Decibel and Docket

About Decibel and Docket

Decibel and Docket is a podcast at the intersection of the music business, live entertainment and the justice system. Hosted by veteran entertainment journalist Dave Brooks and attorney Mike Seville, this weekly podcast examines major legal stories and headlines affecting artists, content creators and the business of culture.

Publisher

Dave Brooks

Category

news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

18 Jan 2026

Latest episode

9 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

40 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   9 Oct 2026

   Does Live Nation Top Boss Michael Rapino Deserve $60 Million A Year + Why Robert Kraft Is Afraid to Treat Zach Bryan Like He Treated Ed Sheeran

   On this episode of Decibel & Docket, journalist Dave Brooks, founder of Decibel News, and entertainment attorney Michael Seville cover three music business stories: Zach Bryan’s free speech stand at Gillette Stadium, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino’s new $60 million-a-year contract, and the U.S. Copyright Office’s new inquiry into streaming fraud and AI-generated music. Three weeks after New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft had Macklemore removed from Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour for saying “Free Palestine” on stage, Zach Bryan wore a Free Palestine shirt at Gillette Stadium. Kraft said and did nothing. Dave and Mike argue that the difference comes down to money. Bryan set a stadium attendance record, and Brooks says canceling him would have cost millions and created a PR disaster. Dave traces Bryan’s streak of defiance: his Navy background, his 2023 Oklahoma arrest, his public fights with Ticketmaster and his habit of treating pressure as a dare. Their conclusion is that venue owners’ “principles” often depend on box office numbers. Live Nation Entertainment doubled Michael Rapino’s target pay to $60 million a year through 2031. With a $20 million signing grant, the package is worth about $320 million over five years. Dave breaks down the structure: Cash: about $20 million, made up of a $3 million salary and a bonus tied to adjusted operating income, a non-GAAP metric. Stock: about $40 million in equity, with performance shares tied to Live Nation ranking in the top quarter of the S&P 500 and the stock rising toward roughly $290 a share. Rapino-friendly terms: time-based vesting, the ability to lock in payouts after two years, and vesting at target if he is pushed out. Mike, an attorney, says the headline number is not unusual for a public-company CEO. The accelerated vesting clauses are what stand out, along with Live Nation paying for Rapino’s own lawyers to negotiate against the company. With Ticketmaster facing a remedies phase after a federal jury found Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing and overcharged fans, the hosts ask what the board’s fiduciary reasoning was. They also ask how a $60 million CEO payday looks to fans priced out of concert tickets for artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Zach Bryan. Mike closes with salary negotiation advice: successor contracts built on proven results give you the most leverage. The U.S. Copyright Office has opened a Federal Register inquiry into fake streams, bot farms and AI-generated tracks that pull royalties from the fixed payout pools on Spotify and other streaming services (DSPs). Dave points to Deezer’s report that up to 85% of streams on AI-generated music were fraudulent. He also warns that the DSPs may not want the scrutiny, because fraudulent streams inflate the user engagement metrics Wall Street rewards. Mike sees the inquiry as a first step that could produce a factual record for Congress and the courts. The hosts discuss: the Michael Smith streaming fraud prosecution whether one case should drive new laws a private right of action that would let artists sue fraudsters a duty-of-care standard for streaming platforms, compared with ISP liability protections how to pay royalties on AI music that can’t be copyrighted They also cover why the Copyright Office sits under the Library of Congress, and how Register Shira Perlmutter kept her job after the Trump administration tried to fire her. Listen to Decibel & Docket on Spotify and YouTube, and subscribe to Decibel News at decibel.news for coverage of live entertainment, ticketing, antitrust and music law. That’s about 3,900 characters. I fixed the transcript’s misspellings of Rapino, Sheeran, Bryan, Rodrigo and Perlmutter, and spelled Mike’s surname as Seville rather than “Saville.” I left out the name of Rapino’s law firm because it was garbled in the transcript.

2. 

   2 Oct 2026

   Did Anthropic Use Torrents and Illegal Downloading To Steal Song Lyrics + Deep Dive on Ari Emanuel's New Book Roll The Calls

   On this episode of the Decibel & Docket podcast, entertainment journalist Dave Brooks (founder of decibel.news) and entertainment attorney Michael Seville cover Hollywood power, AI copyright litigation, and the latest turn in the Live Nation–Ticketmaster antitrust case. The episode opens with Endeavor and WME chief Ari Emanuel's new book, Roll the Calls. Dave explains the Hollywood practice of "rolling calls," where an assistant lines up phone calls back to back so a power broker never waits, a habit Emanuel says fills 200 to 300 calls a day starting at 4 a.m. Dave calls the audiobook, narrated by Bob Odenkirk, one of the most unfiltered Hollywood memoirs he's read, full of score-settling and built around two themes: rage as a motivator and Emanuel's lifelong struggle with dyslexia. Dave quizzes Michael with true-or-false stories from the book, including Larry David officiating Emanuel's 2022 wedding in Saint-Tropez and clashing with Elon Musk, a young Emanuel's standoff with CAA's Michael Ovitz, the Entourage character Ari Gold, returning Saudi investment after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, and his infamous email war with Irving Azoff. The main segment examines the August 28 federal lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California by Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell against Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI chatbot. The publishers allege Anthropic used more than 20,000 songs, including lyrics and sheet music for hits like "All I Want for Christmas Is You," "Eye of the Tiger," "Livin' on a Prayer," and "Hallelujah," to train its large language models. Unusually, the suit also names CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann personally. Michael explains why this case is different from AI-generated music suits: the claims focus on how the material was acquired. The complaint alleges content came from pirate sources such as Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror via torrenting, and from scraping licensed lyric sites. It brings four counts: direct and contributory copyright infringement by torrenting, direct copyright infringement, and removal of copyright management information. The hosts discuss the earlier Bartz v. Anthropic authors' case before Judge William Alsup, which found training on copyrighted works could be fair use but acquiring them through piracy was not, and which ended in a $1.5 billion settlement, the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history. The publishers seek up to $150,000 per work in statutory damages. Anthropic calls the suit recycled allegations and maintains AI training is transformative fair use. Michael also explains why related AI copyright cases could be assigned to a single judge to avoid conflicting rulings. The final segment returns to the Live Nation antitrust case. Twenty states plus Washington, D.C., led by Colorado, are asking Judge Arun Subramanian to order Live Nation to turn over records of how it negotiated its settlement with the Department of Justice. Under the Tunney Act, the judge must decide whether that settlement serves the public interest. The states want negotiation records (including texts and any White House involvement), how the 13 amphitheaters in the deal were chosen, internal compliance plans, and why the settlement reappoints the monitor from the 2020 consent decree. Michael covers attorney-client privilege, in-camera review, sovereign immunity hurdles in getting federal records, and why lobbyists and private-sector players may be fair game. He also explains how the judge could treat the DOJ settlement as a floor and add remedies, and why he now believes a Ticketmaster divestiture is more likely than he first thought.

3. 

   24 Sept 2026

   Author Spencer Waller Joins Dave to Talk About The History of Antitrust and Monopolies in the Theater Business + What Does Rob Bonta's Surrender on ParaBros Merger Mean for Live Nation?

   The centerpiece of this episode is Dave's interview with Spencer Weber Waller, an antitrust professor at Loyola University Chicago, former Justice Department prosecutor, and author of Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage, out October 15 from Bloomsbury's Methuen Drama imprint. Waller says the book began during COVID, when his wife, who works on the business side of theater, asked if he had heard of the American Theatrical Syndicate. He hadn't. It turned out that in 1896 six producers, booking agents, and theater owners met in a New York hotel and formed a cartel that controlled most Broadway houses and national tour booking. Producers and performers could work only in Syndicate theaters, and venues could book only Syndicate shows. Waller traces a similar pattern in vaudeville. There the East Coast Keith-Albee circuit and the West Coast Orpheum Circuit combined rather than competed. He stresses that these weren't cartoon villains. The Syndicate brought real order to a chaotic post–Civil War touring business, but it charged a heavy price for that order. The Shubert brothers began as a small Syndicate client in upstate New York. After being blackballed, they built a rival theater empire, sometimes colluded with the Syndicate, and joined it in a failed 1907 invasion of vaudeville that ended with a payoff and a 15-year non-compete. Waller notes that much of this conduct would be a criminal felony today. It went unchecked partly because courts ruled that theater wasn't "trade or commerce." The Supreme Court's baseball decision then made things murkier. By the 1950s, the Shuberts were the last monopoly standing, and the government finally sued. The Supreme Court rejected the Shuberts' defense, and they were forced to sell theaters and exit booking and ticketing. Dave raises a point: by then, taste, the movies, and the Great Depression had already weakened these companies more than the government had. Waller agrees that enforcement often arrives as a monopoly starts to decline, and he compares it to Microsoft. He still believes the breakup improved Broadway by giving producers more options. The book ends at the present day, with the Live Nation–Ticketmaster case. Waller criticizes the DOJ's mid-trial settlement as lenient. He notes reports of White House meetings and a pardoned witness, and he praises Jeffrey Kessler, his former co-author, for winning the states' jury verdict on short notice. His view is that when a company has already broken two consent decrees, another round of behavioral promises isn't enough, and a breakup is the right remedy. Asked whether Live Nation is bigger than the Syndicate and the Shuberts combined, he says it arguably has more power, even though consumers today have more entertainment choices. The Rob Bonta / Paramount–Warner Bros. Settlement Dave and Michael also examine California AG Rob Bonta's settlement allowing Paramount to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Michael calls himself "disappointed," echoing the AGs who signed off, and he worries about CNN, the creative side of the business, and Warner's vast library. Dave asks whether stopping a merger is harder than prosecuting one afterward. Michael agrees that it is: before a merger, harm is hypothetical, while afterward there is evidence. He also notes that American culture tends to celebrate corporate titans. Dave notes that Larry Ellison's threat to move Paramount to Tennessee gave the company leverage. The key question is what this means for Live Nation. Its lawyers may cite the settlement to argue for the behavioral remedies in its DOJ deal. Michael thinks the comparison won't carry much weight with Judge Subramanian, because Live Nation already broke earlier behavioral commitments and now has a liability verdict against it. Both hosts suspect that the backlash may push Bonta to take a harder line on a Live Nation breakup, especially since Michael Rapino has little leverage.

Who has been a guest on Decibel and Docket

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Laura Segura
• Vivian Donahue
• Katie Holmes
• Randy Nichols
• Bernard Resnick

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

6 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

5 ratings

Contact Decibel and Docket

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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