As of Jan. 1, 2026, Ek will “transition” to the role of executive chairman of Spotify, the company said Tuesday. At that time, Gustav Söderström, currently co-president and chief product and technology officer, and Alex Norström, co-president and chief business officer, will become Spotify’s co-CEO. Söderström and Norström will report to Ek and both will also serve on the company’s board of directors (subject to shareholder approval).
Kenny from The Starting Line talked with The Aquarian about their new album:
Those three records were made in a five- or six-year time span. It’s really messed up to think about. Then it took us 18 years to record another one! Time seems to be a weird accordion. In that very short amount of time a lot happened in my life. Then in the next 18 years it got spaced out in terms of events. Making Say It Like You Mean It memories are attributed to being in a professional studio and working with a professional producer for the first time. Also, I was working with one of my idols [Mark Trombino] who had made so many of my favorite records up to that point. It was hard not to be intimidated by it.
A lot of that process I was going with the flow. It even frustrated Trombino a little bit. I remember there were times he would say, “How does this sound?” I would say, “Sounds really great!” Then he would say “What do you think of this?” And I’d say “That sounds so good!” [laughs] “Okay just get the fuck out of here and I’ll actually do work” because I was no help at all. I guess I have to start having opinions about these things.
It was just big wide eyes taking it all in! I wanted to sound like Blink 182 and Jimmy Eat World! This would be cool if we could have a record that sounded as good as Clarity. I remember I was listening to very little pop-punk by the time we got to making Based On A True Story. I was trying to fit more of that style into the songwriting and moving away from general punk aesthetic. It was closer to our philosophy now. This is who we are and this is what feels good on the stage. Let’s try and concentrate on that good stuff.
Over 400 artists have signed on to the “No Music for Genocide” project:
No Music For Genocide is a cultural boycott of Israel. Over 400 initial artists and labels have geo-blocked and removed their music from that territory in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza; ethnic cleansing of the Occupied West Bank; apartheid within Israel / ’48; political repression of Pro-Palestine efforts wherever we live; and the music industry’s own ties to weapons and crimes against humanity.
Twenty One Pilots have filed a lawsuit against Temu:
As evidence, the complaint includes dozens of pages of photos comparing official merch to the alleged counterfeit products sold on Temu. One example features an official $35 Twenty One Pilots t-shirt alongside a strikingly similar replica sold on Temu for $7.54.
Spotify’s new messaging feature—which is actually the newest iteration of a social messaging feature the streaming giant killed off in 2017 due to low engagement—wants to give users more control. It features encryption “in transit and at rest,” an option to reject message requests from others, and the option to opt out completely. But anything short of opting out of the feature will inadvertently introduce a doxxing risk by linking you to people with whom you’ve shared music in the past.
Andy Baio has the best break down of the Will Smith AI(?)-crowd controversy I’ve seen:
This minute-long clip of a Will Smith concert is blowing up online for all the wrong reasons, with people accusing him of using AI to generate fake crowds filled with fake fans carrying fake signs. The story’s blown up a bit, with coverage in Rolling Stone, NME, The Independent, and Consequence of Sound.
[…]
But here’s where things get complicated.
The crowds are real. Every person you see in the video above started out as real footage of real fans, pulled from video of multiple Will Smith concerts during his recent European tour.
Ashley Carman, writing for Bloomberg:
In 2020, Spotify made waves in the music industry with the announcement of a tool that would alter how people hear music on its platform: Discovery Mode, which allows labels and artists to accept a 30% reduction in royalties in exchange for an algorithmic boost. These promoted songs can show up in certain playlists , including Spotify Radio, autoplay and particular personalized selections. […]
The Discovery Mode tool has become a critical part of many marketing strategies, particularly around an album release or to promote a catalog. Almost everyone I spoke with emphasized that the tool alone won’t create new fans or offer long-lasting impact. It requires a more holistic strategy, meaning people might hear a song on Spotify because of Discovery Mode, but, at the same time, also encounter a billboard with the artist in question or hear the song in a TV show or on TikTok. Shortly thereafter, the artist might go on tour. This means artist teams try to be selective about what they include, though people I spoke with noted that both Spotify and distributors encouraged them to opt every song into it.
404 Media (paywalled) is reporting on how Spotify is allowing AI-Generated songs on various dead artists’ pages:
According to his official Spotify page, Blaze Foley, a country music singer-songwriter who was murdered in 1989, released a new song called “Together” last week. The song, which features a male country singer, piano, and an electric guitar, vaguely sounds like a new, slow country song. The Spotify page for the song also features an image of an AI-generated image of a man who looks nothing like Foley singing into a microphone.
Craig McDonald, the owner of Lost Art Records, the label that distributes all of Foley’s music and manages his Spotify page, told me that any Foley fan would instantly realize “Together” is not one of his songs.
Consequence has more:
Update: In a statement a spokesperson for Spotify said, “The content in question violates Spotify’s deceptive content policies, which prohibit impersonation intended to mislead, such as replicating another creator’s name, image, or description, or posing as a person, brand, or organization in a deceptive manner. This is not allowed. We take action against licensors and distributors who fail to police for this kind of fraud and those who commit repeated or egregious violations can and have been permanently removed from Spotify.”
After 129 shows, the Springsteen and E Street Band 2023-25 Tour grossed $729.7 million and sold 4.9 million tickets, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. Any way you slice the data, it’s the biggest of his career.
Scrubs is officially returning.
A long-discussed revival of the 2000s comedy series has landed a series order from ABC, where it’s been in development since December 2024 — though series creator Bill Lawrence and members of the cast have talked about reuniting for years before that. Donald Faison and Sarah Chalke, who starred in the original version of the show, have signed on to join series lead Zach Braff in the revival. All three will also be executive producers on the show, which is set to premiere in the 2025-26 season.
“That’s why we’re calling on the UK government to protect copyright and introduce new transparency obligations for AI companies so that music rights can be licensed and enforced, as well as calling for the clear labelling of content solely generated by AI,” Jones indicated.
The latter adverb raises interesting questions about what an across-the-board labeling system would look like in practice. For obvious reasons, if they do incorporate AI, established artists probably won’t want their music labeled as such – hence the “solely” clarifier.
This seems like a no-brainer to me.
The billionaire, who primarily lives in Stockholm, just led a €600 million investment in Helsing, a 4-year-old, Munich-based defense tech company that is now valued at €12 billion, as first reported by the Financial Times and confirmed separately by TechCrunch. The deal makes it one of Europe’s most valuable privately held companies; it also highlights Europe’s scramble to build its own military muscle as the world grows messier and the U.S. turns inward. […] But what started as an AI software company has grown much more ambitious. Helsing is now building its own strike drones and aircraft and said it’s working on a fleet of unmanned mini submarines in order to improve naval surveillance.
Stereogum with a nice write-up on (the still criminally underrated) mewithoutYou:
I am writing this on the 10th anniversary of their sixth album, Pale Horses, because I believe that this band, and this album in particular, is still perplexingly overlooked and under-discussed. Part of the reason for this is that it’s hard to explain the band’s appeal. They’re hard to contextualize. Most people just don’t know what their deal is. mewithoutYou appears only sporadically in this fine publication, despite a 20+ year career opening for bands like Cursive and the Dismemberment Plan. One of their songs is namechecked in a 2014 list of 30 songs from the golden era of emo, and there’s a few honorable mentions of their new music in the postscripts of articles about other Songs/Albums of the Week. The only real dedicated coverage came in 2022 in write-ups of the band’s farewell tour.
The blogosphere has a particularly important role to play, because now more than ever, it’s where the ideas come from. Blog posts have launched movements, coined terms, raised millions, and influenced government policy, often without explicitly trying to do any of those things, and often written under goofy pseudonyms. Whatever the next vibe shift is, it’s gonna start right here.
The villains, scammers, and trolls have no compunctions about participating—to them, the internet is just another sandcastle to kick over, another crowded square where they can run a con. But well-meaning folks often hang back, abandoning the discourse to the people most interested in poisoning it. They do this, I think, for three bad reasons.
One: lots of people look at all the blogs out there and go, “Surely, there’s no room for lil ol’ me!” But there is. Blogging isn’t like riding an elevator, where each additional person makes the experience worse. It’s like a block party, where each additional person makes the experience better. As more people join, more sub-parties form—now there are enough vegan dads who want to grill mushrooms together, now there’s sufficient foot traffic to sustain a ring toss and dunk tank, now the menacing grad student next door finally has someone to talk to about Heidegger. The bigger the scene, the more numerous the niches.
The cult of goal-setting thrives in this illusion. It converts uncertainty into an illusion of progress. It demands specificity in exchange for comfort. And it replaces self-trust with the performance of future-planning. That makes it wildly appealing to organizations, executives, and knowledge workers who want to feel like they’re doing something without doing anything unpredictable. But the more interesting question is: who is not setting goals? And why?
It turns out that many of the people doing genuinely innovative work avoid explicit goals entirely. They work within constraints instead.
Loved this.
