Music

The rapper admitted to using AI on his ’80s-tinged $TARFACE project and received a rare zero. Jet was the last to receive the dishonor in 2006 for Shine On. Pitchfork pulls no punches, saying:

“Together, the companies will develop entirely new music experiences that reimagine how artists and fans can connect,” according to a press release. “The agreement ensures that BMG artists and songwriters who choose to participate have their rights protected and are compensated for their music, while also settling prior use of BMG recordings and publishing works.”

Arturia’s Pigments is my go-to synth plugin. It’s powerful, versatile, and shockingly easy to build complex patches in. It’s currently marked down to $129 from its usual price of $199. But if you’re hesitant to commit even that much, the company just launched Pigments Play, a free stripped-down version.

It will be going away in 24 hours, but to celebrate 8/08 Bjooks, the company behind Beat Gems and Pedal Crush, is making Inspire the Music — 50 Years of Roland History free to read. The company is also offering 15 percent off the hardcover version for the day.

I’m eyeing Boatshoes, the new album from Baltimore’s Brian Ennals (who collaborated with Infinity Knives on last year’s incredible A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears) and frequent Aesop Rock producer Blockhead. Don’t forget, Bandcamp skips its cut and every penny goes directly to the artist today.

It’s the first platform to adopt Musixmatch’s new Sentinel detection service designed explicitly for generative AI. Its sizable database pulls from over 200,000 publishers, including the big three, to identify copyrighted lyrics and compositions. And importantly, it doesn’t just scan prompts and inputs, but also the resulting outputs.

He’s continuing his post-helmet media whirlwind and stopped by the Chanel Connects podcast, where the topic briefly turned toward AI. “I’m not really interested in the creative usage of artificial intelligence,” he says, noting that part of the creative process is experimentation and discovery, “The number one goal of this process is surprise.”

A new partnership with licensing house Merlin has given artists on labels like Sub Pop, Warp, Epitaph, Domino, Stones Throw, Ninja Tune, Mad Decent, Polyvinyl Records and more the “option to participate” in Spotify’s “superfan” remix tool, which launched in May with UMG as the first participant.

Bud Cole has been catching some flak over comments he made to T3 about AI’s role in music. Now he’s attempting to clarify what he meant. You can read his full statement provided to The Verge at the bottom of our post from this weekend, but here’s the gist:

Design firm Pen & Pixel was behind more than 20,000 album covers between the early ‘90s and 2000s. They were the go-to for Cash Money and No Limit, creating the gaudy diamond-encrusted covers for Master P’s “MP da Last Don” and Juvenile’s “400 Degreez.”

Music-playing robots are nothing new. It’s been 13 years since Compressorhead went viral, after all. But this DIY project from Reddit user MegCell is still pretty impressive. The melody isn’t hard-coded, either. Instead, the robot can read MusicXML files, meaning, theoretically, it can play almost any song you want.

The German licensing organization GEMA filed suit in January of 2025. The court found that Suno didn’t have the rights to train its models on artists represented by GEMA, and now it has to disclose any “illicit revenue” and pay unspecified damages. The company can still appeal the ruling.

The iconic media player of the Napster generation has partnered with Deezer to power Winamp’s own “premium music subscription service,” which is set to launch in the first half of 2027. The new Winamp Player will combine Deezer’s music catalogue with users’ local music libraries, internet radio stations, podcasts, and more. And yes — the interface will be “highly customizable.”

Kavinsky, aka Vincent Belorgey, was found in his home in Paris on Tuesday, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office. He was most well known for the song Nightcall, which was produced with Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, and featured in the movie Drive as well as the Grand Theft Auto V soundtrack.

There are very few unexplored frontiers for the iconic first-person shooter. Microsoft Word, an Ikea smart lightbulb, even tractors are fair game. But this is the first time I’ve seen Doom running on a modular synthesizer. Don’t be fooled by the laptop, it’s just streaming video from the synth.

After joining Fred Again for an absolutely incredible DJ set at USB002 earlier this year, Bangalter is making another helmet-free appearance this year, sitting down with Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange) for an interview on the A24 podcast. The two talk about the art of scoring movies, the challenge of making synths sound soulful, and more.

The comedian and artist behind “Planet of the Bass” and my personal favorite, “Selekta,” has an absolutely incredible sendup parodying Paul Simon’s Graceland jaunt to Africa. Gordon is popularly compared these days to Weird Al but his ability to embed authentically in genre is even more sophisticated. He’s a shapeshifter who does real homework on his parodies. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Happy new latter-career Strokes album release, my fellow olds. But the Avalanches dropping a rad, new song with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O? That’s the purest I-DJed-At-My-College-Radio-Station-In-2006 energy that we’ve got.

The music streaming platform receives almost 90,000 AI-generated tracks each day, a jump from the 75,000 it last reported in April. Using its AI music detection tool, Deezer now says it will take down AI tracks “used to generate fraudulent streams,” in addition to those that haven’t been streamed in six months or more.