Remember back in 2014 when every iTunes music library suddenly started showing U2's new album, Songs of Innocence?

In a new memoir (excerpted by the Guardian), U2's lead singer Bono says he's very sorry — and explains exactly how it happened: "Free music?" asked Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, with a look of mild incredulity. "Are you talking about free music...? But the whole point of what we're trying to do at Apple is to not give away music free. The point is to make sure musicians get paid."

"No," I said, "I don't think we give it away free. I think you pay us for it, and then you give it away free, as a gift to people. Wouldn't that be wonderful...?"

Tim was not convinced. "There's something not right about giving your art away for free," he said. "And this is just to people who like U2?"

"Well," I replied, "I think we should give it away to everybody. I mean, it's their choice whether they want to listen to it." See what just happened? You might call it vaunting ambition. Or vaulting. Critics might accuse me of overreach. It is.....

At first I thought this was just an internet squall. We were Santa Claus and we'd knocked a few bricks out as we went down the chimney with our bag of songs. But quite quickly we realised we'd bumped into a serious discussion about the access of big tech to our lives. The part of me that will always be punk rock thought this was exactly what the Clash would do. Subversive. But subversive is hard to claim when you're working with a company that's about to be the biggest on Earth.

For all the custard pies it brought Apple — who swiftly provided a way to delete the album — Tim Cook never blinked. "You talked us into an experiment," he said. "We ran with it. It may not have worked, but we have to experiment, because the music business in its present form is not working for everyone."

If you need any more clues as to why Steve Jobs picked Tim Cook to take on the leadership of Apple, this is one. Probably instinctively conservative, he was ready to try something different to solve a problem. When it went wrong, he was ready to take responsibility.
"A study six months later found that only a quarter of iTunes users actually listened to at least one Song of Innocence," remembers Rolling Stone. Elsewhere in the excerpt, Bono talks about actually meeting with Steve Jobs in 2004, a conversation that resulted in the iconic "Vertigo" iPod ad. Then a new single, U2 offered the track to Apple to use for free, though the band attempted to get "some Apple stock" in exchange.

"'Sorry,' said Steve. 'That's a dealbreaker,'" Bono wrote. Instead, U2 settled for their own branded iPod.
Bono suggested it be black and red, according to his article in the Guardian — describing Steve Jobs' reaction as "nonplussed." Apple, he said, is about white hardware. "You wouldn't want a black one." He thought for a moment. "I can show you what it would look like, but you will not like it."

When, later, he showed the design to us, we loved it. So much that he'd ask Jony Ive, the company's design genius, to look at it again, and OK, maybe even experiment with a red component on the device, too. To reflect our Atomic Bomb album cover....

Vice reports: Sure, you may be trying to cut down on screen time by tracking your minutes in an app on the very same smartphone you're trying to unplug from, but how about a smartphone that doesn't even have a screen to stare at in the first place? Enter MyManu's Titan screenless smartphone...

Titan is a set of eSim-enabled, voice controlled earbuds with embedded live voice translation.... So, what can you do with a "screenless smartphone, anyway? According to MyManu, you can make calls, send messages, listen to music or other streamed content, and even translate speech into over 30 languages using its built-in MyJune app — so basically, all of the "phone" parts of having a smartphone minus the hours of fucking around on apps, games, and social media.
Its web site promises the phone allows you to:

• Interact without constant screen glare
• Get better sleep, reduce eyestrain and headaches
• Reduce anxiety
• Avoid nasty bacteria or viruses [from constantly touching your screen]

The downside?

There's no screen....

Bruce66423 shares a report from the BBC: A hacker who stole two unreleased songs from Ed Sheeran and sold them on the dark web has been jailed for 18 months. Adrian Kwiatkowski traded the music by Sheeran and 12 songs by rapper Lil Uzi Vert in exchange for cryptocurrency. The 23-year-old, from Ipswich, managed to get hold of them after hacking the performers' digital accounts, the Crown Prosecution Service said. Kwiatkowski admitted 19 charges, including copyright infringement and possessing criminal property. He had made 131,000 pounds ($148,000) from the music, City of London Police said.

According to police, seven devices, including a hard drive that contained 1,263 unreleased songs by 89 artists, were seized. A document saved on the hard drive summarised the method he had used to obtain them along with a stash of Bitcoin which was seized. In August, Kwiatkowski pleaded guilty at Ipswich Magistrates Court to three charges of unauthorised access to computer material, 14 charges of selling copyrighted material, one charge of converting criminal property and two charges of possession of criminal property. Chief crown prosecutor Joanne Jakymec said Kwiatkowski had "complete disregard" for the musicians' creativity, hard work and lost earnings. "He selfishly stole their music to make money for himself by selling it on the dark web," she said. "We will be pursuing ill-gotten gains from these proceeds of crime."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A good fall TV run comes to an end on Sunday when HBO airs its House of the Dragon season one finale, a week or so after Amazon wrapped up the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The shows aren't done yet providing content, though. Both Amazon and HBO offer companion podcasts to keep fans engaged, and both devised wildly different approaches for their audio. The podcasts offer behind-the-scenes chats with cast and crew and strive to become the definitive place to hear conversations around their respective programming. The shows' similarities end there, however.

HBO, for example, released three episodes of The Official Game of Thrones Podcast: House of the Dragon before the actual TV series aired, choosing to hype listeners up for the debut through an interview George R.R. Martin, as well as an "everything we know"-style show. Since then, the program has been released weekly alongside new episodes of the series on Sunday evenings. Michael Gluckstadt, director of podcasts for HBO and HBO Max, says the podcast will continue even after the series breaks between seasons. "There's no end date for this in sight," he said, which is atypical for podcasts the network has released in the past, including for Succession and The Gilded Age. [...] The podcast is available on all platforms, as well as on YouTube and the HBO Max app.

Meanwhile, Amazon didn't release any episodes of its The Official The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Podcast until the season finale. Marshall Lewy, chief content officer at Amazon's Wondery, said the team wanted the streaming series to "speak for itself." Wondery has created companion podcasts before, namely for its own podcasts that were adapted for streaming, like Dr. Death and WeCrashed, but this marks the first time the team has worked in coordination with an Amazon series. "This is really our first opportunity to do a partnership like this connected to Prime Video," Lewy said. The podcast now receives front-and-center promotion ahead of each streaming video episode, which is the first time the coveted space has promoted something other than a Prime video series, he said. A promotion for The Official The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Podcast that surfaces on Prime Video. The podcast is only available on Amazon Music, the Wondery app and Audible, a critical difference from HBO's strategy. Lewy said this decision made sense given that anyone watching the show is a Prime subscriber and can freely access Amazon Music. "The effort put into these podcasts not only speaks to the need to increase fan engagement with the programming but to create an ongoing dialogue with viewers so they don't drop off from season to season," writes Bloomberg's Ashley Carman. "A person's podcast time likely differs from their streaming time, which in theory minimizes the risk of cannibalizing the hours that viewers could be spending on other Amazon or HBO series."

"The video services want more than just sixty minutes of their viewers' attention once a week -- they want to be a part of their day and part of their conversations with friends for as long as possible."

The RIAA has submitted its most recent overview of notorious markets to the U.S. Trade Representative. As usual, the music industry group lists various torrent sites, cyberlockers and stream-ripping services as familiar suspects. In addition, several 'AI-based' music mixers and extractors are added as an emerging threat. TorrentFreak reports: "There are online services that, purportedly using artificial intelligence (AI), extract, or rather, copy, the vocals, instrumentals, or some portion of the instrumentals from a sound recording, and/or generate, master or remix a recording to be very similar to or almost as good as reference tracks by selected, well known sound recording artists," RIAA writes.

Songmastr is one of the platforms that's mentioned. The service promises to "master" any song based on the style of well-known music artists such as Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Coltrane, Bob Dylan, James Brown and many others. The site's underlying technology is powered by the open-source Matchering 2.0 code, which is freely available on GitHub. And indeed, its purported AI capabilities are prominently in the site's tagline. "This service uses artificial intelligence and is based on the open source library Matchering. The algorithm masters your track with the same RMS, FR, peak amplitude and stereo width as the reference song you choose," Songmastr explains.

Where Artificial Intelligence comes into play isn't quite clear to us. The same can be said for the Acapella-Extractor and Remove-Vocals websites, which the RIAA lists in the same category. The names of these services are pretty much self-explanatory; they can separate the vocals from the rest of a track. The RIAA logically doesn't want third parties to strip music or vocals from copyrighted tracks, particularly when these derivative works are further shared with others. While Songmastr's service is a bit more advanced, the RIAA sees it as clearly infringing. After all, the original copyrighted tracks are used by the site to create derivative works, without the necessary permission. [...] The RIAA is clearly worried about these services. Interestingly, however, the operator of Songmastr and Acapella-Extractor informs us that the music group hasn't reached out with any complaints. But perhaps they're still in the pipeline. The RIAA also lists various torrent sites, download sites, streamrippers, and bulletproof ISPs in its overview, all of which can be found in the full report (PDF) or listed at the bottom of TorrentFreak's article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, tech archivist Jason Scott announced a new website called Discmaster that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and much more. The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands of people over the years. The new site pulls them together behind a search engine with the ability to perform detailed searches by file type, format, source, file size, file date, and many other options.

Discmaster is the work of a group of anonymous history-loving programmers who approached Scott to host it for them. Scott says that Discmaster is "99.999 percent" the work of that anonymous group, right down to the vintage gray theme that is compatible with web browsers for older machines. Scott says he slapped a name on it and volunteered to host it on his site. And while Scott is an employee of the Internet Archive, he says that Discmaster is "100 percent unaffiliated" with that organization.

One of the highlights of Discmaster is that it has already done a lot of file format conversion on the back end, making the vintage files more accessible. For example, you can search for vintage music files -- such as MIDI or even digitized Amiga sounds -- and listen to them directly in your browser without any extra tools necessary. The same thing goes for early-90s low-resolution video files, images in obscure formats, and various types of documents. "It's got all the conversion to enable you to preview things immediately," says Scott. "So there's no additional external installation. That, to me, is the fundamental power of what we're dealing with here." "The value proposition is the value proposition of any freely accessible research database," Scott told Ars Technica. "People are enabled to do deep dives into more history, reference their findings, and encourage others to look in the same place."

"[Discmaster] is probably, to me, one of the most important computer history research project opportunities that we've had in 10 years," says Scott. "It's not done. They've analyzed 7,000 and some-odd CD-ROMs. And they're about to do another 8,000."

Wikipedia describes Homestar Runner as "a blend of surreal humour, self-parody, and references to popular culture, in particular video games, classic television, and popular music." But after launching in 2000, the web-based cartoon became a cultural phenomenon, co-creator Mike Chapman remembered in 2017: On the same day we received a demo of a song that John Linnell from They Might Be Giants recorded for a Strong Bad Email and a full-size working Tom Servo puppet from Jim Mallon from Mystery Science Theater 3000.... The Homestar references in the Buffy and Angel finales forever ago were huge. And there was this picture of Joss Whedon in a Strong Bad shirt from around that time that someone sent us that we couldn't believe. Years later, a photo of Geddy Lee from Rush wearing a Strong Bad hat on stage circulated which similarly freaked us out. We have no idea if he knew what Strong Bad was, but our dumb animal character was on his head while he probably shredded 'Working Man' so I'll take it!
After a mutli-year hiatus starting around 2009, the site has only been updating sporadically — and some worried that the end of Flash also meant the end of the Flash-based cartoon and its web site altogether. But on the day Flash Player was officially discontinued — December 31st, 2020 — a "post-Flash update" appeared at HomestarRunner.com: What happened our website? Flash is finally dead-dead-dead so something drastic had to be done so people could still watch their favorite cartoons and sbemails with super-compressed mp3 audio and hidden clicky-clicky easter eggs...!

[O]nce you click "come on in," you'll find yourself in familiar territory thanks to the Ruffle Project. It emulates Flash in such a way that all browsers and devices can finally play our cartoons and even some games.... Your favorite easter eggs are still hidden and now you can even choose to watch a YouTube version if there is one.

Keep in mind, Ruffle is still in development so not everything works perfectly. Games made after, say 2007, will probably be pretty janky but Ruffle plans on ulitmately supporting those too one day. And any cartoons with video elements in them (Puppet Jams, death metal) will just show you an empy box where the video should be. But hang in there and one day everything will be just like it was that summer when we got free cable somehow and Grandma still lived in the spare bedroom.
And since then, new content has quietly been appearing at HomestarRunner.com. (Most recently, Thursday the site added a teaser for an upcoming Halloween video.)

The Homestar Runner wiki is tracking this year's new content, which includes:

• Strong Bad livestreaming his play of a text adventure (titled "Disk 4 of 12 — Vampire's Castle") on September 19th
• Strong Sad streaming a demo of the expando deck for Trogdor!! The Board Game (July 2)
• A Twitch parody in which Strong Bad livestreams a speedrun on a horrific beef-themed game (titled "Strong-Play: Marzipan Beef Reverser") on April 25th
• A new Strong Bad Email on April 1st

And past videos are now also being uploaded on the site's official YouTube channel.

Sony has announced the availability of its first OTC hearing aids, the $1,000 CRE-C10 and $1,300 CRE-E10, built in partnership with WS Audiology. Engadget reports: The devices are built for daily use for those with mild to moderate hearing loss. They're controlled via Sony's "Hearing Control" app that guides users through setup and allows them to personalize settings like volume control. It also allows a "self-fit" that adjusts to appropriate pre-defined hearing profiles "based on thousands of actual, real-life audiogram results," Sony said. The CRE-C10 model (above) offers a battery life of up to 70 hours of continuous use. Sony says they're one of the smallest OTC hearing aids on the market, offering a discreet design that's "virtually invisible when worn" and "exceptional sound quality." It goes on sale this month for $1,000 at Amazon, Best Buy, and select hearing-care professionals.

Meanwhile, the CRE-E10 has a more earbud-like design, powered by a rechargeable battery with up to 26 hours of life between charges. It's Bluetooth compatible as well, so users can connect to devices and listen to streaming audio or music, though only on iOS, Sony says. Those will go on sale for $1,300 sometime this winter at Sony's website. In August, the FDA decided to allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter and without a prescription to adults.

Today, Microsoft and Apple announced a number of deeper integrations of Apple services on both Windows PCs and Xbox game consoles, including Music and TV apps for both platforms and the ability to browse your iCloud Photo Library within the Windows 11 Photos app. Ars Technica reports: The Apple Music app for Xbox is already available. Existing users can download the app and start listening to their playlists and stations, while new users can sign up for a one-month trial. The user interface for Apple Music on the Xbox is almost exactly the same as the one we've used before on Apple TV hardware. It doesn't add any new features we haven't seen before, but it's nice to see parity between the platforms. The Music and TV apps for Windows aren't available yet, but the companies say they'll both be available next year.

The Windows iTunes app lets users listen to songs and watch TV and movies purchased through Apple's online store. Even though Apple Music will arrive on Windows, iTunes will continue to be available, and users will still be able to access Podcasts and Books there. While you'll have to wait until next year to download the Music and TV apps in Windows, the iCloud Photo Library integration is available right now. You'll have to download the iCloud Windows app (which is already used to sync a variety of things, like browser bookmarks) and opt into syncing your iCloud Photo Library. After that, both videos and photos should be available within the Windows 11 Photos app.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Toyota Motor Corporation is warning that customers' personal information may have been exposed after an access key was publicly available on GitHub for almost five years. Toyota T-Connect is the automaker's official connectivity app that allows owners of Toyota cars to link their smartphone with the vehicle's infotainment system for phone calls, music, navigation, notifications integration, driving data, engine status, fuel consumption, and more. Toyota discovered recently that a portion of the T-Connect site source code was mistakenly published on GitHub and contained an access key to the data server that stored customer email addresses and management numbers. This made it possible for an unauthorized third party to access the details of 296,019 customers between December 2017 and September 15, 2022, when access to the GitHub repository was restricted.

On September 17, 2022, the database's keys were changed, purging all potential access from unauthorized third parties. The announcement explains that customer names, credit card data, and phone numbers have not been compromised as they weren't stored in the exposed database. Toyota blamed a development subcontractor for the error but recognized its responsibility for the mishandling of customer data and apologized for any inconvenience caused. The Japanese automaker concludes that while there are no signs of data misappropriation, it cannot rule out the possibility of someone having accessed and stolen the data. For this reason, all users of T-Connect who registered between July 2017 and September 2022 are advised to be vigilant against phishing scams and avoid opening email attachments from unknown senders claiming to be from Toyota.

"Our new robot overlords are making a whole lot of progress in the space of AI music generation," quips TechCrunch, discussing a new project called "Harmonai" backed by Stability AI (creators of the open source AI image generator Stable Diffusion): In late September, Harmonai released Dance Diffusion, an algorithm and set of tools that can generate clips of music by training on hundreds of hours of existing songs.... Dance Diffusion remains in the testing stages — at present, the system can only generate clips a few seconds long. But the early results provide a tantalizing glimpse at what could be the future of music creation, while at the same time raising questions about the potential impact on artists....

Google's AudioLM, detailed for the first time earlier this week, shows... an uncanny ability to generate piano music given a short snippet of playing. But it hasn't been open sourced. Dance Diffusion aims to overcome the limitations of previous open source tools by borrowing technology from image generators such as Stable Diffusion. The system is what's known as a diffusion model, which generates new data (e.g., songs) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As it's fed the existing samples — say, the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography — the model gets better at recovering all the data it had previously destroyed to create new works....

It's not the most intuitive idea. But as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and other such systems have shown, the results can be remarkably realistic.
Its lyrics are gibberish, TechCrunch concedes — though their article also features several audio clips (including a style transfer of Smash Mouth's vocals onto the Tetris theme).

And the article also notes a new tool letting artists opt of of being used in AI training sets, before raising the obvious concern...

The project's lead stresses that "All of the models that are officially being released as part of Dance Diffusion are trained on public domain data, Creative Commons-licensed data and data contributed by artists in the community." But even with that, TechCrunch notes that "Assuming Dance Diffusion one day reaches the point where it can generate coherent whole songs, it seems inevitable that major ethical and legal issues will come to the fore."

For example, beyond the question of whether "training" is itself a copyright violation, there's the possibility that the algorithm might accidentally duplicate a copyrighted melody...

The Washington Post calls it "the gauzy, schmaltzy, vaguely creepy orchestral music unofficially dubbed the QAnon anthem." They also report that it's been "unceremoniously yanked from YouTube and Spotify for violating a harassment policy and alleged copyright infringement, respectively."

NBC News reports: In an email to NBC News, composer Will Van De Crommert wrote that he was "exploring legal options" and that "this particular track, which was originally entitled Mirrors, is available to license online. I however was not notified of any licenses for political rallies, nor did I authorize such use." A YouTube representative said in an email Monday that the company "removed the video in question for violating our harassment policy, which prohibits content targeting someone by suggesting they're complicit in a conspiracy theory used to justify real-world violence, such as QAnon." A Spotify representative said that "the content in question was removed following an infringement claim...."

Van De Crommert said the uploads in question are identical to his and that he has no association with the account that put his music online alongside QAnon language. "I do not align with the views of QAnon, and this individual has unlawfully distributed my music under their own name," he said.
The Post credits the song's morose strings for its impact, describing it as "the kind of stock sentimental, algorithmically emotional pablum regularly employed to sell us trucks, insurance, petrochemicals, diapers, more trucks, pharmaceuticals, whole-grain bread and presidents."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Even as Americans cut back in the face of rising prices and recessionary fears, fewer want to give up their streaming subscriptions, especially when it comes to TV, movies and music services, such as Amazon Prime, Netflix and Spotify. Roughly two-thirds of consumers said they will have to decrease their spending due to inflation; however, only about a quarter plan to cancel such subscriptions in the months ahead, according to a recent report by the National Research Group. Most people said they were more likely to cut back on dining out, groceries and clothing.

Consumers are least likely to cancel Amazon Prime, TV and movie streaming services and home security systems, the report found, even over food and gasoline. Just over half, or 51%, also said subscriptions now make up a "significant" portion of their monthly spending. On average, U.S. consumers estimate they spend $135 a month and 17.8% of their monthly budget on subscriptions, the National Research Group found. The report polled more than 2,500 adults in August.

Following another quarter that saw marketers pull back on their ad spending, Meta today announced it's increasing its ad load on Instagram with the launch of two new ad slots. TechCrunch reports: Amid a slew of product updates for advertisers, including a music catalog for advertisers and a new ad format for Facebook Reels, the company said it will now allow advertisers to run ads on the Explore home page and in profile feeds. Meanwhile, though Instagram Reels began rolling out 30-second ads globally last year, followed by Reels ads on Facebook earlier in 2022, the new format now being tested will involve shorter ads on Facebook Reels, specifically.

Called "post-loop" ads, these 4- to 10-second skippable ads and standalone video ads will play after a Reel has ended. When the ad finishes playing, the Reel will then resume and loop again. Like TikTok, many Reels are designed to be watched more than once -- but stuffing an ad at the end could see users instead choosing to scroll to a new video instead of watching the same one again. This is a risky move, as people will also likely consider this a poor user experience.

Meta also said it will test "image carousel" ads in Facebook Reels starting today. These are horizontally scrollable ads that can include anywhere from two to 10 image ads and are shown at the bottom of Facebook Reels content. In addition, the company is introducing new Instagram ad placements as a way to increase the surface for ads as it struggles to monetize its TikTok competitor, Reels. This is being done through the addition of ads on the Explore home page and in the profile feed. [...] Historically, Instagram had only placed ads on Explore within the Explore feed -- that is, when a person taps on a post and scrolls. But now, it's expanding to the Explore home page itself, as it says it sees users spending meaningful time there, Instagram told TechCrunch. This is already rolling out globally.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is launching a podcast called "The Langley Files." As the agency explains, "The mission of 'The Langley Files: A CIA Podcast' is to educate and connect with the general public, sharing insight into the Agency's core mission, capabilities and agility as an intelligence leader... and to share some interesting stories along the way!" Variety reports: The podcast features suspenseful intro music and a narrator explaining that CIA will be "sharing what we can" with stories that go "beyond those of Hollywood scripts and shadowed whispers." CIA Director Bill Burns is the featured guest on Episode 1 of "The Langley Files." "We do usually operate in the shadows, out of sight and out of mind," Burns said in the premiere. However, he continued, "in our democracy, where trust in institutions is in such short supply... it's important to try to explain ourselves the best we can and to demystify a little bit of what we do."

According to Burns, one of the biggest misconceptions people have about the CIA stems from Hollywood's depictions of intelligence field agents. Many people think CIA is a "glamorous world" of "heroic individuals who drive fast cars and defuse bombs and solve world crises all on their own" -- a la Jason Bourne, James Bond and Jack Ryan. (Bond is a British spy, but you get the drift.) On the podcast, Burns shared that he drives a 2013 Subaru Outback "at posted speed limits." [...] The CIA says each episode of the podcast will be about 15-30 minutes long and will "feature our hosts leading conversations with a range of special guests." The series is distributed on major audio platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and Player.fm. "From all of us here at CIA -- we'll be seeing you," said one of the hosts before signing off the inaugural episode.

Today, YouTube announced major changes to its YouTube Partner Program, allowing creators to earn ad revenue on Shorts, its TikTok competitor. TechCrunch reports: Now, Shorts creators can qualify for the Partner Program, which allows creators to earn ad revenue from YouTube. The existing Partner Program requires YouTubers to have over 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the last year. Now, Shorts creators can join the Partner Program if they have at least 10 million views on the platform over the last 90 days. As members of the Partner Program, these creators will earn 45% of ad revenue from their videos.

"I'm proud to say this is the first time real revenue sharing is being offered for short form video on any platform at scale," said YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan. He's right. TikTok has started experimenting with ad revenue sharing, but its efforts seem to focus more on the advertiser than the creator, as only the top 4% of all videos on TikTok can be monetized through its TikTok Pulse program. For the most part, creators have found it increasingly difficult to make money from TikTok's Creator Fund. [...]

YouTube Shorts is poised to become TikTok's biggest competitor. If creators can make more money on Shorts than on TikTok, then they're incentivized to make original content for the YouTube platform. YouTube also shared that this update to the Partner Program will enable the platform to license more music for use in Shorts, which could help encourage creators to use Shorts more often. Creators in the program will be compensated the same, regardless of whether they use licensed music. YouTube also unveiled Creator Music, now in beta testing. Creators can browse a large catalog of songs to purchase for use in their content, with the terms of the music rights spelled out in simple terms. They'll also be able to opt for tracks with new revenue-sharing option where both creators and music rights holders earn money from their content.

Since January 1, 2009, Jonathan Mann has written an original song every day and shared it online. Starting as an unemployed 26-year-old, Mann remembers in an online video that "I made my living entering video contests — I'd submit to 12 of them in 12 days, win one or two, and that was my income for the month."

But Mann released that video after song #4,000, reflecting that "A bunch of videos went viral. I released eight albums. In 2016 I got the Guinness World Record for most consecutive days writing a song. And I've carved out this living delivering keynotes at conferences all over the world — as well as watching all the other talks then getting up at the end to sing a song that recaps everything."

And now 13 years, 8 months, and 9 days after he first began, "I have officially written 5000 songs in 5000 days," Mann announced Friday on Twitter — sharing a special 5,000th song including singing appearances from 112 of his listeners. Mann still shares his videos free online — but for four years, Mann has also been auctioning the songs as NFTs living on the Ethereum blockchain. (By Friday night someone had bid 5 ETH -- about $1,700 -- for song #5,000. And the NFTs also confer membership status for the decentralized autonomous organization, SongADAO).

Mann also writes songs on commission on a "pay-what-you-feel" basis, and has even written songs for companies like SquareSpace and OKCupid. ("Most businesses pay between $2000 and $5000 for a song and a video.") Once Steve Jobs even opened Apple's press conference about its iPhone antennas dropping phone calls by playing one of Mann's satirical songs.

"I saw that on YouTube this morning, and couldn't help but want to share it," Steve Jobs said, according to this 2017 summation of Mann's other wacky career highlights: On day #202, he won a $500 American Express gift card in a jingle contest held by Microsoft for the launch of their Bing search engine. When TechCrunch quipped that Bing had succeeded "in finding the worst jingle ever," Mann responded with a second song — setting TechCrunch's article to music (along with a speculative interior monologue which Mann acknowledges is "completely made up.")

Mann later admitted that his jingle was the worst song he'd recorded that July. ("I wrote it in 10 minutes ...") And his worst song that October was a related song that he'd written when "I received an email from Microsoft of a video showing middle-school kids in Pennsylvania singing and dancing to my Bing song."

"I was horrified. Don't get me wrong, the kids were adorable, but Bing? What had I created!?"

But he was honored when the kids told him they'd enjoyed dancing to his song, and when they asked for one about their own school, Mann obliged.

When Steve Wozniak turned 60, Mann was ready with a musical tribute — Song #588, "That's Just Woz...."

And in January of 2011, as the world learned Jobs had taken an indefinite medical leave of absence, Mann released song #753: Get Better, Steve Jobs...

Mann's duet with Siri earned over 1,609,675 views....

On Day #810 Mann convinced his girlfriend Ivory to sing the other half of a duet called "Vegan Myths Debunked." They'd apparently been dating for a year before he started his song-a-day project. But after four more years, on Day #1,435, Mann and his girlfriend Ivory decided to break up — and released a music video about it....

And in 2014, on day 1,951, Mann's wife gave birth to his son Jupiter....

Day #2000, in June of 2014, Mann answered questions from Reddit users, answering every question with a song....

At a speaking engagement, he offered his own perspective on time: "100 days went by, a year went by, a thousand days went by. At a certain point, it just becomes a part of my life. And so that's how I stand before you now having written 2,082 songs in as many days."

As the audience applauds, he segues into his larger message, "I'm happiest when I'm making."
The article closes by quoting the song Mann wrote on Day #2001 — for a video which included part of every one of the 1,999 previous videos, in a spectacular montage called "2000 Songs in 2000 Days...."

"And I will sing until I'm all out of breath. And the color of the sun is a dark, dark red. And the governments will fall. And we'll sing until it hurts. And we'll ring forever through the universe."

The video ends with a personal message from Mann himself.

"Make something every day," it urges in big letters.

"Just start. I believe in you."

Apple has officially announced the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max. In the first big display redesign since Apple introduced the iPhone X in 2017, both handsets have a new pill-shaped cutout that replaces the notch and can adjust dynamically. Both devices also have a faster A16 Bionic chip and an always-on display. From a report: Apple CEO Tim Cook calls the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max the "most innovative pro lineup yet." The iPhone 14 Pro will start at $999, and the iPhone 14 Pro Max starts at $1,099. Both will be available for preorder on September 9th and available in stores on September 16th. The first notable design change with the iPhone 14 Pro models is the display. While Apple will offer the usual 6.1- and 6.7-inch options, the notch is being replaced by a pill-shaped cutout that will house the Face ID components and a second circular cutout for the front-facing camera. Apple has moved the proximity sensor behind the display, and notifications will now pop out of the notch in an animation. Apple calls this system the Dynamic Island. Notifications and alerts will adapt and move around the pill-shaped notch, and Apple is really leaning into how it animates and uses the system for new notifications. Apple demonstrated a variety of ways the Dynamic Island will animate and work in practice, including live activity widgets coming to life and animations and controls for music. When you swipe to go home, background tasks like music playback will move to the island.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A high-profile push by Congress to rein in the nation's biggest internet companies is at risk of failing with time running out to pass major legislation ahead of midterm elections. Alphabet's Google, Apple, Amazon.com and Meta and their trade groups have poured almost $95 million into lobbying since 2021 as they seek to derail the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which has advanced further than any US legislative effort to address the market power of some of the world's richest companies. After a nearly two-year battle, the bill is now at a critical juncture as the Senate returns this week for a final stretch before the November midterms. Backers of the measure swear they have the necessary votes, yet it's unclear if they do, and the Senate will be busy with other must-pass spending legislation.

Although clipping the wings of tech giants through antitrust reform had support from both Republicans and Democrats during this Congress, a likely GOP majority in the House next year is expected to focus on allegations that internet platforms squelch conservative viewpoints. That's why tech lobbyists have been trying to run out the clock. Leading Republicans like California's Kevin McCarthy, who is on track to become Speaker under a GOP majority, have publicly opposed the antitrust push. The legislation's sponsors can see the window narrowing. Antitrust advocates were expecting a vote before Congress adjourned for four weeks in August. But Schumer told donors in July that it didn't have enough votes to pass.

The bill has 13 co-sponsors in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to pass and be sent to the House. Supporters like Yelp's head of public policy Luther Lowe, a longtime Google critic, argue that enough undecided lawmakers would vote for the measure if it came to the floor. A Schumer spokesperson said he's working with the bill's sponsors to find the necessary votes and he still plans to bring it to the floor. The bill was approved by both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on strong bipartisan votes. Several amendments have addressed concerns about privacy and security issues. What hasn't killed the bill "has made it stronger," said Yelp's Lowe. The measure seeks to restrict the companies from favoring their own products, so that competitors who depend on these platforms to reach consumers wouldn't be at a disadvantage. That could impact the design of Google Maps, the display of Apple Music on an iPhone or the prominence of Amazon Basics on the company's e-commerce site. "I don't see it going to the floor," said Michael Petricone, senior vice president of government affairs at the Consumer Technology Association, a trade group that counts Amazon, Google and Facebook among its members. "With an election coming up, I expect senators to come back and focus on issues that are popular with voters. Tech regulation is not one of those issues."

A jeweler. A plastic surgeon. An OnlyFans Model. They and others received a blue check in likely the biggest Instagram verification scheme revealed to date. After ProPublica started asking questions, Meta removed badges from over 300 accounts. From a report: To his more than 150,000 followers on Instagram, Dr. Martin Jugenburg is Real Dr. 6ix, a well-coiffed Toronto plastic surgeon posting images and video of his work sculpting the decolletage, tucking the tummies and lifting the faces of his primarily female clientele.

Jugenburg's physician-influencer tendencies led to a six-month suspension of his Ontario medical license in 2021 after he admitted to filming patient interactions and sharing images of procedures without consent. He apologized for the lapse and is currently facing a class-action lawsuit from female patients who say their privacy was violated. But on Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer, and in roughly a dozen sponsored posts scattered across the web, Jugenburg's career and controversial history was eclipsed by a new identity. On those platforms, he was DJ Dr. 6ix, a house music producer who's celebrated for his "inherent instinctual ability for music composition" and who "assures his followers that his music is absolutely unique." It's an unconvincing persona -- perhaps even less so once his "music" is played. But it was enough to secure what he wanted: a verification badge for his Instagram account.

The coveted blue tick can be difficult to obtain and is supposed to assure that anyone who bears one is who they claim to be. A ProPublica investigation determined that Jugenburg's dubious alter ego was created as part of what appears to be the largest Instagram account verification scheme ever uncovered. With a generous greasing of cash, the operation transformed hundreds of clients into musical artists in an attempt to trick Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, into verifying their accounts and hopefully paving the way to lucrative endorsements and a coveted social status. Since at least 2021, at least hundreds of people -- including jewelers, crypto entrepreneurs, OnlyFans models and reality show TV stars -- were clients of a scheme to get improperly verified as musicians on Instagram, according to the investigation's findings and information from Meta.