Month: December 2023

Spotify is pulling support for two music festivals in protest against a controversial new tax directed at music-streaming platforms operating in France, and threatened more action will follow in the coming months. Antoine Monin, managing director for Spotify in the France and the Benelux regions, took to X this week to decry a new tax

We are fast approaching half a billion people listening to podcasts, and today one of the independent players hoping to cash in on that activity has announced some funding to grow. Podimo, the Copenhagen-based podcasting startup that’s built around a Netflix-style monthly subscription fee, has raised another €44 million ($48 million at today’s rates) in

Traditionally, being a hardcore movie fan means collecting physical memorabilia like autographed posters to show dedication. However, in recent years, a number of companies have started betting on digital collectibles to become the new symbol of a fan’s devotion. Really (formerly Moviebill) — an AR platform that provides digital collectible movie tickets and interactive experiences

Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered chatbot, can now compose songs thanks to an integration with GenAI music app Suno. Users can enter prompts into Copilot like “Create a pop song about adventures with your family” and have Suno, via a plug-in, bring their musical ideas to life. From a single sentence, Suno can generate complete songs

We last wrote about Breakr — a platform that connects record labels, artists and brands with social media influencers to run mass campaigns in a programmatic way — when it closed a $4.2 million round in 2021. In the past two years, Breakr has onboarded more than 30,000 influencers and managed more than $3.5 million in

A new class action lawsuit filed this week in the U.S. District Court in D.C. accuses Google and parent company Alphabet of anticompetitive behavior in violation of U.S. antitrust law, the Sherman Act, and others, on behalf of news publishers. The case, filed by Arkansas-based publisher Helena World Chronicle, argues that Google “siphons off” news

Since the company’s earliest days as an MIT spinoff, Boston Dynamics’ systems have always provided entertainment value. It’s something the Hyundai-owned firm has long embraced by releasing dozens of wildly viral videos over the decades. With a few exceptions, however, entertainment was more of side benefit than the ultimate goal. That, however, will be changing

Earlier this fall, Spotify was found to be developing a new feature that would allow its streaming app users to create playlists using AI technology and prompts. Now, that “AI playlists” feature has been spotted in the wild, as part of a test that to see how users will respond to AI-driven playlist creation. The

Google’s making the second generation of Imagen, its AI model that can create and edit images given a text prompt, more widely available — at least to Google Cloud customers using Vertex AI who’ve been approved for access. But the company isn’t disclosing which data it used to train the new model — nor introducing

After coming to Bard and the Pixel 8 Pro last week, Gemini, Google’s recently announced flagship GenAI model family, is launching for Google Cloud customers using Vertex AI. Gemini Pro, a lightweight version of a more capable Gemini model, Gemini Ultra, currently in private preview for a “select set” of customers, is now accessible in

Many, if not most, generative AI tech vendors argue that fair use entitles them to train AI models on copyrighted material scraped from the internet — even if they don’t get permission from the rightsholders. But some vendors, such as OpenAI, are hedging their bets — perhaps wary of the outcome of pending relevant lawsuits.

Xbox has brought is Cloud Gaming service to Meta Quest VR headset devices, as both companies said it would at the launch of the latest Quest 3 hardware earlier this year. The Xbox Cloud Gaming app has a beta label, and it’s limited to Quest 2, Quest 3 and Quest Pro headsets (sorry OG Quest

Independent music distribution service DistroKid launched its Android app today months after the company launched the iOS app. The Android app has similar capabilities to its iOS counterpart, which has been downloaded over half a million times. Artists can upload their tracks directly from their phones, get alerts for payments, look at analysis from services