Music | The Verge

25 years later, is it time for a new iPod?

2026-04-23T09:09:02-04:00

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the original iPod. With its monochrome display, mechanical scroll wheel, and 5 GB hard drive, Apple's pioneering music player now looks like the relic of a bygone era.

And yet, in a surprising twist, there's growing interest in a redo.

After being essentially flat for five years, Google searches for "MP3 Player" tripled since last fall. A Reddit group for fans of digital audio players is now attracting 90,000 visitors per week on average …

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Deezer says AI song uploads have nearly overtaken human music

2026-04-20T13:56:26-04:00

Deezer says it receives nearly 75,000 AI-generated song submissions to its music streaming platform each day, accounting for about 44 percent of all daily uploads, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Despite the increase in "fraudulent" uploads, Deezer says the consumption of AI songs makes up around 1 to 3 percent of total streams, as the platform continues to remove AI-generated music from its recommendation algorithm.

Deezer positions the tool as setting an "industry standard," adding that the platform is currently the "only" music streaming service tagging AI-generated tracks. The service also demonetizes AI-generated songs and has stopp …

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Teenage Engineering might be getting into instrument amps next

2026-04-17T06:01:48-04:00

An unannounced Teenage Engineering device, the KO-Amp 35, can be found over at the FCC in a new filing. The label clearly marks it as a member of the midrange EP family instruments, which currently includes the KO-II and its spinoffs, the Riddim and the Medieval. The name suggests that TE could be getting into the budget guitar and instrument amp space, but the filing reveals very little.

All we know is that it has a built-in rechargeable battery and Bluetooth, but little else. There is also a "model difference statement," which suggests the KO-Amp will come in multiple colors. The angle and distance of the images in the filing make it diff …

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Spotify just won $322 million from music pirates it can’t find

2026-04-16T07:45:19-04:00

Spotify and the three major labels have won a $322 million default judgement against Anna's Archive, the open-source library and pirate activist group that planned to publicly release millions of music files scraped from Spotify's platform.

The judgment comes after the unknown operator of Anna's Archive failed to respond to a lawsuit filed by Spotify, Universal Music Group (UMG), Warner Music Group (WMG) and Sony Music, which was made publicly available in January. The lawsuit was launched in response to Anna's Archive announcing in December that it had ripped 86 million songs from Spotify and intended to create a "preservation archive" fo …

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Justin Bieber’s YouTube Coachella set had nothing to do with who owns his music

2026-04-19T12:25:43-04:00

This past Saturday at the Coachella music festival, Justin Bieber played the first of two headlining sets in a deal reportedly worth $10 million. It was his most significant solo performance in years. But Bieber spent some of his time on stage the way many of us do on Saturday nights: on YouTube. For some of the set, Bieber played parts of his older songs right off YouTube from a Mac laptop. Behind him, on the stage's screen, you could see YouTube's website as he searched for songs in real time and then put the videos on full-screen while he sang along on stage.

"I'm sorry to cut it, but these are little snippets. I just want to see how fa …

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AI influencers are ‘everywhere’ at Coachella

2026-04-19T12:26:00-04:00

Coachella kicked off on Friday, and as usual, it's the place to be for online influencers looking to show off their memorable experiences at the festival. A quick scroll through my social media feeds has already shown me many uncannily attractive figures in glitzy outfits, posing for perfectly staged photographs with celebrities.

Only some of these content creators aren't really there. They don't even exist at all outside of our screens. They're generated using AI tools.

Faking Coachella attendance is nothing new - even real influencers have been doing so in recent years - but generative AI has now progressed to the point where it's become …

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Room for the Moon is thrillingly weird experimental pop

2026-04-13T05:55:13-04:00

I mean, I guess it kinda looks like the moon? | Image: Kate NV / RVNG Intl.

For obvious reasons, I've had Moon on the mind all week. So I was trying to figure out what I should recommend this week that would thematically fit. Brian Eno's Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks is incredible, and if you haven't listened to it, go do that now. But it also seemed a bit on the nose. Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool also came to mind. But it also felt a bit obvious. Then I remembered Kate NV's Room for the Moon, a record I had on repeat in 2020.

Russian artist Kate Shilonosova chases ideas across 11 tracks inspired by Russian and Japanese pop from the '70s and '80s, as well as children's movies. This obviously leads Room for …

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Spotify now lets you turn off all its videos

2026-04-09T06:33:09-04:00

The new controls apply to both individual and family accounts. | Image: Spotify

Spotify is adding new toggles to stop any and all video from playing inside the app, for both music and podcasts. The controls are rolling out worldwide, work across all platforms and devices, and can be used by managers of Family Plans to limit video content for every member on the subscription.

The new controls haven't arrived on my UK account or devices yet, but will appear under the "Content and display" settings on a phone, or the "Display" section on desktop. The existing toggle to disable Canvas clips - the short, looping, autoplay videos that Spotify added to the app in 2019 - is joined by a new toggle that disables access to music …

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Suno and major music labels reportedly clash over AI music sharing

2026-04-07T12:23:43-04:00

The AI-powered musicmaker Suno is struggling to reach licensing deals with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. That's according to a report from the Financial Times, which says both sides can't agree on whether users should be able to share the AI-generated songs they create.

"Universal wants AI-generated tracks to stay inside apps such as Suno and not spread freely across the internet. Suno, however, wants users to be able to share and distribute those songs more widely," the Financial Times reports. Suno, which lets users create AI-generated music with a text prompt, became the subject of a massive copyright lawsuit from U …

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Los Thuthanaka’s Wak’a is a mellower follow-up to last year’s surprise Pitchfork favorite

2026-04-05T14:26:06-04:00

Los Thuthanaka basically came out of nowhere last year to capture Pitchfork's album of the year with their self-titled debut. Because it wasn't available on streaming, it largely flew under the radar. I honestly kind of forgot about it until Pitchfork gave it the number one spot in its year-end list. In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure how, though. Los Thuthanaka sounds like nothing else. It's joyous, jagged, and sounds like it's being blasted out of a broken Bluetooth speaker in your neighbor's backyard - it's glorious.

The follow-up EP Wak'a turns down the tempo and smooths some of the sharper edges. It uses the same sound palette of blo …

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