Chase Bliss has made the unfortunate decision to discontinue the instrument because of production costs. But it has decided to open-source the entire project, including the hardware, and even released a new, simplified firmware as a jumping-off point for any would-be tinkerers. This also means you could build your own Chompi if you really wanted.
There are a lot of complaints about a Spotify outage on Downdetector, and when we checked ourselves, cached playlists seem to work just fine, but logging in fresh or trying to stream new music and playlists popped up error messages pointing us to try songs stored offline.
The @SpotifyCares support account has confirmed developers are looking into the problems, but there’s no word on when service might be fully restored.
[Downdetector]
Producer and sound designer Decap’s ‘Drums That Knock’ are all over some of the biggest hits of the last 10 years.
Ticket sales for the first shows at Apple’s new live music venue in London will open on Monday September 28th at 9AM GMT (4AM ET), but competition will be fierce — there’s only 600 seats to fight over. If you fancy your chances though, these are all the acts announced so far:
Elton John: September 28th
Baby Keem: October 2nd
Skye Newman: October 7th
Troye Sivan: October 13th
Arlo Parks: October 22nd
Burna Boy: October 29th
Chase & Status: November 26th
Charli XCX: December 3rd
Along with a bunch of AI news today, YouTube music exec Lyor Cohen announced a renewed agreement with concert promoter Goldenvoice to keep streaming both weekends of the Coachella music festival for the next four years.
This continues an arrangement that will hit 15 years next April, despite Bloomberg’s report of competing bids from the likes of Netflix and Amazon. It also says that in the future we’ll see more pre-event programming, as well as mini-documentaries and other videos about artists between sets.
A redesigned wordmark has appeared at the start of a new promotional video for Apple Music Hall, and at the top of the venue’s website. That said, the current version is still being used across the Apple Music website, and displayed inside the new show venue. so it’s unclear if Apple will be using the new logo anywhere else.
A new “Premium early access” feature for users in India forces users without a subscription to wait three extra days for access to new albums:
With UMG’s ‘Hear It First’, participating artists and their labels can collaborate with Spotify to choose to make select new releases available to Premium subscribers up to three days early. Every Spotify listener gets access after that - or free listeners can subscribe at any time to get early access.
Update: Added quote from Spotify support page.
The podcast is getting ‘back to basics’ with Punk 2.0
The chiptune rock band formed in 2004 on forums and remains very online to this day.
The band’s Amelia Meath says they’re back “to continue to employ everyone that we employ,” after what’s been an “incredibly hard” year off Spotify, but implored fans to listen on other platforms instead. Their new album Ow ∞ came out last week, when the pair spoke to The Verge for our weekend questionnaire.
Caldera Music brings your Plex music libraries and Winamp-style visuals to Apple TVs and Google TVs. Feingold is also building connected light fixtures and other weird and interesting hardware.
The stream, Lofi House, stars Lofi Teacher, a mustachioed dude. “Once the final bell rings and school is out, he switches gears to pursue his passion behind the decks,” the Lofi Girl X account says. Love the lore.
The stream is live now, it’s great.
Sheeran’s tour is on the verge of collapse after he booted Macklemore for saying “Free Palestine” on stage. Other openers, Finneas and Aaron Rowe, along with his backing band, dropped in solidarity. Now a planned contest to open at the Mexico City stop has been flooded with pro-Palestinian clips, memes, and fart videos.
Swifties with a Premium subscription can watch all 58 of Taylor’s videos in Spotify’s “Switch to video” mode, from her first-ever video for 2006’s “Tim McGraw” to “Opalite.”
The lawsuit claims DistroKid has created an “AI-slop pipeline” diverting listeners away from human artists. Universal Music Group, which is launching its own AI music platform, also alleges that DistroKid gives users the “false impression” that the music it distributes is “created and owned by real human artists,” not AI-generated music.
A new settings toggle rolling out starting today excludes kids and family music from your taste profile and recommendations. With it turned on, your kids can listen to their music on repeat without it taking over your Spotify Wrapped, Discover Weekly, and Daily Mix.
From April 2nd-4th, Oprah Winfrey’s AHA — an immersive experience that blends music, visual art, and storytelling — will be showing at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
The 1980 record from the San Francisco band is raw, infectious, and shockingly modern.
We finally got a real look at the viral Nopia in July after more than three years of development. Now the company is preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign on Tuesday, with super early-bird pricing starting at $650.
The band’s new, organic-sounding record Ow ∞ is out now
The long-running lyrical breakdown and live performance series will now be available to stream on Spotify as it continues to grow its video efforts. Verified first came to Spotify last year as part of a limited rollout, but now archival episodes are being added alongside new installments every week.
We already kinda knew that thanks to a hack of the company’s data in July. And Suno admitted to training its models on publicly available music. But this is the first time it has explicitly copped to ripping audio from YouTube, saying in a court filing:
Suno admits that audio data was obtained from YouTube for use as training data using YT-DLP.
[Music Business Worldwide]
Unsurprisingly, while there has been an incredible outpouring of support following Dolly’s passing, there have also been a lot of people trying to exploit it. Stella Parton has finally had enough of the “insensitivity from strangers,” which she said has “been challenging to absorb and or ignore.”
Every dollar you spend on the site today goes straight to the artist, as is tradition. I’ll be celebrating by picking up the new Chat Pile record, Who Loves the Sun, another blast of noise-soaked existential dread from the Oklahoma City quartet. Let me know what you’re snagging in the comments.
An ad for the AI music generator Suno showed Blige interacting with an AI song that seemed to use her own voice, while calling the output “dope.” The singer received backlash for the ad online, and now a Suno spokesperson tells Variety that the company canceled the campaign because it didn’t get proper approval:
We entered into a business deal with someone who presented themselves as Ms. Blige’s official representative. As soon as we learned this was not the case, and that Ms. Blige was uncomfortable, we terminated the advertising campaign.
He filed the suit alongside Guy Forsyth, Eduardo Calle, and Camper Van Beethoven’s David Lowery. Interestingly, rather than filing a straightforward copyright case, the plaintiffs claim Suno imitates their voices and styles without permission. After a long intro that involves the Borg for some reason, the complaint says:
The $749 FP-40 connects to the company’s Piano Sphere app for “personalized learning, feedback, and motivation.”
It’s basically mid-aughts Brooklyn in audio form.
I recently started running again. And, as I started building back to my first half marathon in almost a decade, I realized — my running playlist is hopelessly out of date. Nothing on there is newer than 2018, so tell me what keeps you motivated to power through the pain.
