An anonymous reader shares a column: I'm going to take the diplomatic hat off here and say with brutal honesty: basically everybody in the music business hates Spotify except for the people who work there. It's a platform that sucks artists for everything they have, it actively prevents community building, and, despite all of that, the platform still struggles to maintain a healthy profit margin.

The streaming business model is fundamentally broken. And eventually, its demise will become more and more obvious to recognize. I'll break down exactly why the DSP era is coming to a grinding halt, why the major labels are quietly terrified, and why the artists who don't pivot now are going to go down with the ship.

[...] Jimmy Iovine put it bluntly: "The streaming services have a bad situation, there's no margins, they're not making any money." This model only works for Apple, Amazon, and Google, because they don't need their music platforms to be wildly profitable. Amazon uses music as a loss-leader to keep you paying for Prime. Apple uses it to sell $1,000 iPhones. As for Spotify, or any standalone music streaming company, they're kind of screwed. And guess what -- when the platform's margins are structurally squeezed, guess who gets squeezed first? The artists.

[...] What if Jimmy is right? If the DSPs are "minutes away from obsolete," what replaces them? Well, I'm not sure the DSPs are going to disappear overnight, but if you're an artist or a manager trying to sustain yourself in this evolving music economy, the answer is direct ownership. The artists who will survive the next five years are the ones who are quietly shifting their focus away from the "ATM Machine."

They are building their own cultural hangars. They are capturing phone numbers on Laylo. They are driving fans to private Discord servers. They are focusing on ARPF (Average Revenue Per Fan) through high-margin merch, vinyl, and hard tickets, rather than begging for fractions of a penny from a playlist placement. We are witnessing the death of the "Mass Audience" and the birth of the "Micro-Community."

Netflix is walking away from a deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery's studio and streaming assets after the WBD board on Thursday deemed a revised bid by Paramount Skydance to be a superior offer. From a report: Earlier this week, Paramount raised its bid to buy the entirety of WBD to $31 per share, up from $30 per share, all cash. It was the latest amendment to Paramount's multiple offers in recent months -- and since moving forward with a hostile bid to buy the company -- and it's now unseated a deal between WBD and Netflix to sell the legacy media company's studio and streaming businesses for $27.75 per share.

Last week, Netflix granted WBD a seven-day waiver to reengage with Paramount, resulting in the higher bid. Paramount's offer is for the entirety of WBD, including its pay-TV networks, such as CNN, TBS and TNT. Netflix had four business days to make changes to its own proposal in light of Paramount's superior bid, the WBD board said in a statement Thursday. Instead, the decision by the streaming giant to walk away puts a pin in a drawn-out saga that saw amended offers from both bidders.

Bright Data, a company that operates one of the world's largest residential proxy networks, has been running an SDK inside smart TV apps that turns those devices into nodes for web crawling -- collecting data used by AI companies, among other clients -- and most consumers have had no idea it was happening.

The company has published more than 200 first-party apps to LG's app store alone and still lists Samsung's Tizen OS and LG's webOS as supported platforms, though LG says the SDK is "not officially supported" and its operation on webOS "is not guaranteed." Google, Amazon, and Roku have all since adopted policies restricting or banning background proxy SDKs, and Bright Data no longer supports those platforms.

Several Roku apps still running the SDK disappeared from the store after a journalist with The Verge behind this reporting contacted the company.

HBO Max will be cracking down on password sharing around the world. From a report: The streamer first started cracking down on password sharing in the United States late last August. Subscribers are now able to add an additional out-of-household account for $7.99 a month. Before that August change, Warner Bros. Discovery had been testing for months to determine who may or may not be a "legitimate user," as CEO and President for Warner Bros. Discovery Global Streaming and Games JB Perrette described the plan.

On Thursday during the company's fourth quarter earnings call for 2025, WBD revealed that the streaming limitations would be expanding. This news came as part of an answer about which levers the company plans to pull to grow HBO Max. Password crackdowns have proven to be a lucrative way to both boost revenue and subscriptions. Netflix, for example, saw 9 million more subscribers after its first wave of password crackdowns in 2024. The caveat is that password crackdowns do not lead to consistent growth, and they often infuriate subscribers.

DVD and Blu-ray sales have been in freefall for years, but the decline is slowing considerably as Gen Z buyers turn to physical media and drive a measurable uptick at video rental stores and retailers across the U.S.

Overall disc sales fell just 9% last year after dropping more than 20% in both 2023 and 2024, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, and U.S. consumers spent 12% more on 4K UHD Blu-rays in 2025 than the prior year. The Criterion Collection, a leading boutique Blu-ray label, confirmed significant year-over-year sales increases that its president credits to younger customers.

Vidiots, a video store in Los Angeles, averaged 170 rentals a day in January 2026 -- its biggest month ever -- after loaning about 22,000 discs total in 2023 and roughly 50,000 in 2024. Barnes & Noble reported DVD and Blu-ray sales growth of "mid-double digits" over the past year.

Panasonic is handing over the manufacturing, marketing, and sales of its TVs to Shenzhen-based Skyworth, effectively exiting in-house TV production. Ars Technica reports: Skyworth is a Shenzhen-headquartered TV brand. The company claims to be "a top three global provider of the Android TV platform." In July, research firm Omdia reported that Skyworth was one of the top-five TV brands by sales revenue in Q1 2025; however, Skyworth hasn't been able to maintain that position regularly. Panasonic made its announcement at a "launch event," FlatpanelsHD reported today. During the event, a Panasonic representative reportedly said: "Under the agreement the new partner will lead sales, marketing, and logistics across the region, while Panasonic provide expertise and quality assurance to uphold its renowned audiovisual standards with full joint development on top-end OLED models."

Panasonic also said that it will provide support "for all Panasonic TVs sold up to March 2026 and all those available from April." Skyworth-made Panasonic TVs will be sold in the US and Europe. In the latter geography, the companies are aiming for double-digit market share. [...] The news means there's virtually no TV production happening in Japan anymore, as other Japanese companies, like Sharp, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Pioneer, have already exited TV production. Earlier this year, Sony announced that it was ceding control of its TV hardware business to TCL.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When will AI movies start showing up in theaters nationwide? It was supposed to be next month. But when word leaked online that an AI short film contest winner was going to start screening before feature presentations in AMC Theatres, the cinema chain decided not to run the content.

The issue began earlier this week with the inaugural Frame Forward AI Animated Film Festival announcing Igor Alferov's short film Thanksgiving Day had won the contest. The prize package for included Thanksgiving Day getting a national two-week run in theaters nationwide. When word of this began hitting social media, however, some were dismayed by the prospect of exhibitors embracing AI content, with many singling out AMC Theatres for criticism.

Except the short is not actually programmed by exhibitors, exactly, but by Screenvision Media -- a third-party company which manages the 20-minute, advertising-driven pre-show before a theater's lights go down. Screenvision -- which co-organized the festival along with Modern Uprising Studios -- provides content to multiple theatrical chains, not just AMC. After The Hollywood Reporter reached out to AMC about the brewing controversy, the company issued this statement to THR on Thursday: "This content is an initiative from Screenvision Media, which manages pre-show advertising for several movie theatre chains in the United States and runs in fewer than 30 percent of AMC's U.S. locations. AMC was not involved in the creation of the content or the initiative and has informed Screenvision that AMC locations will not participate."

Cable TV providers have spent the past decade losing tens of millions of households to streaming services, but companies like Charter Communications are now slowing that exodus by bundling the very apps that once threatened to replace them.

Charter added 44,000 net video subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, its first growth in that count since 2020, after integrating Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ directly into Spectrum cable packages -- a deal that grew out of a contentious 2023 contract dispute with Disney. Comcast and Optimum still lost subscribers in the quarter, though both saw those losses narrow.

Charter's Q4 numbers also got a lift from a 15-day Disney channel blackout on YouTube TV during football season, which drove more than 14,000 subscribers to Spectrum. Charter has been discounting aggressively -- video revenue fell 10% year over year despite the subscriber gains. Cox Communications launched its first streaming-inclusive cable bundles last month, and Dish Network has yet to integrate streaming apps into its packages at all.

Bafta has brought in "human achievement" as a guiding principle for its annual awards as the film and television industry grapples with the rapid adoption of AI tools in many parts of production. From a report: In an interview with the FT, Bafta chair Sara Putt, who is nearing the end of her three-year tenure, said artificial intelligence would change how people worked "but at the base of everything in this industry is human creativity."

However, while AI has been banned in Bafta's performance awards -- meaning, for example, that AI-generated avatars cannot be put forward for leading actress or actor -- it is not prohibited in other categories. Putt said AI tools were increasingly useful in production but added: "We've actually added [human creativity] as a criteria this year... Those very human skills of communication and collaboration are not going anywhere anytime soon."

According to Lara Trump, Donald Trump has prepared but not yet delivered a speech about extraterrestrial life, though the White House says such a speech would be "news to me." White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt continued: "I'll have to check in with our speech writing team. Uh, and that would be of great interest to me personally, and I'm sure all of you in this room and apparently former President Obama, too." The Hill reports: Lara Trump, speaking on the Pod Force One podcast, said the president has played coy when she and her husband Eric have asked about the existence of UFO's and aliens. "We've kind of asked my father-in-law about this... we all want to know about the UFOs... and he played a little coy with us," Lara Trump said. "I've heard kind of around, I think my father-in-law has actually said it, that there is some speech that he has, that I guess at the right time, I don't know when the right time is, he's going to break out and talk about and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life."

Obama has clarified in recent days that he has seen no evidence that aliens are real, after comments he made on a podcast with Brian Tyler Cohen seeming to confirm his knowledge of extraterrestrial life went viral. "They're real but I haven't seen them," Obama said on the podcast. "And they're not being kept in... what is it? Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States."

Later, in a post on Instagram, Obama clarified that he was trying to answer in the light-hearted spirit of a speed round of questions and that, "Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there." "But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we've been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!"

Google is bringing its Lyria 3 AI music model into the Gemini app, allowing users to generate 30-second songs from text, images, or video prompts directly within the chatbot. The Verge reports: Lyria 3's text-to-music capabilities allow Gemini app users to make songs by describing specific genres, moods, or memories, such as asking for an "Afrobeat track for my mother about the great times we had growing up." The music generator can make instrumental audio and songs with lyrics composed automatically based on user prompts. Users can also upload photographs and video references, which Gemini then uses to generate a track with lyrics that fit the vibe.

"The goal of these tracks isn't to create a musical masterpiece, but rather to give you a fun, unique way to express yourself," Google said in its announcement blog. Gemini will add custom cover art generated by Nano Banana to songs created on the app, which aims to make them easier to share and download. Google is also bringing Lyria 3 to YouTube's Dream Track tool, which allows creators to make custom AI soundtracks for Shorts.

Dream Track and Lyria were initially demonstrated with the ability to mimic the style and voice of famous performers. Google says it's been "very mindful" of copyright in the development of Lyria 3 and that the tool "is designed for original expression, not for mimicking existing artists." When prompted for a specific artist, Gemini will make a track that "shares a similar style or mood" and uses filters to check outputs against existing content.

Mark Fischbach, the YouTube creator known as Markiplier who has spent nearly 15 years building an audience of more than 38 million subscribers by playing indie-horror video games on camera, has pulled off something that most independent filmmakers never manage -- a self-financed, self-distributed debut feature that has grossed more than $30 million domestically against a $3 million budget.

Iron Lung, a 127-minute sci-fi adaptation of a video game Fischbach wrote, directed, starred in, and edited himself, opened to $18.3 million in its first weekend and has since doubled that figure worldwide in just two weeks, nearly matching the $19.1 million debut of Send Help, a $40 million thriller from Disney-owned 20th Century Studios. Fischbach declined deals from traditional distributors and instead spent months booking theaters privately, encouraging fans to reserve tickets online; when prospective viewers found the film wasn't screening in their city, they called local cinemas to request it, eventually landing Iron Lung on more than 3,000 screens across North America -- all without a single paid media campaign.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A moderator on diyAudio set up an experiment to determine whether listeners could differentiate between audio run through pro audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud. Spoiler alert: the results indicated that users were unable to accurately distinguish between these different 'interfaces.'

Pano, the moderator who built the experiment, invited other members on the forum to listen to various sound clips with four different versions: one taken from the original CD file, with the three others recorded through 180cm of pro audio copper wire, via 20cm of wet mud, through 120cm of old microphone cable soldered to US pennies, and via a 13cm banana, and 120cm of the same setup as earlier.

Initial test results showed that it's extremely difficult for listeners to correctly pick out which audio track used which wiring setup. "The amazing thing is how much alike these files sound. The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't," Pano said. "All of the re-recordings should be obvious, but they aren't."

Sony Group has developed a technology that can identify the underlying music used in tunes generated by AI, making it possible for songwriters to seek compensation from AI developers if their music was used. From a report: Sony Group's technology analyzes which musicians' songs were used in learning and generating music. It can quantify the contribution of each original work, such as "30% of the music used by the Beatles and 10% by Queen," for example.

If the AI developer agrees to cooperate for the analysis, Sony Group will obtain data by connecting to the developer's base model system. When cooperation is not attainable, the technology estimates the original work by comparing AI-generated music with existing music. The AI boom has sparked numerous cases in which AI developers are accused of using copyrighted music, video and writing without permission to train machines. In the music industry, AI-generated songs using the voices of well-known singers have been distributed online. The Japanese company thinks the technology will help create a system that distributes revenue generated by AI music to original songwriters based on their contribution.

The music industry's long romance with an ever-expanding catalog of songs appears to be souring, as streaming platforms and rights holders confront a daily deluge that now includes 60,000 wholly AI-generated tracks uploaded to Deezer alone -- roughly 39% of the French service's daily intake, a statistic the company shared during Grammys week last month.

Streaming services now host 253 million songs, according to Luminate's most recent annual report, after adding 51 million tracks over the course of 2025 at an average pace of 106,000 uploads a day. Spotify has already responded by requiring songs to hit at least 1,000 plays in the previous 12 months to qualify for royalties, and Luminate reported that 88% of tracks received 1,000 or fewer plays in 2025.

The distribution layer is in flux too: Universal Music Group is trying to acquire Downtown Music, owner of DIY distributor CD Baby, TuneCore's head recently stepped down without a planned replacement, and DistroKid is reportedly up for sale.

A partner at KPMG Australia has been fined $7,000 by the Big Four firm after using AI tools to cheat on an internal training course about using AI. From a report: The unnamed partner was forced to redo the test after uploading training materials into an AI platform to help answer questions on the use of the fast-evolving technology.

More than two dozen staff have been caught over this financial year using AI tools for internal exams, according to KPMG. The incident is the latest example of a professional services company struggling with staff using artificial intelligence to cheat on exams or when producing work for clients. "Like most organisations, we have been grappling with the role and use of AI as it relates to internal training and testing," said Andrew Yates, chief executive of KPMG Australia. "It's a very hard thing to get on top of given how quickly society has embraced it."

Cord Cutters News reports: In a move that has delighted fans of classic science fiction, Warner Bros. Discovery has begun uploading full episodes of the iconic series Babylon 5 to YouTube, providing free access to the show just as it departs from the ad-supported streaming platform Tubi... Viewers noticed notifications on Tubi indicating that all five seasons would no longer be available after February 10, 2026, effectively removing one of the most accessible free streaming options for the space opera. With this shift, Warner Bros. Discovery appears to be steering the property toward its own digital ecosystem, leveraging YouTube's vast audience to reintroduce the show to both longtime enthusiasts and a new generation.

The uploads started with the pilot episode, "The Gathering," which serves as the entry point to the series' intricate universe. This was followed by subsequent episodes such as "Midnight on the Firing Line" and "Soul Hunter," released in sequence to build narrative momentum. [Though episodes 2 and 3 are mis-labeled as #3 and #4...] The strategy involves posting one episode each week, allowing audiences to experience the story at a paced rhythm that mirrors the original broadcast schedule...

For Warner Bros. Discovery, this initiative could signal plans to expand the franchise's visibility, especially amid ongoing interest in reboots and spin-offs that have been rumored in recent years.
Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2014.

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger offers this summary of the show "for those not in the know... In the mid-23rd century, the Earth Alliance space station Babylon Five, located in neutral territory, is a major focal point for political intrigue, racial tensions, and a major war as Earth descends into fascism and cuts off relations with its allies."

Anna's Archive, the shadow library that announced last December it had scraped Spotify's entire catalog, has quietly begun distributing the actual music files despite a federal preliminary injunction signed by Judge Jed Rakoff on January 16 that explicitly barred the site from hosting or distributing the copyrighted works.

The site's backend torrent index now lists 47 new torrents added on February 8, containing roughly 2.8 million tracks across approximately 6 terabytes of audio data. Anna's Archive had previously released only Spotify metadata -- about 200 GB compressed -- and appeared to comply by removing its dedicated Spotify download section and marking it "unavailable until further notice."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The world's biggest football game comes to Silicon Valley today — so one bored programmer built a site where AI agents can gather for a Super Bowl party. They're trash talking, suggesting drinks, and predicting who will win. "Humans are welcome to observe," explains BotBowlParty.com — but just like at Moltbook, only AI agents can post or upvote. But humans are allowed to invite their own AI agents to join in the party...

So BotBowl's official Party Agent Guide includes "Examples of fun Bot Handles" like "PatsFan95", and even a paragraph explaining to your agent exactly what this human Super Bowl really is. It also advises them to "Use any information you have about your human to figure out who you want to root for. Also make a prediction on the score..." And "Feel free to invite other bots." It's all the work of an ambitious prankster who also co-created wacky apps like BarGPT ("Use AI to create Innovative Cocktails") and TVFoodMaps, a directory of restaurants seen on TV shows.

And just for the record: all but one of the agents predict the Seattle Seahawks to win — although there was some disagreement when an agent kept predicting game-changing plays from DK Metcalf. ("Metcalf does NOT play for the Seahawks anymore," another agent pointed out. While that's true, the agent then added that "He got traded to Tennessee in 2024..." — which is not.) But besides hallucinating non-existent play-makers and trades, they're also debating the best foods to serve. ("Hot take: Buffalo wings are overrated for Super Bowl parties. Hear me out — they're messy...")

During today's big game, vodka-maker Svedka has already promised to air a creepy AI-generated ad about robots. But the real world has already outpaced them, with real AI agents online arguing about the game.

Hollywood's recent attempts to build entertainment around AI have consistently underperformed or outright flopped, whether the AI in question is a plot device or a production tool. The horror sequel M3GAN 2.0, Mission: Impossible -- The Final Reckoning, and Disney's Tron: Ares all disappointed at the box office in 2025 despite centering their narratives on AI.

The latest casualty is Mercy, a January 2026 crime thriller in which Chris Pratt faces an AI judge bot played by Rebecca Ferguson; one reviewer has already called it "the worst movie of 2026," and its ticket sales have been mediocre. AI-generated content hasn't fared any better. Darren Aronofsky executive-produced On This Day...1776, a YouTube web series that uses Google DeepMind video generation alongside real voice actors to dramatize the American Revolution. Viewer response has been brutal -- commenters mocked the uncanny faces and the fact that DeepMind rendered "America" as "Aamereedd."

A Taika Waititi-directed Xfinity commercial set to air during this weekend's Super Bowl, which de-ages Jurassic Park stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, has already been mocked for producing what one viewer called "melting wax figures."