Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:
The new tool allows users to describe what they want to hear in a personalized playlist that reflects the “full arc” of their tastes, according to the company. That means the playlist focuses not only on the songs you like now, but your entire Spotify listening history from day one — something that differentiates the feature from other playlists, the company says.
Hackers impersonating celebrities like Taylor Swift and her team contributed to fleecing fans for $5.3 billion online in 2025, as AI has made online scams more successful, according to a report from social media security company Spikerz. […]
The report found that scammers target Swifties with convincing fake tickets, merch and VIP experiences, while Carpenters’ young fanbase is targeted by clone accounts offering “fake meet-and-greet offers, pre-sale links, and counterfeit merch drops.” Billie Eilish hackers have run fake livestreams or giveaways that mimic her image.
“Temu manufactured and sold a myriad of items that are counterfeit or blatant copies of Plaintiff’s artwork, products, trademarks, and intellectual property,” the suit elaborated, also including multiple screenshots of allegedly infringing MF Doom merch listings.
From there, Temu returned fire in October with a dismissal motion that placed the alleged trademark infringement blame on the shoulders of “independent third-party sellers.”
Evidently, this argument did the trick; Judge Blumenfeld stressed the seller-marketplace distinction when doing away with the MF Doom estate’s direct infringement claim.
In the judge’s view, the plaintiff “cites no authority holding that price control renders an online marketplace a ‘seller’ liable for direct infringement,” while “the presence of Temu’s name on packaging…does not support an inference that Temu is the seller of any product, let alone the products at issue here.”
Joe Wilkins, writing for Futurism:
Though the abomination of an ad only has 20,000 views on YouTube, backlash in the comments was so intense that McDonald’s shut down comments over the weekend, before delisting the video entirely. (Some marketing research databases managed to scrape the clip, if you’re curious.)
This expansion gives millions more listeners access to a catalog of official music videos, from studio versions to live performances and covers. The initial video catalog is limited for now while the feature is in beta, but stay tuned as availability will grow quickly over the coming months.
Matt Birchler, with my favorite line of the week so far:
If a tool makes my job meaningfully better, AI or not, I’m gonna use it, you don’t have to convince me. Maybe some people are resistant to learn anything new, but my impression is that the gains bosses have promised have been too grand and the use cases too broad, so employees get a bad taste in their mouth.
Again, I’ll shout it from the rooftops, if a piece of software is revolutionary and will make workers’ jobs easier, they will use it. If you find you have to keep making the hard sell to your employees, maybe it’s not bringing as much value to them as you think.
Amen.
Henry Yates writes about the history of Bryan Adams’ hit “Summer of ’69” for Louder Sound:
Bryan Adams was nine years old in the summer of ’69. He didn’t join his first band (Shock) until ’76. Which doesn’t quite fit the song’s lyrical content, which appears to rue the break-up of a teenage band (‘Jimmy quit and Jody got married’) and the collapse of a love affair (‘I think about you, wonder what went wrong’).
In reality, Adams’s clean-living image has helped disguise one of the most blatant innuendos of modern rock: the ‘69’ in question doesn’t refer to the year 1969, but to the sexual position. Adams has announced as much from the stage, and even appears to sing ‘me and my baby in a 69’ during the song’s outro.
Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You” has once again topped the charts:
The recurrent tune surges four spots to the Hot 100 summit, tying the record for most weeks at the top alongside Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus. It also marks the seventh consecutive year that “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has hit No. 1. The song previously became Carey’s 19th No. 1 on the Hot 100, the most for any solo artist and only one behind the Beatles as the record-holder.
Ryan Holiday with some great advice on reading:
These 31 rules by no means make a complete list, but if you implement even a couple of them, I’m comfortable guaranteeing you’ll not only be a better reader for it, but a better person too.
–It is not enough that you read. You have to read well. You have to read the right books. You have to figure out how to process and retain and of course apply what you read. As Epictetus said, “I cannot call somebody ‘hard-working’ knowing only that they read.” He said he needed to know what and how they read. He needed to know that their “efforts aim at improving the mind.” Because then and only then would he call you “hard-working.” Then and only then would he give you the title “reader.”
I didn’t read as many books as I wanted to this year. Other priorities ended up taking up my time. I read more from my RSS feeds than I think ever before but I need to make sure I bring book reading back into my daily routine.
Stephen Egerton of the Descendents talked with the local Tulsa paper:
Somewhere in the mid-90s, All — which is the same band as the Descendents but with a different singer — were playing a little festival in Phoenix, as I recall, and these two young guys come running up to me and they’re just really hyper. They said, “Wow, you guys are our favorite band. We started a band just because of you guys.” I thought they were really funny guys. I watched their set, and they were very charismatic. So, I hit it off with Tom (DeLonge) and Mark (Hoppus) immediately.
Ashley King, writing for Digital Music News:
A shareholder class action lawsuit has been filed against StubHub following its post-IPO stock price plunge. The lawsuit alleges the company made materially false or misleading statements, failing to disclose “material adverse information” regarding its business and cash flow.
The complaint, filed in New York federal court on Monday, is one of at least three lawsuits stemming from StubHub’s lackluster quarterly earnings report. It was filed by investors who bought into StubHub’s $758 million initial public offering (IPO) in September. At least four other law firms have announced that they’ve opened their own investigations into StubHub’s numbers.
Slipknot has sold the majority stake in their music catalog:
Neither Slipknot nor HarbourView disclosed financial details of the agreement regarding how much HarbourView paid or what their specific stake in the catalog is, though the company confirmed the partnership includes both publishing and recorded royalties.
The deal had been rumored for months; Billboard reported on the deal in August, reporting at the time that the deal was worth approximately $120 million.
The study found that 73% of respondents supported disclosure when AI-generated tracks are recommended, 45% sought filtering options, and 40% said they would skip AI-generated songs entirely. Around 71% expressed surprise at their inability to distinguish between human-made and synthetic tracks. Deezer, which has 9.7 million subscribers, has seen daily AI music submissions rise to more than 50,000 — about a third of total uploads, up sharply from 18% in April.
This week, Breaking Rust landed the top spot on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart for the second week in a row with the song “Walk My Walk.” But Breaking Rust is not a real person or a real band. It’s an AI project credited to songwriter Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, but the mysterious “artist” has over 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Another AI-generated country singer, Cain Walker, also dominated the Country Digital Song Sales chart this week with tracks in the third, ninth, and eleventh spots. Billboard distinguishes both Walker and Breaking Rust’s music as “virtual acts,” which offers some degree of transparency that the artists and/or the art is AI generated.
We really don’t have to do this.
Marc Hogan, writing for the New York Times:
Setlist.fm can seem at once ubiquitous and inconspicuous. Few reports about its origins are readily available online. According to Live Nation Entertainment, Setlist.fm’s parent company, the site was founded in 2008 by Molindo, a media agency based in Austria that also developed Songtexte, a German-language site that compiles song lyrics. “They’re giant music fans and big data nerds,” said Joe Fleischer, the publisher of Setlist.fm and head of a Live Nation studio that produces marketing content for major brands.
Live Nation acquired Setlist.fm in 2010, although the entertainment giant did not announce the deal until two years later. Fleischer, a former music journalist, joined in 2011, when Live Nation bought BigChampagne, a music data company he helped found.
The entire point of the site, he said, is being useful: “That’s all it’s ever been, is about increasing utility, increasing our usefulness for fans.”
