Marc Maron has announced he’s ending his podcast.
After nearly 16 years spent interviewing musicians, comedians, and other cultural figures, the veteran comedian and actor will release his final episode of the podcast later this fall. Maron broke the news during the post recent WTF episode with John Mulaney, sharing that both he and his producing partner Brendan McDonald are “tired” and “burnt out,” but “utterly satisfied with the work we’ve done.”
Lucas Shaw, writing for Bloomberg:
Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment are pushing to collect license fees for their work and also receive a small amount of equity in Suno and Udio, two leaders among a crop of companies that use generative AI to help make music. Any deal would help settle lawsuits between the two sides, said the people, who declined to be identified because the talks could fall apart.
Dave Shapiro, Sound Talent Group co-founder and former member of Count The Stars, has passed away in a plane crash:
The music agency Sound Talent Group said Thursday that three of its employees, including co-founder Dave Shapiro, died on the private plane that crashed into a San Diego neighborhood.
Shapiro is listed as the owner of the plane and has a pilot’s license, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Shapiro also owned a flight school called Velocity Aviation and a record label, Velocity Records, according to his LinkedIn page.
Zach Braff has signed on for the Scrubs update that’s in development at ABC.
Braff will reprise his role from the 2001-10 series as John, aka J.D., the narrator and central character for most of the show’s first run. ABC confirmed it was developing a Scrubs reboot in December, after creator Bill Lawrence, Braff and other members of the cast had for years said they’d like to reunite.
Jaime Eliezer Karas (Acapulco) has come aboard to direct Suburban Kings, a coming-of-age film penned by Peter Hoare (Kevin Can Wait), to be produced by Chris Mangano (Mangano Movies & Media), Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge (To The Stars Media), and Stan Spry (Evoke Entertainment).
The film follows Wolfgang Binder, a rebellious, skateboarding-obsessed 13-year-old, who is hellbent on spending the summer of ’99 cheering up his best friend after the tragic, unexpected death of his mother.
Ben Folds will help write music for the first Peanuts musical in 35 years.
Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical is the first new Peanuts musical special in 35 years. Ben Folds (of Ben Folds Five, and also the guy who composed “It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown”) will write original music for the July 18 release, as will Jeff Morrow. A Summer Musical has a 40-minute runtime.
Maxwell Zeff, writing for TechCrunch:
A lawyer representing Anthropic admitted to using an erroneous citation created by the company’s Claude AI chatbot in its ongoing legal battle with music publishers, according to a filing made in a Northern California court on Thursday.
Claude hallucinated the citation with “an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors,” Anthropic says in the filing, first reported by Bloomberg. Anthropic’s lawyers explain that their “manual citation check” did not catch it, nor several other errors that were caused by Claude’s hallucinations.
Anthropic apologized for the error and called it “an honest citation mistake and not a fabrication of authority.”
The U.S. Justice Department is conducting a criminal antitrust probe of Live Nation and AEG’s response to concert cancellations at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, Live Nation confirmed while denying any collusion on Thursday. The probe is focused on whether the live-event companies colluded on refund policies for canceled concerts, according to an earlier report by Bloomberg News.
Collusion with competitors can be a criminal offense under antitrust laws. Probes do not always result in charges.
Lorde sat down with Rolling Stone:
As we talk in her apartment and around her city, Lorde often repeats how “terrified” she is to open up about the album — and to let the world hear it. There are songs she forebodingly describes as “rugged,” vulnerable, and messy, fitting for an artist who’s unlearning the conditioning that taught her to be digestible and “good.”
“There’s going to be a lot of people who don’t think I’m a good girl anymore, a good woman. It’s over,” she promises, eyes bright and full of fire. “It will be over for a lot of people, and then for some people, I will have arrived. I’ll be where they always hoped I’d be.”
This summer, streamer Max will bend the knee and rebrand back to its original name, HBO Max.
The change comes just over two years after Warner Bros. Discovery decided to drop HBO from the streamer’s name to become just Max. Note that while HBO and Max have carried separate commercial branding during that time, they’ve competed under one “HBO/Max” label for industry awards.
LOL.
Apple Music, under an exclusive deal with Universal Music Group, is rolling out a collection of instrumental versions of pop songs — crafted based on audio science — that it claims can help you better sleep, relax and focus.
Apple Music’s Sound Therapy collection takes well-known songs and blends in “special sound waves designed to enhance users’ daily routines, while retaining the artist’s original vision,” according to the companies. For example, a “dreamy version of Katy Perry’s ‘Double Rainbow’… could help listeners drift off to sleep.”
Read More “Google Updating Its ‘G’ Icon”Google is now updating the icon so that there are no longer four solid color sections. Instead, red bleeds into yellow, yellow into green, and green into blue. It looks more vibrant and colorful.
Kyle Wiggers, writing at TechCrunch:
SoundCloud appears to have quietly changed its terms of use to allow the company to train AI on audio that users upload to its platform.
As spotted by tech ethicist Ed Newton-Rex, the latest version of SoundCloud’s terms include a provision giving the platform permission to use uploaded content to “inform, train, [or] develop” AI.
And, SoundCloud responded:
The February 2024 update to our terms of service was intended to clarify how content may interact with AI technologies within SoundCloud’s own platform. Use cases include personalized recommendations, content organization, fraud detection, and improvements to content identification with the help of AI technologies.
Ashley King, writing at Digital Music News:
“Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” said Morelle. “It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”
Morelle also linked to a pre-publication draft of a US Copyright Office report released last week—the third part in a longer report—that focuses on copyright and artificial intelligence. The report outlines that, while each case’s outcome cannot be pre-judged, there are limitations on the amount that AI companies can count on “fair use” as a defense when training their large language models (LLMs) on copyrighted work.
Mark Hoppus talked with The Independent:
He leans forward as if letting me in on a secret, “You know, if the band dissolved today, if Tom came to me today and said, ‘I’m out. I’m done with Blink,’ we would shut the whole thing down and it’d be OK. I’d be filled with nothing but gratitude and joy.”