Technology: Last News

A newspaper investigation in Sweden has revealed that criminal gangs are using fake Spotify streams to launder money. The Svenska Dagbladet report (via The Guardian) claims that gang members take the money they make through criminal activity, including drug deals and contract killings, convert it into Bitcoin, and then pay for false Spotify streams of songs published by artists with ties to the gangs.

A consortium of major record labels including UMG, Sony, and Capitol have launched a copyright lawsuit against Internet Archive. The full complaint, which can be read here via Music Business Worldwide, targets the online library’s “Great 78 Project,” a digitized collection of 78-rpm records produced prior to 1972.

Universal Music Group and Google have started to discuss the prospect of officially licensing artists' voices for deepfakes, the Financial Times reports. Both parties reportedly hope to develop a tool that would allow the public to create their own officially licensed deepfakes. Presently, deepfakes are trained on machine learning programs to imitate the voices of singers without authorization; the phenomenon broke into public view with the April release of "heart on my sleeve," a song created with generated versions of Drake's and the Weeknd's voices.

Elon Musk has given Twitter a makeover, scrapping the blue bird icon for a new "minimalist art deco" X image. The Twitter owner first indicated his plans to change the old logo on Saturday before rolling out the new one in the early hours of Monday. The new image was created by one of Musk's followers, who has tweeted that he first created it for a now-defunct podcast.

At a Wednesday hearing in the U.S. Capital, Universal Music Group petitioned the Senate’s intellectual property subcommittee to enact legislature protecting artists and rights holders against AI copyright infringement, Music Business Worldwide reports.

In a new interview with BBC Radio 4, Paul McCartney revealed that a previously unreleased Beatles song is coming in 2023, and artificial intelligence programs were used in its creation. Speaking with Today's Martha Kearney, McCartney gave his thoughts on AI's "scary, but exciting" advancements before revealing that Peter Jackson, director of the 2022 Beatles documentary Get Back, was able to use AI tools to "extricate" John Lennon's vocals from a cassette demo.

Reddit has been hit by a major protest by users protesting the site owner's decision to begin charging third-party app developers for access to its data. It is estimated that over 6,000 subreddits went private on Monday as part of the protest to changes to Reddit's API (Application Programming Interface). These include the likes of r/funny, r/gaming, r/gadgets, and r/todayilearned, all with millions of subscribers each.

A radio host has filed a defamation lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, Variety reports and filings viewed by The FADER confirm. The suit was filed by Mark Walters, founder of Armed American Radio, on June 5 in Georgia’s Superior Court of Gwinnett County. Walters' suit alleges that Fred Riehl, editor of Ammoland.com, used ChatGPT to summarize Second Amendment Foundation (S.A.F.) v.

Ice Cube gave his thoughts on the state of modern rap during a recent appearance on the Full Send podcast, and the conversation inevitably turned to the genre's use of AI. The verdict is decidedly negative.

TikTok could be potentially made unavailable to residents of Montana after Governor Greg Gianforte signed a bill on Wednesday, May 17, effectively banning the company from operating in the state, the New York Times reports. Gianforte cited national security concerns in his decision to sign the bill, which will likely face legal challenges that delay it passing into law.

Holly Herndon is an artist, composer, and computer scientist who has been operating at the intersection of AI and music for years. That's why it’s a good idea to listen when she has some advice for artists as the music industry changes with AI’s many advancements, as she did yesterday (May 15), cautioning artists against signing away the rights to their vocals for programs that could use them for generative AI programs, at least for the time being..

Boomy, a program that uses AI to generate entire songs, announced on May 1 that Spotify had launched a crackdown on tracks created using its technology that had been uploaded to the platform. In a statement to Music Business Worldwide published two days later, a representative for Spotify said that the company had detected illegitimate streams on a number of Boomy-generated songs and taken down the offenders.

Last week, Grimes gave creatives the go-ahead to use AI-generated versions of her voice in their art, offering a 50% royalty split and musing on the possibility of "open sourcing all art and killing copyright." On April 30, she shared a beta version of the GrimesAI-1 Voiceprint. Users who upload their vocal files to the site will receive output audio generated in the style of Grimes' voice. “If you are signed to a label or wish to distribute it yrself," Grimes wrote on Twitter, "plz email us at grimesai@createsafe.io." She requested that the songs using her voice be "tasteful" — last week, Grimes said "rly rly toxic lyrics w grimes voice" such as "baby murder" songs or "Nazi anthems" will face takedown notices.

Last month Elon Musk called time on what he has been calling "legacy verified users," meaning anyone that wanted a blue check mark on their account would have to subscribe to Twitter Blue and pay $8 a month for the pleasure. The uptake hasn't exactly been overwhelming, with TechCrunch reporting that the relaunched subscription service made just $11M on mobile in its first 3 months.

Adam Moskowitz — the attorney in charge of a class action lawsuit brought against FTX promoters including Shaquille O’Neal, Tom Brady, and Larry David — says Taylor Swift was one of only several celebrities who did their due diligence before agreeing to promote the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange. On a new episode of The Scoop, a podcast from the crypto-focused online publication The Block, Moskowitz recalls his surprise at how many hugely popular figures hadn’t checked in with their own lawyers before signing massive contracts with the shady firm.

Universal Music Group has been in correspondence with the major music streaming platforms, including Apple Music and Spotify, to demand that the companies help block the AI programs that are creating new songs based on the music of UMG artists. A report published last week by the Financial Times contains emails and interviews with sources close to UMG.

Management for Bandcamp contacted Topshelf Records on Friday (April 7) and asked them to cease its support for the music platform’s nascent union, Bandcamp United, according to a statement from the record label’s official Twitter account. Topshelf says that the label was “petitioned to cease supporting [Bandcamp United],” a request they declined.

Lil Yachty and Soulja Boy are among a group of famous faces who have been charged with illegally advertising cryptocurrency by the Securities and Exchange Commission. On Wednesday, the SEC filed the charges against the group of eight celebrities, which also includes musicians Ne-Yo and Akon, as well as Jake Paul, Lindsay Lohan, Austin Mahone, and Kendra Lust, with “illegally touting" crypto asset securities Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) "without disclosing that they were compensated for doing so and the amount of their compensation.” Despite not admitting or denying the SEC’s findings, each of the names mentioned by the SEC, except for Soulja Boy and Austin Mahone, has agreed to pay a total of over $400,000 in disgorgement, interest, and penalties to settle the charges.

It's been a tumultuous seven-ish days for internet users of a certain generation. Last Sunday, rumors began to circulate that the legendary mixtape archive DatPiff was gone for good, though the site denied that less than a day later, blaming "technical issues" with its website and app for the user issues.

Spotify is wading into the controversial, often repulsive menage-a-trois of A.I., art, and business with a new listener guide called DJ. Powered by OpenAI and Spotify’s proprietary personalization technology, DJ speaks to Spotify users and offers recommendations based on your listening history as well as commentary between songs.

Riot Games, the parent company behind League of Legends, has brought Lil Nas X on board as president of the popular arena battle video game. It doesn't sound like the responsibilities will involve the nitty gritty of day-to-day management.