Happy New Year, 2024

Another Friday with very little in terms of new albums coming out. The music industry hibernation is almost over and January looks to have quite a few fun releases on the horizon.

We’ll continue to be on a very limited posting schedule over the weekend, so I wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a happy and safe New Year! Thank you to everyone that visited this website over the past year. Our official best of 2023 feature will be coming out on January 8th.

Amazon Prime Video Will Start Showing Ads on January 29th

amazon

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:

Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th. “This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,” the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to “limited advertisements.”

Big loser energy.

The NYT Sues Open AI and Microsoft

Legal

New York Times:

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.

The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.

Bluesky Posts Now Open to Public

Technology

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

Bluesky remains an invite-only decentralized Twitter alternative, but now, you don’t need to have an account and log in to be able to see posts on the platform, according to a blog post from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. Now, anyone can easily see posts from both the web and from the Bluesky app — like this one.

If you want to prevent people who aren’t logged in from seeing your posts, you can “discourage” that by clicking a toggle in settings. But Bluesky notes that “other apps may not honor this request” and that the toggle doesn’t make your account private.

I have an account on Bluesky, but I haven’t found myself using it much. In fact, as Twitter/X have gone up in dumpster-fire flames of Oppenheimer proportions, the more I’ve started to think about if I even want or need this kind of service in my life. There’s a real lack of joy, and besides the Absurdist Twitter thread, I am finding less an less value in any of them. I’ve been spending more time curating my RSS feeds and have replaced the Mastodon/X/Threads space on my home screen with my RSS reader. Kicking social media off the first screen of my phone, so far, has felt like a net positive.

Spotify Protests New Tax in France

Paul Sawers, writing for TechCrunch:

Spotify is pulling support for two music festivals in protest against a controversial new tax directed at music-streaming platforms operating in France, and threatened more action will follow in the coming months.

Antoine Monin, managing director for Spotify in the France and Benelux regions, took to X this week to decry a new tax that will impose a levy of what is expected to be between 1.5 and 1.75% on all music-streaming services, with the proceeds going toward the Centre National de la Musique (CNM), which was established in 2020 to support the French music sector.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

Gift

I just wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and happy holidays. We will be on a more relaxed posting schedule over the next few days, as the music industry is in hibernation. All of us are working on finalizing our best of the year lists and we’ll have those to share with you in early January. 1


  1. The community thread of member lists can be found here.