The Brief – Tuesday 26 May: Spotify partners with Universal Music Group; Tui ends MAFS sponsorship

🎧 Spotify has partnered with Universal Music Group to let fans use generative AI to create covers and remixes of songs. The tool, still in development, will launch as a paid add-on available to premium subscribers and will offer a revenue share for participating artists when AI-adapted music is created based on their work. (TechCrunch)

🗞️ Penske Media is in talks to acquire former Vox Media brands that were not acquired by James Murdoch, including The Verge, Eater, SB Nation, Popsugar and the Dodo. (Adweek)

📱 Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, as well as X, have blocked the accounts of Saudi Arabian dissidents so that they are no longer visible inside the country, following orders from Saudi authorities. (The Guardian)

📺 Holiday company Tui has ended its sponsorship of Channel 4‘s Married at First Sight in the UK, Australia and US, after two women raised rape allegations and another alleged a non-consensual sex act as part of a BBC Panorama documentary. (BBC)

🛍️ Small businesses in the US increased TikTok Shop sales by 66% in 2025 compared to the year before, the platform told ModernRetail. Small businesses were defined as sellers with less than $15m in annual revenue, and there are now more than 215,000 actively selling on the platform in the US. (ModernRetail)