Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Macquarie has agreed to inject up to £1.2bn of fresh equity into struggling utility Southern Water as part of a recapitalisation that will result in the debt owed to its holding company lenders being cut by more than half.

Southern’s Australian owner will initially pump £655mn of equity into the company — which provides water and sewerage services to 4.7mn customers in the south-east of England.

Macquarie intends to provide a minimum of £245mn in additional equity by December, a sum that could rise to as much as £545mn.

As part of the deal Macquarie has also agreed a debt restructuring with lenders to Southern Water’s holding companies, which will apply significant haircuts to the riskiest bonds in the group’s multi-tiered financial structure.

While Southern’s finances are in a less precarious position than those of Thames Water, the UK’s largest water utility that was previously owned by Macquarie, it is still on a watchlist of financially stressed companies monitored by the regulator, Ofwat. It has come under pressure in debt markets over concerns it could breach its covenants.

Southern also faces a backlash from the general public for sewage outflows at some of the UK’s most popular beaches, including Brighton and Whitstable, and is at risk of water shortages after years of under-investment. The company has considered importing water from the Norwegian fjords.

By 2030 Southern will raise annual customer bills by £222 to £642, the largest increase agreed between any of the UK’s 11 privatised water and sewage companies and the regulator. This bill increase comes on top of other inflation-linked rises.

Southern has appealed to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to be able to increase bills even further over the next five years to help it finance upgrades.

Meanwhile, the company paid chief executive Lawrence Gosden a £183,000 bonus last year, helping to boost his total pay by 79 per cent to £764,200.

Southern announced on Tuesday that the debt across its holding companies would be reduced from £865mn to £415mn. There are two main tiers of debt above Southern’s operating company, which sit at a middle holding company and a top holding company respectively.

Bondholders including Ares Management and Australian infrastructure investor Westbourne Capital have agreed to a full writedown of their roughly £370mn of debt, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In return, they will receive an “equity-like” investment in the water company, the person added, in an arrangement similar to a debt-for-equity swap, in which these bondholders receive a minority stake in the business.

Bondholders at the middle holding company will see no impairment to the face value of their debt, the person said, but have agreed to change the terms of the debt and extend its maturity.

The maturities of the remaining debt facilities are being extended to at least September 2030, according to the announcement on Tuesday.

The writedowns are seen as a way to allow new equity to flow directly into the utility’s heavily-indebted operating company, rather than being used to service debt further up the capital structure.

In February, Macquarie committed to injecting £900mn of fresh equity into Southern, an increase on the £650mn it had promised previously.

“This additional equity investment demonstrates our commitment to Southern Water and its management team, and our belief that the planned investment programme will deliver for its customers and the environment,” said Martin Bradley, a senior managing director at Macquarie Asset Management.

An endgame was not immediately in sight. Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota is working for a last-minute agreement between those in his party worried the bill’s reductions to Medicaid will leave millions without care and his most conservative flank, which wants even steeper cuts to hold down deficits ballooning with the tax cuts.

Thune declared at one point they were in the “homestretch” as he dashed through the halls at the Capitol, only to backtrack a short time later, suggesting any progress was “elusive.”

At the same time House Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled more potential problems ahead, warning the Senate package could run into trouble when it is sent back to the House for a final round of voting, as skeptical lawmakers are being called back to Washington ahead of Trump’s Fourth of July deadline.

“I have prevailed upon my Senate colleagues to please, please, please keep it as close to the House product as possible,” said Johnson, the Louisiana Republican. House Republicans had already passed their version last month.

It’s a pivotal moment for the Republicans, who have control of Congress and are racing to wrap up work with just days to go before Trump’s holiday deadline Friday. The 940-page “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” as it’s formally titled, has consumed Congress as its shared priority with the president.

In a midnight social media post urging them on, Trump called the bill “perhaps the greatest and most important of its kind.” Vice President JD Vance summed up his own series of posts, simply imploring senators to “Pass the bill.”

The GOP leaders have no room to spare, with narrow majorities in both chambers. Thune can lose no more than three Republican senators, and already two — Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who warns people will lose access to Medicaid health care, and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who opposes raising the debt limit — have indicated opposition. Tillis abruptly announced over the weekend he would not seek reelection after Trump threatened to campaign against him.

Attention quickly turned to key senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, who have also raised concerns about health care cuts, but also a loose coalition of four conservative GOP senators pushing for even steeper reductions.

And on social media, billionaire Elon Musk was again lashing out at Republicans as “the PORKY PIG PARTY!!” for including a provision that would raise the nation’s debt limit by $5 trillion, which is needed to allow continued borrowing to pay the bills.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said his side was working to show “how awful this is.”

“Republicans are in shambles because they know the bill is so unpopular,” Schumer said as he walked the halls.

A new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034 if the bill became law. The CBO said the package would increase the deficit by nearly $3.3 trillion over the decade.

Senators to watch

Few Republicans appear fully satisfied as the final package emerges, in either the House or Senate.

Tillis said it is a betrayal of the president’s promises not to kick people off health care, especially if rural hospitals close.

Collins had proposed bolstering the $25 billion proposed rural hospital fund to $50 billion, but her amendment failed. And Murkowski was trying to secure provisions to spare people in her state from some health care and food stamp cuts while also working to beef up federal reimbursements to Alaska’s hospitals. They have not said how they would vote for the final package.

“Radio silence,” Murkowski said when asked.

At the same time, conservative Senate Republicans proposing steeper health care cuts, including Rick Scott of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, filed into Thune’s office for a near-midnight meeting.

The Senate has spent some 18 hours churning through more than two dozen amendments in what is called a vote-a-rama, a typically laborious process that went on longer than usual as negotiations happen on and off the chamber floor. The White House legislative team also was at the Capitol.

A few of the amendments — to strike parts of the bill that would limit Medicaid funds to rural hospitals or shift the costs of food stamp benefits to the states — were winning support from a few Republicans, though almost none were passing.

Sen. Mike Crapo, the GOP chairman of the Finance Committee, dismissed the dire predictions of health care cuts as Democrats trafficking in what he called the “politics of fear.”

What’s in the big bill

All told, the Senate bill includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, according to the latest CBO analysis, making permanent Trump’s 2017 rates, which would expire at the end of the year if Congress fails to act, while adding the new ones he campaigned on, including no taxes on tips.

The Senate package would roll back billions of dollars in green energy tax credits, which Democrats warn will wipe out wind and solar investments nationwide. It would impose $1.2 trillion in cuts, largely to Medicaid and food stamps, by imposing work requirements on able-bodied people, including some parents and older Americans, making sign-up eligibility more stringent and changing federal reimbursements to states.

Additionally, the bill would provide a $350 billion infusion for border and national security, including for deportations, some of it paid for with new fees charged to immigrants.

Democrats fighting all day and night

Unable to stop the march toward passage, the Democrats as the minority party in Congress are using the tools at their disposal to delay and drag out the process.

Democrats forced a full reading of the text, which took 16 hours, and they have a stream of amendments.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, raised particular concern at the start of debate late Sunday about the accounting method being used by the Republicans, which says the tax breaks from Trump’s first term are now “current policy” and the cost of extending them should not be counted toward deficits.

She said that kind of “magic math” won’t fly with Americans trying to balance their own household books.

At first, everything appears to be in order. But it’s not.

I’ve uncovered multiple examples of how AI-generated music released by – oh yes – fake artists is rapidly growing in popularity on music streaming services.

I’ll focus on Spotify – mainly because of the transparency it offers when it comes to listening data.

Yet music from all of the artists named below is available on a range of streaming services, including Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and more.

Aven-this… cannot be real

Outlaw country artist Aventhis is verified on Spotify – where just over a million (1.072M) listeners absorb his work each month.

He’s even popular enough to have one of those official Spotify-generated ‘THIS IS… Aventhis’ playlists under his name.

And his music? It’s gaining traction, with the blues-soaked, 2025-released Mercy On My Grave racking up more than 2 million plays.

You already know what comes next, but that doesn’t make writing it feel any less depressing.

Aventhis isn’t real. Neither is his voice. He, and it, are both AI-generated.

Aventhis is not an outlaw of any kind. He’s a bot.

I know this for sure because, to verify it, I deployed some sophisticated decoding technologies. Namely: a human being’s eyes, brain, and fingers. Plus the internet.

Three months ago, over on YouTube, under one of Aventhis’ videos, a commentator outright asked what role AI has played in the artist’s music.

The anonymous owner of Aventhis’ channel replied: “[The] voice and image is created with the help of AI. The lyrics are written by me.”

I’d wager that, in this case, ‘me’ is really David Vieira – the man credited as the songwriter and producer behind Aventhis’ songs on Spotify (see below).

I’d also wager that, to create Aventhis’ music, Vieira probably used one of Udio and Suno – the two best-known generative AI music platforms,  which both enable users to input their own lyrics for created songs.

Aventhis was recently recommended to me by Spotify via an algorithmic playlist.

So far, ‘he’ has released three albums of songs on Spotify and other streaming services: Dark Country Vol.1, Dark Country Vol.2, and Dark Country Vol.3.

All three have arrived in the past four months – 57 tracks in total.

The Devil’s in the detail

Once I started listening to Aventhis, Spotify soon recommended another AI artist, also in the ‘outlaw country’ field, and likely created with Suno or Udio.

The Devil Inside is a ‘band’ with approximately 700,000 Spotify monthly listeners.

Like Aventhis, they are Spotify ‘verified’ and their biggest track – Bones In The River – has 1.6 million streams to date.

The Devil Inside takes the ‘AI-as-f**k’ trophy here, because the group has an entirely fake persona… and fake faces.

According to their streaming platform biography, the band hails “from the rugged landscapes of the American South”.

Then the insidious bit: “The songs are based on real creative inspiration, but the characters are illustrative. The images are part of a carefully crafted visual world that complements the music’s dark, cinematic atmosphere, much like a graphic novel or a fictional film universe.”

In other words, the guys you see below – who have their own Instagram page and a range of merch available online – have never actually been born.

In the human sense, anyway.

Sundown, you better beware vs. Hustles Culture

Some hulabaloo has been caused in the past few days by a different, seemingly AI-generated band – The Velvet Sundown – gaining traction on streaming platforms.

Following some media pickup, The Velvet Sundown now has just over 550,000 Spotify monthly listeners.

They, too, have an AI-generated band ‘photo’ (see below).

And just like Aventhis and The Devil Inside, they are ‘verified’ on Spotify, with an official ‘THIS IS…’ playlist on the service.

At least some of the online outrage caused by The Velvet Sundown in recent days has been driven by their music being recommended in subscribers’ algorithmic playlists, like Discover Weekly.

In truth, this is nothing new.

Around six months before Spotify recommended me Aventhis’ music, I was directly pitched a suspiciously AI-looking artist by the platform for the first time.

Nick Hustles’ oeuvre combines classic soul sounds of the ’70s with (often pretty offensive) lyrical pastiches of modern street slang.

As we headed into the 2024 festive break, my algo-Spotify playlist added Hustles’ Christmas-themed I Caught Santa Clause [sic] Sniffing Cocaine.

Puerile lyrics and slight AI wobble in the vocals aside, the track was – ahem – heavily influenced by the lazy bass runs and falsetto vocals of Marvin Gaye’s  I Want You-era output.

Today, Nick Hustles’ most popular tracks include ‘I Feel Like Slapping A N**** Today’, ‘I LOST MY FUCKING VAPE AGAIN’, and ‘Be Yourself’.

Another Hustles track, ‘Why U N****s Gotta Hate,’ gets a special mention here because 50 Cent recently filmed himself singing along to it – and affectionately chuckling at its lyrics – before broadcasting it to his 35 million Instagram followers.

---

Nick Hustles currently has over 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.

Unlike the other AI artists mentioned here, with Hustles, there is a decent online footprint of who actually created him.

According to social profiles, Nick Hustles was unleashed into the world by Nick Arter, who describes himself as a “Songwriter | Lyricist | AI Storyteller | Music Futurist”.

---

---

Apparently based in Pennsylvania, Arter is the founder of social channel AI For The Culture, which has over 100,000 followers on Instagram.

Said Instagram page features an array of fictional AI artists of Arter’s creation, usually presented as having recorded ‘deep cuts’ from long-lost 60s/70s/80s soul and funk records.

“Songwriter | Lyricist | AI Storyteller | Music Futurist.”

Nick Arter’s biog on Instagram

This article has yet to discuss how the popularity of AI artists on streaming services – and the rapidity with which ‘they’ can release new tunes – could potentially divert royalties away from real human performers.

Suffice to say that, since Nick Hustles’ music started appearing on Spotify last year, he (aka: Nick Arter) has released over 50 ‘singles’ on the platform.

Tellingly, one of Arter’s Instagram tracks, attributed to the completely made-up artist Terry “Goldmind” Watkins, is called I Make More Money Than My Teachers.

---

---

The bigger picture

Now that we’ve started exploring this rabbit hole, it’s not very hard to find much more AI-made music on Spotify, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music.

For example, judging by the telltale factors (algorithmic relation to other AI acts, suspicious artwork, the AI vocal ‘wobble’, etc.), I suspect the following artists have all been created with Suno/Udio/alternatives.

I discovered many of them when they were linked to other AI artists in Spotify’s ‘Fans Also Like…’ section.

As you can see, they’re all doing nicely.

---

---

So.

In this article alone, based on a few days of rudimentary research, I’ve named 13 different AI-made ‘artists’ currently active on Spotify, with approximately 4.1 million cumulative monthly listeners between them.

• Obvious question 1: Is this scratching the surface? How much ‘AI slop’ is now running free on music streaming platforms like Spotify – and how much ‘stream-share’ in terms of royalties are being absorbed by the creators of these fake acts?
• Obvious question 2: Is there any hope that music streaming services and DIY distributors will/can clean up this music? Would doing so, behind closed doors at the DSPs, actually clash with a tech utopian ideology?
• Obvious question 3: Where is all this going?

I can take a crack at answering Q3, there. It’s not a happy place.

Under Aventhis’ ‘Fans Also Like…’ section on Spotify (see below), you’ll find the equally AI-born Devil Inside, Aven, and DV8.

You’ll also find very non-AI artists, including Bryan Elijah Smith, whose The Line is one of my favourite songs from the past year (by an actual homo-sapian).

---

---

And here’s the thing. You see Sons Of Legion, above?

They’re a real and popular human duo based in Nashville – who’ve signed to Concord.

But earlier, especially considering the Spotify-recommending-AI situation, I couldn’t be sure.

To check, I deployed music’s acid test for humanness: I searched for any upcoming tour dates – to no avail.

Then I scanned their socials, and found, just a few days ago, they both spoke to camera – explaining that although they might do “pop up” shows in 2025, they won’t look to do a proper tour until 2026.

‘How convenient,’ I found myself thinking. ‘So you don’t need to prove to anyone you’re actual human beings. Am I looking at a couple of AI-generated deepfakes here?’

I wasn’t. I wish Sons Of Legion a long and successful career ahead.

Yet this experience reminds us how skeptical music fans might become over authenticity, should fictional AI slop continue to be splattered throughout their streaming services.

The ultimate test of whether fans like – or trust – tomorrow’s artists may require actually seeing them perform… up close, and away from a screen.

When you think about it, perhaps it was ever thus.Music Business Worldwide

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free

Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world

Donald Trump’s top trade officials are scaling back their ambitions for comprehensive reciprocal deals with foreign countries, seeking narrower agreements to avert the looming reimposition of US tariffs.

Four people familiar with the talks said US officials were seeking phased deals with the most engaged countries as they race to find agreements by July 9, when Trump has vowed to reimpose his harshest levies.

The narrower, piecemeal plan for new deals marks a retreat from the White House’s vow to strike 90 trade deals during the 90-day pause in the sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs the president announced on April 2.

But it also offers some countries a chance to strike modest agreements. The administration would seek “agreements in principle” on a small number of trade disputes ahead of the deadline, the people said.

Countries that agree these narrower deals would be spared the harsher reciprocal tariffs, but left with an existing 10 per cent levy while talks on thornier issues continue, the people said.

However, talks remain complex, and alongside its narrower approach to deals, the administration was also still considering imposing tariffs on critical sectors, people familiar with the matter said.

The twin track, involving the threat of new tariffs alongside openness to deals, underscores the difficulty facing negotiators with Trump, who has used trade as a cudgel to secure concessions from other countries.

Last week the president announced he would end trade talks with Canada, prompting Ottawa to immediately rescind a digital services tax that Washington objected to.

Trump triggered a global stock market rout in early April after imposing steep tariffs on the US’s largest trading partners, following weeks of a chaotic trade policy rollout marked by reversals and U-turns.

Although he has since walked back some of the most punitive levies, so far the US has only reached a trade pact with the UK and signed a tentative truce with China.

Foreign negotiators are now trying to understand what will come next.

The US commerce department had already launched national security probes — Section 232 investigations — into goods including copper, lumber, aerospace parts, pharmaceuticals, chips and critical minerals.

Several countries in serious trade talks with the US have sought relief from existing sectoral tariffs of 25 per cent on cars and their parts and 50 per cent on steel and aluminium.

The US’s trade deal with the UK provides a limited lower-tariff quota for British cars and pledges to negotiate other carve-outs for pharmaceuticals. The UK also won lower levies on steel and aerospace parts.

People familiar with the talks said the poor visibility of possible new sectoral tariffs the US might impose at a later date were hindering discussions.

On Monday, Treasury secretary Scott Bessent suggested the US was focused primarily on the reciprocal tariffs, and would leave sectoral levies until later.

“The Section 232s take longer to implement, so we’ll see what happens with those,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg TV.

It is also unclear how Trump will set any new tariff rates on countries that do not agree a new deal before the July 9 deadline.

On Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was meeting with his trade team to set tariff rates for “many of these countries if they don’t come to the table in good faith”.

The president later suggested on his Truth Social account that Japan would be sent a new tariff rate, despite weeks of trade negotiations between them.

“To show people how spoiled Countries have become with respect to the United States of America, and I have great respect for Japan, they won’t take our RICE, and yet they have a massive rice shortage,” Trump wrote.

“In other words, we’ll just be sending them a letter, and we love having them as a Trading Partner for many years to come.”

Some people familiar with the talks said there was also uncertainty about whether Trump would stick to his schedule about ending his 90-day pause.

Bessent also told Bloomberg TV that any potential extensions to the July 9 deadline would be up to the president, but that he expected to see “a flurry” of deals ahead of the deadline. 

But last week the Treasury secretary told Fox News that the US was negotiating with 18 trading partners and agreements could be done during the summer.

In May, two court rulings declared Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose reciprocal tariffs unlawful. The administration has appealed, but the rulings had also injected uncertainty into talks, people familiar with the negotiations said.

The White House declined to comment.