting the information and using it to contact victims for further fraud. AI-generated depictions of public figures are similarly being used to make such scams appear legitimate.

“Some individuals received an email or a phone call, while others were approached, or observed an advertisement via social media or forums,” the IC3 said. “Almost all complainants indicated the scammers claimed to have recovered the victim’s lost funds or offered to assist in recovering funds.”

Regardless of how legitimate social media profiles look, or how realistic those AI-generated videos may be, the IC3 is warning that none of them should be believed for a simple reason: The IC3 doesn’t have a social media presence of any kind, and it doesn’t investigate crimes or offer to recover lost funds through social media.

“Any social media profiles or pages claiming to represent IC3 or offering to recover lost money are fraudulent and are actively attempting to steal your personal or financial information,” the IC3 warned. “IC3 will never directly communicate with individuals via phone, email, social media, phone apps, online chat, or public forums.” 

The IC3 said that any contact made with a cybercrime victim who reports an incident via its actual website will be made by an FBI employee from a local field office or other law enforcement official. 

Here’s another hot tip: If you fall victim to a cybercrime or online scam, don’t post about it on social media – that’s only going to invite someone with bad intentions to seek you out. ®