Music

In January 2024, the label announced a major cost-cutting initiative that is expected to run through 2027. As another round of layoffs is expected, several executives are leaving, including Tunji Balogun, Chairman and CEO of Def Jam Recordings; Nicole Wyskoarko and Sam Riback of Interscope Geffen A&M; Ben Mortimer, President of Polydor Label Group; Rebecca Allen, Chief Artist and Strategy Officer at Universal Music Group UK; and Mark Crossingham, Managing Director of UMG Ireland.

The new on/off toggle, arriving by the end of the year, lets you exclude “AI-generated tracks, albums, and the related artists” from search results. Deezer also launched an AI music detection tool earlier this year, after a surge in AI song uploads on its platform.

Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire announced the decision to honor the French-Tunisian music producer on Friday. In a post on Instagram, he said, “By naming a square in Paris after him, we pay tribute to a truly great artist. But we also affirm that rap, electronic music, and popular culture are integral to our shared heritage.”

The band’s latest album, Marrow Deep, is getting a limited-edition vinyl pressing that has actual ground-up mastodon teeth in it. The band was given a bag of the fossils 20 years ago. They weren’t display quality, so they decided to do something special with them. Only 170 are available, and they’re being sold via raffle.

If you’re tired of the Spotify desktop app gobbling up a big chunk of your computer’s RAM, Spotifast for Linux, macOS, and Windows takes a leaner approach and typically needs just 100 to 250MB. A Spotify Premium account is required to actually stream music instead of just browsing, and if you need another reason to switch, Spotifast includes a Mini Player that supports Winamp 2 skins.

A few Reddit users have reported seeing a new look that features cleaner text, streamlined controls, and, most importantly, full-width artwork on albums and playlists. It’s a huge improvement over the cramped, boxed-in look of the current app. Hopefully it’ll be rolling out to more users soon.

Michael Smith, who pleaded guilty earlier this year, was also ordered to pay over $8 million. According to the DOJ, that’s the amount he earned in royalties from using bots to stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs from 2017 to 2024.

It took only about a week for someone to take the source code from the adorable but discontinued sampler and turn it into a free virtual instrument called NIBBI. You can download it and play it as a standalone app, open it in your DAW, or just tinker with it in your browser.

The feature is rolling out to Spotify Premium subscribers, presenting you with questions about music trivia, album cover art, and audio track previews. You can find a music quiz by scrolling down on the “Now Playing” view of a participating artist’s song.

According to the Financial Times, that’s nearly double the 135,000 takedown requests Sony Music had previously sent for AI tracks imitating its artists, like Harry Styles, Adele, and Britney Spears. Over the past year, Sony has also filed lawsuits against AI music platforms like Suno and Udio over copyright infringement.

Are you streaming only? Have you dug out your old iPod? Have a massive vinyl collection? I want to know which music formats you listen to most and why. I’ve been buying more on Bandcamp, ripped all my CDs, and started carrying around an iPod again. But I haven’t been able to ditch streaming completely.

Ok, let’s be honest, it’s not much of a competition. The AI songs suck, and it’s pretty easy to tell which is human and which is AI when compared side by side. But the diary-style detailing of the songwriting process for both illustrates just how low-effort AI music is.

You know the deal: every dollar you spend today goes straight to the artist. I’ve got a handful of albums I’ve been eyeing for a while but haven’t picked up yet, like Sophie Birch’s latest. But my priority today is the new Gilla Band record, Pugnello, which absolutely rips.

The budget-friendly Volt Gen 2 and Volt Max lineups still feature a built-in emulation of UA’s classic 1176 compressor. But add an emulation of the LA-2A compressor as well as three different preamp modes for Warmth (tube), Focus (solid-state), and Shine (British Class-A) that let you do a lot of tone shaping before you even hit your DAW.

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.

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:

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.

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: