Spin did a profile on Blink-182’s “All the Small Things” as it turns 25:
Blink didn’t jump at the idea. “I remember Mark saying, ‘I don’t think this is funny,’” recalls Siega. “And when I told Tom, ‘You’re gonna run down the beach with a dog chasing you’ [parodying Britney Spears’ “Sometimes” video], he went, ‘I don’t get it.’ The biggest challenge was getting them to understand what they were making fun of. They were hesitant. We had to really rehearse those dance sequences.”
Ed Newton-Rex, writing for Music Business Worldwide:
First up, it’s worth saying that I don’t think DSPs should ban all AI music. There are clearly good use-cases for AI in music creation; if training data is licensed, these use-cases are worth supporting, at least in my book. (I do think a music streaming service will emerge that does explicitly reject all AI music, as Cara has done in the image space. And it will probably do well. But there are good reasons for most DSPs not to take such a blanket approach.)
As table stakes, DSPs should follow the example of other media platforms – Instagramand TikTok, for example – and label content that is generated by AI.
That way, music fans can at least choose what they listen to, and, therefore, what they support. Require uploaders to label AI music they upload, and introduce a post-upload moderation process for tracks that slip through the cracks. This is perfectly feasible. You hope that most uploaders will be honest – in general, people tend to prefer to be – and, for those who aren’t, there are a number of third-party systems that can detect AI music with a high degree of accuracy.
The attorney general for Washington, D.C., sued StubHub on Wednesday, accusing the ticket resale platform of advertising deceptively low prices and then ramping up prices with extra fees.
The practice known as “drip pricing” violates consumer protection laws in the nation’s capital, Attorney General Brian Schwalb said.
“StubHub intentionally hides the true price to boost profits at its customers’ expense,” he said in a statement.
The company said it is disappointed to be targeted, maintaining its practices are consistent with the law and competing companies as well as broader industry norms. “We strongly support federal and state solutions that enhance existing laws to empower consumers, such as requiring all-in pricing uniformly across platforms,” the company said in a statement.
The organizer of Malaysia’s Good Vibes Festival has filed a lawsuit against the 1975 and all its members individually following frontman Matty Healy’s protest against the country’s anti-LGBTQ laws during the event last July. The festival is seeking £1.9 million ($2.4 million) after the band’s antics resulted in the festival being shut down.
In court documents filed by festival organizers Future Sound Asia in the U.K. High Court, they claim that the 1975 and their management team were aware of the numerous prohibitions the band had to abide by in order to perform.
Imogen Heap (Frou Frou, “Let Go”): “Let Go” was originally written for a film called Phone Booth. It had a much bigger energy, much bigger drums, very intense. I always loved the song, but it didn’t get into the movie. Then one night in our studio in West London, I brought out my cello. We stripped away all the intensity, and we were just left with the strings and the voice and that amazing bass line. We loved it so much, but through that whole Frou Frou album [Details], nobody really got to know about it until after Garden State.
Braff: There was a Radiohead song at the end, [“Sulk”]. Of course it would have been a huge Hail Mary try, but as I recall, what happened was we found a song that just works better. We didn’t need to make the insane ask of Radiohead.
Abby Jones, writing at Stereogum:
Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group have filed a joint lawsuit against Verizon, alleging the internet service provider of facilitating “massive copyright infringement committed by tens of thousands of its subscribers.”
The suit, filed in filed in Manhattan July 12, claims that Verizon has failed to protect copyrighted material by knowingly providing high-speed internet to a large community of online pirates.
YouTube is in talks with record labels to license their songs for artificial intelligence tools that clone popular artists’ music, hoping to win over a sceptical industry with upfront payments. The Google-owned video site needs labels’ content to legally train AI song generators, as it prepares to launch new tools this year, according to three people familiar with the matter. The company has recently offered lump sums of cash to the major labels — Sony, Warner and Universal — to try to convince more artists to allow their music to be used in training AI software, according to several people briefed on the talks.
Comedy Central’s website has also been scrubbed from the internet:
For years, the Comedy Central website was home to a large amount of content, including clips from every episode of The Daily Show since 1999, the full run of The Colbert Report, and many more shows. Now, the site simply redirects to Paramount+, with a message explaining that “while episodes of most Comedy Central series are no longer available on this website,” fans can still watch the channel through their TV providers or find “many seasons of Comedy Central shows” on Paramount+.
Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:
As highlighted by repair technician and consumer privacy advocate Louis Rossmann, Sonos has made a significant change to its privacy policy, at least in the United States, with the removal of one key line. The updated policy no longer contains a sentence that previously said, “Sonos does not and will not sell personal information about our customers.” That pledge is still present in other countries, but it’s nowhere to be found in the updated US policy, which went into effect earlier this month.
It has not been a good few months for Sonos.
Spotify Technology SA will introduce a new, higher-priced premium plan for its most ardent users later this year, according to a person familiar with the plan. Users will be charged at least $5 more per month for access to better audio and new tools for creating playlists and managing their song libraries, said the person.
The Spotify Premium Individual plan is increasing by $1, from $10.99 to $11.99 per month, according to the company’s updated price listings. The Premium Family plan, which provides access for up to six members a household, is going up by $3, from $16.99 to $19.99 per month.
Andrew Van Dam, writing for The Washington Post:
So, we looked at the data another way, measuring the gap between each person’s birth year and their ideal decade. The consistency of the resulting pattern delighted us: It shows that Americans feel nostalgia not for a specific era, but for a specific age.
The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.
Spotify’s brief attempt at being a hardware company wasn’t all that successful: the company stopped producing its Car Thing dashboard accessory less than a year after it went on sale to the public. And now, two years later, the device is about to be rendered completely inoperable. Customers who bought the Car Thing are receiving emails warning that it will stop working altogether as of December 9th.
Unfortunately for those owners, Spotify isn’t offering any kind of subscription credit or automatic refund for the device — nor is the company open-sourcing it. Rather, it’s just canning the project and telling people to (responsibly) dispose of Car Thing.
Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It’s strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we’re unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we’re old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences.
The pervasive nature of music paralysis across generations suggests that the phenomenon’s roots go beyond technology, likely stemming from developmental factors. So what changes as we age, and when does open-eardness decline?
Survey research from European streaming service Deezer indicates that music discovery peaks at 24, with survey respondents reporting increased variety in their music rotation during this time. However, after this age, our ability to keep up with music trends typically declines, with respondents reporting significantly lower levels of discovery in their early thirties. Ultimately, the Deezer study pinpoints 31 as the age when musical tastes start to stagnate.
Kristin Robinson, writing at Billboard:
When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
To determine how great this loss in royalty value would be for the music business, Billboard calculated that songwriters and publishers will earn an estimated $150 million less in U.S. mechanical royalties from premium, duo and family plans for the first 12 months that this is in effect, compared to what they would have earned if these three subscriptions were never bundled