"As part of their growing battle against popular open source software tool youtube-dl, three major music labels are now suing Uberspace, the company that currently hosts the official youtube-dl homepage," reports TorrentFreak: According to plaintiffs Sony, Universal and Warner, youtube-dl circumvents YouTube's "rolling cipher" technology, something a German court found to be illegal in 2017.... While the RIAA's effort to take down youtube-dl from GitHub grabbed all the headlines, moves had already been underway weeks before that in Germany. Law firm Rasch works with several major music industry players and it was on their behalf that cease-and-desist orders were sent to local hosting service Uberspace. The RIAA complained that the company was hosting the official youtube-dl website although the tool itself was hosted elsewhere.

"The software itself wasn't hosted on our systems anyway so, to be honest, I felt it to be quite ridiculous to involve us in this issue anyway — a lawyer specializing in IT laws should know better," Jonas Pasche from Uberspace said at the time.

In emailed correspondence today Uberspace informed TorrentFreak that, following the cease-and-desist in October 2020, three major music labels are now suing the company in Germany... According to the labels, youtube-dl poses a risk to their business and enables users to download their artists' copyrighted works by circumventing YouTube's technical measures. As a result, Uberspace should not be playing a part in the tool's operations by hosting its website if it does not wish to find itself liable too....

The alleged illegality of youtube-dl is indeed controversial. While YouTube's terms of service generally disallow downloading, in Germany there is the right to make a private copy, with local rights group GEMA collecting fees to compensate for just that. Equally, when users upload content to YouTube under a Creative Commons license, for example, they agree to others in the community making use of that content. "Even if YouTube doesn't provide video download functionality right out of the box, the videos are not provided with copy protection," says former EU MP Julia Reda from the Society for Freedom Rights (GFF) to NetzPolitik. "Not only does YouTube pay license fees for music, we all pay fees for the right to private copying in the form of the device fee, which is levied with every purchase of smartphones or storage media," says Reda.

"Despite this double payment, Sony, Universal and Warner Music want to prevent us from exercising our right to private copying by saving YouTube videos locally on the hard drive."

Boomy is a new AI startup that helps users create their own songs using artificial intelligence software that does most of the heavy lifting. The BBC reports: You choose from a number of genres, click on "create song", and the AI will compose one for you in less than 30 seconds. It swiftly picks the track's key, chords and melody. And from there you can then finesse your song. You can do things such as add or strip-out instruments, change the tempo, adjust the volumes, add echoes, make everything sound brighter or softer, and lay down some vocals.

California-based, Boomy, was launched at the end of 2018, and claims its users around the world have now created almost five million songs. The Boomy website and app even allows people to submit their tracks to be listed on Spotify and other music streaming sites, and to earn money every time they get played. While Boomy owns the copyright to each recording, and receives the funds in the first instance, the company says it passes on 80% of the streaming royalties to the person who created the song. [CEO Alex Mitchell] adds that more than 10,000 of its users have published over 100,000 songs in total on various streaming services.

David Bowie's estate has sold his entire songwriting catalog to Warner Music, including classics like "Space Oddity," "Let's Dance" and "Heroes," in the latest blockbuster deal for music rights. The New York Times reports: Warner's music publishing division, Warner Chappell, announced the agreement on Monday, saying that it encompassed Bowie's entire corpus as a songwriter, from the material on his 1967 debut album, "David Bowie," to his final album, "Blackstar," released just before Bowie's death in 2016 at age 69. The deal, for more than 400 songs, also includes soundtrack music; the material for Bowie's short-lived band Tin Machine from the late 1980s and early '90s; and other works. The price of the transaction was not disclosed, but is estimated at about $250 million. "These are not only extraordinary songs, but milestones that have changed the course of modern music forever," Guy Moot, the chief executive of Warner Chappell, said in a statement. David Bowie, the so-called "most wired rock star on the planet," has been featured in a number of Slashdot stories over the years.

In 2002, Bowie talked about his new album, distribution deal with Sony, and how he's "fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."

In the late 90s, Bowie advocated for MP3s, telling The Guardian that they "could change the entire idea of what music is -- and that isn't so bad." Years later, he seemed to agree that concert ticket prices needed to increase to offset the rise in P2P file sharing and illegal downloads.

Peter Jackson's seven-hour documentary "Get Back" (now streaming on Disney+) edits footage from the Beatles' ambitious recording sessions for their 1970 album Let It Be. But long-time Slashdot reader MattSparkes writes that the whole documentary "would have been impossible without custom-made artificial intelligence, say sound engineers." Sixty hours of footage were recorded but most of the audio was captured by a single microphone that picked up the musicians' instruments in a noisy jumble rather than a carefully crafted mix. It also recorded background noise and chatter, which made much of the footage unusable.

The team scoured academic papers on using AI to separate audio sources but realised that none of the previous research would work for a music documentary. They consulted with Paris Smaragdis at the University of Chicago and started to create a neural network called MAL (machine assisted learning) and a set of training data that was higher quality than datasets used in academic experiments.
The Washington Post describes it as "a sort of sonic forensics," adding that the name MAL was a deliberate homage to the HAL computer in 2001: a Space Odyssey — and to the Beatles' beloved road manager and principal assistant, Mal Evans. Using MAL, Jackson and his colleagues were able to painstakingly and precisely isolate each and every audio track — be it musical instrumentation, singing or studio chatter — from the original mono recordings made for most of "Let It Be." "What we've managed to do is split it all apart in a way that is utterly clean and sounds much better," Jackson said.
Other interesting observations from the Post:

• "Get Back" tapped nearly 120 hours of previously unheard audio recordings. Jackson and his team started work in 2017.

• Jackson's team also "carefully restored, upgraded and enlarged the grainy original 16-millimeter" footage from the 1969 documentary Let It Be "so that it now pops with vibrant color."

• Jackson's documentary "was originally set to open in theaters last year as a two-and-a-half hour feature film, but was pushed back by the pandemic. With more time unexpectedly on his hands, Jackson transformed his feature film into the six-hour epic...."

• Jackson would also like to release an expanded director's cut sometime in the future, "but there are no current plans to do so."

• "At one point, Jackson's favorite version of his Get Back film clocked in at 18 hours..."

Long-time Slashdot reader kjshark writes: Eric Clapton has successfully sued a German woman who posted an illegal recording for €9.95, about $11 on eBay. The CD was a single-bootlegged recording of a Clapton concert from the 1980s.

After Clapton sent a court in Düsseldorf an affidavit stating the recordings were illegal, the defendant claimed she was unaware the CD was recorded illegally and that her late husband originally purchased the CD at a department store in 1987. Her appeal was rejected by the court.

The court ruled that the woman pay the legal fees for both parties which amount to around $3,500 and that if she continues to keep the recording up on eBay she'll face six months in prison or a fine of around $283,000.

Apple is rebuilding Apple Music as a full native app with the first beta of macOS Monterey 12.2. 9to5Mac reports: Back in 2019, when Apple introduced macOS Catalina, the well-known iTunes was replaced by the Music app to better reflect the company's strategy on iOS and tvOS. However, although under a new name, the Music app on macOS retained the iTunes backend, which was basically a bunch of web content loaded into an app. While this works for most users, having web content within apps makes the experience less fluid. Luckily Apple is finally changing this with macOS Monterey 12.2 beta, which includes some big changes to the Music app backend.

As first noted by Luming Yin on Twitter, Apple Music in macOS 12.2 beta now uses AppKit -- which is macOS' native interface framework. 9to5Mac was able to confirm based on macOS code that the Music app is now using JET, which is a technology created by Apple to turn web content into native apps. Some parts of the Music app were already native, such as the music library. But now Mac users will notice that searching for new songs in Apple Music is much faster as the results pages are displayed with a native interface instead of as a webpage. Scrolling between elements has also become smoother with the beta app, and trackpad gestures are now more responsive.

Universal Control, a feature unveiled at Apple's WWDC event earlier this year, won't be available until spring 2022. Originally planned for a fall release, the feature aims to let users control multiple Macs and iPads with a single mouse and keyboard or trackpad. 9to5Mac reports: Now Apple has changed the launch date for Universal Control from sometime before the winter solstice to "available this spring" as updated on its website. Apple first showed off Universal Control during an on-stage demo at WWDC 21 and it ended up proving to be too ambitious to ship this year. Here's how it describes the feature: "A single keyboard and mouse or trackpad now work seamlessly between your Mac and iPad -- they'll even connect to more than one Mac or iPad. Move your cursor from your Mac to your iPad, type on your Mac and watch the words show up on your iPad, or even drag and drop content from one Mac to another." The good news is that Apple SharePlay is now available on Mac. According to Engadget, SharePlay "allows up to 32 people to enjoy the same TV shows, movies, music and livestreams and more in sync with each other on FaceTime calls." This feature was slated to arrive in the fall just like Universal Control.

Problems with some of the Amazon Web Services cloud servers are causing slow loading or failures for significant chunks of the internet. From a report: The company's widespread network of data centers powers many of the things you interact with online, so as we've seen in previous AWS outage incidents, any problem can have massive ripple effects. People started noticing problems at around 10:45AM ET. There are reports of outages for Disney Plus streaming, as well as games like PUBG, League of Legends, and Valorant. We've also noticed some problems accessing Amazon.com, as well as other Amazon products like the Alexa AI assistant, Kindle ebooks, Amazon Music, or Ring security cameras. The DownDetector list of services with spikes in their outage reports runs off nearly any recognizable name: Tinder, Roku, Coinbase, both Cash App and Venmo, and the list goes on.

Verizon might be collecting information about your browsing history, location, apps, and your contacts, all in the name of helping the company "understand your interests," first spotted by Input. The Verge reports: The program, which Verizon appears to automatically opt customers into, is called Verizon Custom Experience and its controls lay buried in the privacy settings on the My Verizon app. The program introduces two different options that appear in the app, Custom Experience and Custom Experience Plus, each of which varies in terms of invasiveness. Verizon provides additional information about both settings within the app, as well as on a FAQ page on its website. It appears that the Custom Experience option is a stripped-down version of Custom Experience Plus, and as Verizon states directly in the app, it helps Verizon "personalize" its "communication with you" and "give you more relevant product and service recommendations" by using "information about websites you visit and apps you use on your mobile device."

Meanwhile, Custom Experience Plus has the same stated purpose -- to help Verizon provide you with a more "personalized" experience. However, it not only uses information about the websites and apps you use on your mobile device, but it also says it uses your "device location," along with "phone numbers you call or that call you" to help Verizon "better understand your interests." This also includes your CPNI, which tracks the times and duration of your calls, and because Verizon is your wireless network provider, it can track your location even if you've turned off location services on your phone. As Verizon explains on its site, it might use your information to, say, present you with an offer that includes music content, or give you a music-related option in its Verizon Up reward program if it knows you like music. Verizon explicitly states that for the more invasive Customer Experience Plus tracking, you "must opt-in to participate and you can change your choice at any time." Signing up for those Up Rewards, or other promotions with consequences buried in the fine print may have opted customers in unknowingly. How to opt-out: "[...] open your My Verizon app, and then hit the gear icon in the top-right corner of the screen. Scroll down and select 'Manage privacy settings' beneath the 'Preferences' heading. On the next page, toggle off 'Custom Experience' and 'Custom Experience Plus.' To erase the information that Verizon has already collected about you through the program, tap 'Custom Experience Settings,' and hit 'Reset.'"

"Fueled largely by millenial hipsters under the age of 35, the old, outdated format has risen from the dead," argues the Hustle: In the 1970s, vinyl sales peaked at 530 million units per year and accounted for 66% of all music format revenues... [B]y the '90s, vinyl sales dipped to less than 10 million units — a mere 0.1% of market share. In recent years, though, something odd has happened: Vinyl has made a small but mighty comeback... In an age of fleeting digital pleasures, vinyl has quenched a thirst for tangible assets.

For each of the past 15 years, sales of new vinyl have gradually increased. In the first half of 2021 alone, 17 million albums were sold — an 86% jump from 2020.

In an extremely rare twist, an old technology came back to surpass a newer one. Last year, for the first time since 1986, vinyl records outranked CDs in annual sales. This year, they're on pace to more than double CD revenue...

These figures don't even include the millions of used records sold through online marketplaces like Discogs (9 million active listings) and eBay (3.5 million), or at the 1,400 local record stores peppered throughout the U.S. Per Forbes, used vinyl sales are likely 1.5 times those of new records, or about 50 million units based on 2021 projections.
84% of the music industry's revenue now comes from sreaming, the article acknowledges. (And a vinyl record creates 12 times as many greenhouse gas emissions as other music formats.)

But for artists, the economics are undeniable. Even though the price of polyvinyl chloride has quadrupled since 2020, "A band would have to amass 450,000 streams on Spotify to match the profit of 100 vinyl sales."

Square, the financial services and digital payments company founded by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2010, announced today that it is changing its name to Block. From a press release: Block will be the name for the company as a corporate entity. The Square name has become synonymous with the company's Seller business, which provides an integrated ecosystem of commerce solutions, business software, and banking services for sellers, and this move allows the Seller business to own the Square brand it was built for. The change to Block acknowledges the company's growth. Since its start in 2009, the company has added Cash App, TIDAL, and TBD54566975 as businesses, and the name change creates room for further growth. Block is an overarching ecosystem of many businesses united by their purpose of economic empowerment, and serves many people -- individuals, artists, fans, developers, and sellers.

The name change to Block distinguishes the corporate entity from its businesses, or building blocks. There will be no organizational changes, and Square, Cash App, TIDAL, and TBD54566975 will continue to maintain their respective brands. A foundational workforce, which includes teams such as Counsel, People, and Finance, will continue to help guide the ecosystem at the corporate level. As a result of the name change, Square Crypto, a separate initiative of the company dedicated to advancing Bitcoin, will change its name to Spiral. The name has many associated meanings for the company -- building blocks, neighborhood blocks and their local businesses, communities coming together at block parties full of music, a blockchain, a section of code, and obstacles to overcome. "We built the Square brand for our Seller business, which is where it belongs," said Jack Dorsey, cofounder and CEO of Block. "Block is a new name, but our purpose of economic empowerment remains the same. No matter how we grow or change, we will continue to build tools to help increase access to the economy."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Niantic, the augmented reality platform that's developing games like Pokemon GO, raised $300 million from Coatue, valuing the company at $9 billion. The San Fransisco-based startup, which initially spun out of Google, will use this money to build what it calls the "real-world metaverse." As early as August, Niantic founder and CEO John Hanke has referred to the metaverse -- at least, the one that renders us bound to VR headsets, like in "Ready Player One" -- as a "dystopian nightmare."

Unlike Facebook, which changed its company name to Meta to signal its investment in VR technology, Niantic wants to develop technology that brings people closer to the outside world. Earlier this month, Niantic unveiled its Lightship AR Developer Kit (ARDK), which makes tools to develop AR games publicly available for free to anyone who has a basic knowledge of the Unity game engine. "At Niantic, we believe humans are the happiest when their virtual world leads them to a physical one," Hanke said at the time. "Unlike a sci-fi metaverse, a real-world metaverse will use technology to improve our experience of the world as we've known it for thousands of years." The funding will help expand the ARDK, which has already been used by companies like Coachella, Historic Royal Palaces, Universal Pictures, SoftBank, Warner Music Group and the PGA of America to create augmented reality experiences.

Long-time Slashdot reader tlhIngan writes: We know Spotify has many complaints about Apple, specifically how Apple Music competes with Spotify. This has resulted in many complaints about unfair competition from Spotify, enough to bring about the scrutiny of European regulators. However, it appears Spotify might be the architect of their own complaints, from not supporting AirPlay 2 (which they rapidly backtracked on due to customer complaints), to now, not supporting the HomePod natively.

Apple introduced third-party support for the HomePod, which allows the speaker to natively play audio from streaming services without requiring an iOS device. Most notably, when the list of providers supporting the feature was announced by Apple, Spotify was conspicuously absent. Now Apple users are demanding Spotify add support for HomePod or they are switching to Apple Music.

Crypto.com's deal last week to replace Staples as the title sponsor of an iconic downtown Los Angeles sports center appears to have already paid for itself. From a report: The CRO token has surged more than 55% in the past seven days as of Monday and reached a record on Sunday, according to pricing from CoinGecko, and is now the 13th-biggest by market capitalization at about $18 billion. Its gains come as many other top cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ether and Binance Coin, fall back. Two people familiar with the naming agreement said last week that it was worth $700 million over 20 years. The deal is a continuation of a trend by Crypto.com and others to gain name recognition and customers through pacts in sports, music and more.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Winamp is getting closer to release with a redesigned website, logo, and a new beta signup allowing users to soon test the upcoming version of the media player. Before we streamed our music, users would rip their albums or download MP3s to listen on their computer using media players. One of the most popular media players to play MP3s was Winamp, with its retro skins and animated visualizers that moved along with the music you were playing. However, Winamp had not seen any further development after its version 5.5 release in 2007.

In October 2018, after Winamp 5.8 was leaked online, the developers decided to publish the leaked version on their website Winamp.com to allow everyone to use it in all its nostalgic glory. Unfortunately, while Radionomy, the owners of Winamp, said they had big plans for Winamp, no further versions have been released since then. The only new Winamp development we have seen has been by the Winamp Community Update Project (WACUP) who released Preview version 1.0.20.7236 with bug fixes and improvements. You can sign up for a Winamp beta test here.

Discord has been quietly building its own app platform based on bots over the past few years. More than 30 percent of Discord servers now use bots, and 430,000 of them are used every week across Discord by its 150 million monthly active users. Now that bots are an important part of Discord, the company is embracing them even further with the ability to search and browse for bots on Discord. From a report: A new app discovery feature will start showing up in Discord in spring 2022. Verified apps and bots (which total around 12,000 right now) will be discoverable through this feature. Developers will be able to opt into discoverability, once they're fully prepared for a new influx of users that can easily find their bots. Bots are powerful on Discord, offering a range of customizations for servers. Discord server owners install bots on servers to help moderate them or offer mini-games or features to their communities. There are popular bots that will spit out memes on a daily basis, bots that help you even create your own bot, or music bots that let Discord users listen to tunes together.

Microsoft has created a new Media Player app for Windows 11, and it's beginning to test the app with Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel today. The redesigned Media Player app will support both audio and video, and it includes a design that better matches Windows 11's UI improvements. From a report: "At the heart of Media Player is a full-featured music library that allows you to quickly browse and play music, as well as create and manage playlists," explains Dave Grochocki, a senior program manager lead for Microsoft's Windows inbox apps team. "The update to the new Media Player will replace the Groove Music app."

The playback view in this new Media Player app includes album art or artist imagery, which will appear both in full-screen modes and the mini player option. Media Player will also support video, which is usually handled in Windows 10 and Windows 11 in a separate Films & TV app. "All your content in the music and video folders on your PC will appear automatically in your library, but you can also tell Media Player where to look for additional content in app settings," says Grochocki.

Amazon employee Dustin Mitchell is also a metal guitarist in Texas who decided to name his band "Doomscroll," reports Kotaku — and in February Mitchell tried trademarking Doomscroll with America's Patent and Trademark Office.

But then on October 13th, the last day of the trademark's 30-day public comment period, "he got an email from a lawyer who represented Id Software." The lawyer asked Mitchell to extend the 30-day USPTO trademark deadline in order to avoid any legal action.

Mitchell felt weird after getting the email, telling Wired that he was a big fan of the old Doom games as a kid and now he was facing off against the devs over his band name. "They're trying to take something away from me that is completely unrelated to them," said Mitchell. A trademark lawyer told Wired that while it might seem odd, Mitchell most likely had every right to trademark the word doomscroll because within the context of music it "is not generic or descriptive of music, musical performances, or musical services."

But Id's lawyers are most likely "scooting" in to try to protect the brand name and franchise from any confusion. According to the Wired report, Id has similarly stepped in to stop other folks from trademarking or registering brand names that use the word doom, including a rock metal event named the "Maryland Doom Fest" and a podcast titled "Garden of Doom." For now, the future of Doomscroll (The band) is up to lawyers at Id Software.

In October, Mitchell received a lengthy trial schedule that goes all the way until 2023. So this most likely won't be settled anytime soon, unless the guitarist gives up the fight.

Shortly after Thursday's release of Grand Theft Auto: The Definitive Edition, the Rockstar Games Launcher on PC went down, leaving most Rockstar titles unplayable, reports PC Gamer.

They also identified possible issues explaining why: Firstly, the Trilogy has shipped with internal developer comments visible on the code, such as... "This shit doesn't work the way they wrote it below so we'll just show the text and place the blip at the beginning of the mission...."

Coders leaving funny comments is one thing: even if you might not want the public to see it, who really cares. However some dataminers have found that Vice City and San Andreas may have shipped with songs that have technically been 'removed' from the game because the licenses have expired... The presence of unlicensed music could in theory be a big headache for Rockstar. While the music may not be accessible to the average user, it is in the product's files and can be accessed using certain tools. And, oh yeah, without the appropriate license.
One dataminer told the site that the audio codec used in these games is the open source OGG-VORBIS, and for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, "EVERY song is there." And then Thursday the official Twitter feed for Rockstar Support announced their Games Launcher was "temporarily offline for maintenance." PC Gamer reported it remained down for more than 16 hours.

Friday night Rockstar Support announced their Launcher was now back online — but that GTA: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition "is unavailable to play or purchase as we remove files unintentionally included in these versions.

"We're sorry for the disruption and hope to have correct ones up soon."

The world's largest music company has created a band of four virtual apes. Bloomberg reports: Universal Music, the home to top-selling musicians like Drake and Taylor Swift, is working with collector Jimmy McNelis to convert four of his NFTs into a band called Kingship. Kingship consists of four digital characters -- three bored apes and one mutant ape -- all part of an NFT collection known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The club is one of the most successful NFT stories of the past year; it gave anyone who bought one of the apes full commercial rights to use the image.

10:22PM, one of Universal's labels, has hired a team of crypto artists and animators to turn the two-dimensional apes into three-dimensional beings. The company will record music for Kingship that it releases on streaming services. The "band" will perform and participate in video games, virtual-reality applications and across the constellation of digital experiences known as the metaverse. "You can call it an NFT band, or think of them as characters," Celine Joshua, the head of 10:22, said in an interview this week. "The characters will come to life. The apes will come to life."

As technophiles coalesce around the idea of Web 3.0 -- a decentralized internet -- Joshua has jumped into the world of NFTs. That's how she met McNelis, one of the leading collectors. McNelis acquired hundreds of ape NFTs from Yuga Labs LLC, the creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and has a collection that he estimates is worth more than $100 million. He was an early buyer of Ethereum, a cryptocurrency. Joshua pitched him on the idea of creating a new group, and picked four characters that she thought would work as a band. That includes a golden ape, another of which just sold at Sotheby's for $3.4 million. Kingship's golden ape is valued at around $190,000 at current prices, according to offer data on OpenSea, the largest marketplace for NFTs.