ICQ to Shutdown

Michael Kan, writing for PCMag:

On Friday, the ICQ website posted a simple message: “ICQ will stop working from June 26.” It now recommends users migrate to the messaging platforms from VK, the Russian social media company that acquired ICQ from AOL in 2010, but under a different corporate name. 

It’s an unceremonious end for a software program that helped kick off instant messaging on PCs in the 1990s. ICQ, which stands for “I Seek You,” was originally developed at an Israeli company called Mirabilis before AOL bought it in 1998 for $407 million.

ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger. Those were the days.

Spotify to Discontinue Car Thing

The Verge:

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.

QuickTune for MacOS

Apps

Mario Guzman has released a new Apple Music app that mimics the nostalgia feel of old Apple operating systems:

Control Apple Music with this simplified controller that has the look and feel of QuickTime 7 and Mac OS X “Tiger”.

Behind the Collapse of Vice

Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at The Verge:

Sometimes certain lines of business weren’t told about the revenue goals they were expected to fulfill. Meanwhile, the company’s actual accounting and expense controls were messy. For instance, Vice’s digital division had expenses from NetJets — a private jet service — on its profit and loss statement, two sources told me. (A third confirmed the NetJets account existed without saying which balance sheet it was on. Two sources took credit for eventually canceling the NetJets account. “Since at least 2021, Vice has not had a NetJets account,” according to Vice spokesperson Samira Sorzano.) One executive source alleged that the digital division was funding a production executive’s $350,000 salary — an executive who the source claims did virtually nothing. Another exec heard, to their shock, that someone had reportedly spent $24,000 on a one-way ticket from New York to London.

Pitchfork Lived and Died by the Internet

Pitchfork

Nick Heer:

If your music listening experience is mostly driven by playlists and suggestions, you might be less interested in reviewers and critics. That is not a denigration of how anyone listens to music, mind you — I am not a prescriptivist about this kind of stuff. You should experience art in the way you choose.

But streaming music is ultimately just a catalogue into which anyone can dive. It reduces the bar to entry and, on the other side of the same coin, reduces the cost of exiting. If you do not like an album, there is not a $20 sunk cost compelling you to keep going. But you also do not need to spend $20 to experiment with something you are unsure if you will like.

Spotify Experimenting With Online Video Courses

Jon Porter, writing for The Verge:

Spotify’s UK users are getting access to a fourth category of content to sit alongside its existing library of songs, podcasts and audiobooks: online courses. The company is today launching a new experiment that’ll see video-based lessons from BBC Maestro, Skillshare, Thinkific, and PlayVirtuoso made available via Spotify’s apps on mobile and desktop. The experiment is running in just the UK, and there are currently no guarantees that it’ll get a wider more permanent launch.

The Delivery Rider Who Took on His Faceless Boss

Financial Times:

UberCheats was an algorithm-auditing tool. Samii, who was working as a cycle courier for Uber in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the time, had lost trust in the automated system that essentially functioned as his boss. He had become convinced the Uber Eats app was consistently making errors and underpaying him. After weeks of trying and failing to get a human being at Uber to explain, he felt he had no choice but to take matters into his own hands.

Spotify Adding Music Videos

Spotify is rolling out music videos as a new beta feature for some artists.

The beta version of music videos on Spotify begins rolling out today with a limited catalog of music videos, including hits from global artists like Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat, and Ice Spice, or local favorites like Aluna and Asake.

Universal Music Still Not Available on TikTok

Technology

Reece Rogers, writing for Wired:

Over a month after the first songs vanished, it remains unclear when Universal and TikTok might reach new deals. “I think one of the risks for the music industry in general is if it turns out that the users on TikTok simply adapt,” says Cirisano, “and start using more unlicensed music. Start using more independent music. Start making more videos without music.” It’s quite frustrating for users to wake up one day and discover that videos with millions of views are now muted, and they might rethink their approach to making content.

Flop Rock: Inside the Underground Floppy Disk Music Scene

The Verge

The Verge:

Nobuko believes the proliferation of floppy music in Western cultures is linked to strong punk movements with a DIY aesthetic. “Also, the lobit scene seems to be bigger in countries that had bad internet connections, so they would already use lobit encoding to upload or download things online,” he explains. In a similar vein, Hilkmann believes that floppy recordings are an explicitly anti-capitalist niche that exists outside the usual means of publishing music today on Spotify and other streaming services. “A medium, artistically, is only interesting as long as it’s available,” he says. “Now that floppy disks are becoming more and more difficult to get, they’ve become more and more a collector’s item almost, while a few years ago, it was more like almost a trashy medium that you could quickly get your hands on and do fun things with.”

Adobe Reveals a GenAI Tool for Music

Technology

TechCrunch:

Today at the Hot Pod Summit in Brooklyn, Adobe unveiled Project Music GenAI Control, a platform that can generate audio from text descriptions (e.g. “happy dance,” “sad jazz”) or a reference melody and let users customize the results within the same workflow.

Using Project Music GenAI Control, users can adjust things like tempo, intensity, repeating patterns and structure. Or they can take a track and extend it to an arbitrary length, remixing music or creating an endless loop.

A video example.

Vice.com Shutting Down

The Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal:

Vice Media said it would stop publishing content on its flagship website and plans to cut hundreds of jobs, following a failed effort by owner Fortress Investment Group to sell the embattled digital publisher and its brands.

The moves were laid out in an internal memo from Chief Executive Bruce Dixon, a copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“It is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously,” Dixon told employees in the memo. He said the company could partner with established media companies to distribute its content. “As part of this shift, we will no longer publish content on vice.com.”

Amazon Prime Video Will Start Showing Ads on January 29th

amazon

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:

Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th. “This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,” the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to “limited advertisements.”

Big loser energy.

Bluesky Posts Now Open to Public

Technology

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

Bluesky remains an invite-only decentralized Twitter alternative, but now, you don’t need to have an account and log in to be able to see posts on the platform, according to a blog post from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. Now, anyone can easily see posts from both the web and from the Bluesky app — like this one.

If you want to prevent people who aren’t logged in from seeing your posts, you can “discourage” that by clicking a toggle in settings. But Bluesky notes that “other apps may not honor this request” and that the toggle doesn’t make your account private.

I have an account on Bluesky, but I haven’t found myself using it much. In fact, as Twitter/X have gone up in dumpster-fire flames of Oppenheimer proportions, the more I’ve started to think about if I even want or need this kind of service in my life. There’s a real lack of joy, and besides the Absurdist Twitter thread, I am finding less an less value in any of them. I’ve been spending more time curating my RSS feeds and have replaced the Mastodon/X/Threads space on my home screen with my RSS reader. Kicking social media off the first screen of my phone, so far, has felt like a net positive.