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.”
The voice cast for the Tom DeLonge produced animated series, Breaking Bear, has been announced:
Brendan Fraser (The Whale), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Annie Murphy (Schitt’s Creek), Elizabeth Hurley (The Royals) and Josh Gad (Frozen) will lead the voice cast for Tubi‘s new adult animated series Breaking Bear.
The series parodies the tropes of mobster dramas, comically combining elements of characters like Yogi Bear with series like The Sopranos. It hails from Julien Nitzberg (The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia), Evoke Entertainment (Creepshow, Twelve Forever, Day of the Dead) and Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Media (Monsters of California, Unidentified).
Underoath sat down for a lengthy chat with Revolver:
“Every record we’ve ever done, people find a way to hate it,” he continues. “When an artist makes something that I don’t understand right off the rip, especially if it’s an artist that I love, I want to listen to it and understand why. Not until all five of us are stoked does a song make it out of the studio. That’s how it is every time we make music … Whatever you [eventually] hear in your speakers is exactly what excites Underoath at this moment.”
The All-American Rejects talked with Variety:
The Rejects decided to leave Interscope on their own terms. “We weren’t dropped,” notes Ritter. “We negotiated our way out of that building because it didn’t feel like it was a home for us anymore. They had Imagine Dragons records.” The band continued to tour relentlessly, and the burnout set in. “We did a couple of tours in that break and they just didn’t feel right at all,” says Gaylor. “By the end of them, we were like, I don’t want to do this. Packing on the bus to go home like…” He widens his eyes as if stunned, staring into the abyss.
Turnstile sat down with The New York Times to talk about their upcoming album:
“There is something exciting about being able to make music in a way where there’s no formula, there’s no expectation,” Yates, 35, said. The band’s 2021 album, “Glow On,” propelled it from the upper echelons of the underground into a dramatically larger landscape that included TV commercials, Grammy nominations and a spot opening for Blink-182’s arena tour. With a new album, “Never Enough,” due June 6, Turnstile is pushing its sound further, and the stages are set to get even bigger, leading to an inevitable question: Can the group retain its magic (and its mission) as it grows?
The singer-songwriter has extended his deal with the label for at least two albums, sources say, with the deal closing over the weekend. Meanwhile, Bryan is also selling his publishing catalog, a source familiar with the matter confirms to THR, with the deals netting Bryan a reported $350 million.