Apple has been a laggard in the smart-home space, but a versatile new device in early development could change that. From a Bloomberg report: The company is working on a product that would combine an Apple TV set-top box with a HomePod speaker and include a camera for video conferencing through a connected TV and other smart-home functions, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. The device's other capabilities would include standard Apple TV box functions like watching video and gaming plus smart speaker uses such as playing music and using Apple's Siri digital assistant.

If launched, it would represent Apple's most ambitious smart-home hardware offering to date. The Cupertino, California-based technology giant is also mulling the launch of a high-end speaker with a touch screen to better compete with market leaders Google and Amazon.com, the people said. Such a device would combine an iPad with a HomePod speaker and also include a camera for video chat. Apple has explored connecting the iPad to the speaker with a robotic arm that can move to follow a user around a room, similar to Amazon's latest Echo Show gadget. Development of both Apple products is still in the early stages, and the company could decide to launch neither or change key features. The company often works on new concepts and devices without ultimately shipping them.

Austin, Texas is America's fastest-growing major metro area, reports Bloomberg Businessweek, growing 30% from 2010 to 2019. But today a minimum wage worker hoping to afford a one-bedroom rental "would now need to work a 125-hour week."

And meanwhile, homeowner Matthew Congrove says he's now getting a half-dozen all-cash offers on his house every week. "In the boldest attempt, a stranger simply showed up at his home unannounced and asked to buy it..." Even Congrove — a software engineer who moved from Florida seven years ago — is most concerned about how the new wave of tech workers is affecting his adopted city's culture. Lately, he's seen more T-shirts bearing startup logos than band names. New condos have sprouted up where quirky bungalows once stood. And the commute time to his downtown office has tripled. "They just keep coming," Congrove says. "The fleece vests, the tech bros — that's definitely imported from California."

During the pandemic, Austin has welcomed more new residents from the Bay Area than from any other region outside Texas, according to records provided to Bloomberg by the U.S. Postal Service... Oracle late last year said it was moving its headquarters to Austin, and a stream of tech elites including prominent investor Jim Breyer and the chief executive officers of Dropbox and Splunk made plans to relocate. Elon Musk, the second-richest man in the world, is now a resident of Texas — though he hasn't said where — and Tesla Inc. is building a factory in Austin's outskirts, where Musk has said the company will need 10,000 people by 2022. He's also expanding the Austin area operations for Boring Co. and SpaceX, and has moved his personal foundation to the city's downtown.

For all his boosterism, even Musk recognizes the potential hazards of the influx he's helping spark. In a tweet on April 4, he called out the "urgent need to build more housing in greater Austin area!"

The region is facing the same boomtown dynamics that have plagued San Francisco for decades.... "There is a fairly broad-based concern that some of the things that aren't working in other areas are going to be brought here," says Dax Williamson, a managing director for Silicon Valley Bank who leads its technology banking practice for Central Texas. "If we price out the musicians we're going to find ourselves in a bad place." In a sign that may already be happening, Tesla recently selected a warehouse in southern Austin that served as music rehearsal space, with plans to transform it into a $2.5 million Tesla showroom this summer.

Hating California is a tradition in Texas, but Austin's growing pains aren't all California's fault. According to the Austin Chamber, more than half of newcomers from 2014 to 2018 came from other parts of the state, followed by just 8% from California and 3% from New York... Still, out-of-state arrivals from affluent cities tend to be richer than average existing residents and, as a consequence, have a greater impact on the local economy. "Probably 5 out of 10 of my clients are Californians, and others could say the same thing," says Susan Horton, president of the Austin Board of Realtors. "The majority are all tech people, and the last wave were all coming to work at Tesla."

A right-to-repair bill died in the Colorado state legislature on March 25, 2021. After almost three hours of testimony from business leaders, disabled advocates, and a 9-year-old activist, legislators said there were too many unanswered questions and that the proposed law was too broad. Motherboard reports: Colorado's proposed right-to-repair law was simple and clear. At 11 pages, the legislation spent most of its word count defining terms, but the gist was simple: It would let people fix their own stuff without needing to resort to the manufacturer and force said manufacturer to support people who want to fix stuff. "For the purpose of providing services for digital electronic equipment sold or used in this state, an original equipment manufacturer shall, with fair and reasonable terms and cost, make available to an independent repair provider or owner of the manufacturer's equipment any documentation, parts, embedded software, firmware, or tools that are intended for use with the digital electronic equipment, including updates to documentation, information, or embedded software," the proposed bill said.

The Colorado House Business Affairs & Labor committee met to consider the law on March 25. Twelve legislators voted to indefinitely postpone considering the bill. Only one voted for it. "I still have a lot of questions. I still have a lot of concerns," Rep. Monica Duran (D) said at the end of the committee hearing. She voted no on the bill. It was a stunning statement given just how many people testified on behalf of the right-to-repair legislation and how few questions the committee asked them. [...] In their own comments, the legislators repeated lines Apple and other companies often use to defend their repair monopolies. Shannon Bird (D), for example, said that manufacturers have the right to dictate how a customer uses its product. She stressed that Apple can sell licenses to whatever it wants. "Apple Music is different than purchasing a CD," she said. "I have a hard time believing that we would call it Apple having a monopoly on its own product."

Many of the legislators on the committee conflated the repair market with the phone market itself. Others said that a right-to-repair bill would increase the cost of phones for everyone. Rep. Steven Woodrow (D), a sponsor of the bill, explained why this didn't make any sense. "We're not talking about the market for phones. We're talking about the market for repairs, it's a secondary market," he said. "By restricting competition in that market they're engaged in manipulation. The cost should go down. By allowing for repairs you're increasing the supply. Basic econ says that as the supply increases the price decreases."

On the 27th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death, Engadget reports: Were he still alive today, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain would be 52 years old. Every February 20th, on the day of his birthday, fans wonder what songs he would write if he hadn't died of suicide nearly 30 years ago. While we'll never know the answer to that question, an AI is attempting to fill the gap.

A mental health organization called Over the Bridge used Google's Magenta AI and a generic neural network to examine more than two dozen songs by Nirvana to create a 'new' track from the band. "Drowned in the Sun" opens with reverb-soaked plucking before turning into an assault of distorted power chords. "I don't care/I feel as one, drowned in the sun," Nirvana tribute band frontman Eric Hogan sings in the chorus. In execution, it sounds not all that dissimilar from "You Know You're Right," one of the last songs Nirvana recorded before Cobain's death in 1994.

Other than the voice of Hogan, everything you hear in the song was generated by the two AI programs Over the Bridge used. The organization first fed Magenta songs as MIDI files so that the software could learn the specific notes and harmonies that made the band's tunes so iconic. Humorously, Cobain's loose and aggressive guitar playing style gave Magenta some trouble, with the AI mostly outputting a wall of distortion instead of something akin to his signature melodies. "It was a lot of trial and error," Over the Bridge board member Sean O'Connor told Rolling Stone. Once they had some musical and lyrical samples, the creative team picked the best bits to record. Most of the instrumentation you hear are MIDI tracks with different effects layered on top.
Some thoughts from The Daily Dot: Rolling Stone also highlighted lyrics like, "The sun shines on you but I don't know how," and what is called "a surprisingly anthemic chorus" including the lines, "I don't care/I feel as one, drowned in the sun," remarking that they "bear evocative, Cobain-esque qualities...."

Neil Turkewitz went full Comic Book Guy, opining, "A perfect illustration of the injustice of developing AI through the ingestion of cultural works without the authorization of [its] creator, and how it forces creators to be indentured servants in the production of a future out of their control," adding, "That it's for a good cause is irrelevant."

Spotify said Tuesday it has acquired the company behind the live audio app Locker Room, giving the music and podcast platform a new foothold in a space that has seen a surge of interest following the rise of the app Clubhouse. From a report: The company, Betty Labs, launched Locker Room in October as a sports-focused platform for live audio conversations. Spotify said it plans to "evolve and expand" the app "into an enhanced live audio experience for a wider range of creators and fans." Locker Room will soon expand and rebrand to become more like Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces: a forum for live conversations about music, culture and all manner of topics. "Creators and fans have been asking for live formats on Spotify, and we're excited that soon, we'll make them available to hundreds of millions of listeners and millions of creators on our platform," Spotify's chief research and development officer Gustav Soderstrom said in a statement. The acquisition comes amid a surge of interest in live audio following the meteoric rise of Clubhouse, an app that has drawn more than 10 million users in under a year, amassed a $1 billion-plus valuation and inspired Facebook, Twitter and others to develop their own Clubhouse competitors.

"The platforms have driven the price of content to zero," says William Deresiewicz, author of The Death of the Artist. "This demonetized content is still generating a fortune. But the artists aren't getting that money."

"Artists today are beset on all sides by monopolists and oligopolists," argues a 7,000 word analysis in The American Prospect. "Like so many sectors of our economy, government inaction has allowed the music business to consolidate, with devastating effects on musicians. Radio is to a shocking degree in the hands of one company, Liberty Media. Two companies, Live Nation and Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), control a large number of venues and artist management services, with Live Nation dominating ticketing. The major labels have been whittled down to three. Record stores, alt-weeklies, and other elements that nurtured local music scenes are largely gone.

Dwarfing all that in significance is streaming, which has become the industry's primary revenue source, despite giving a pittance to the vast majority of artists. For the main streaming companies — YouTube and Spotify — music is really a loss leader, incidental to data collection, the advertising that can be sold off that data, and the promise of audience growth to investors... This radical upending of the industry's business model has benefited a few stars, while the middle-income artist, like so much of the middle class in America, struggles to survive...

Chris Castle, an entertainment attorney who used to work at A&M Records, could see it coming when he caught wind of an advertisement for a rebooted version of Napster that operated as a primitive streaming service. The tagline was: Own Nothing, Have Everything. Castle recalled: "I thought right there, that's the end." David Lowery, lead singer of Camper van Beethoven and later Cracker, who now lectures at the University of Georgia in addition to making music, described the internet as reassembling all the gatekeepers that kept artists away from fair compensation. "We celebrated disintermediation, and went through a process of re-intermediation," he said.
The article points out that in 2018 YouTube already accounted for 47% of all on-demand playtime globally, according to figures from a nonprofit trade group — while RIAA figures show that streaming now accounts for 83 percent of all recorded income in the U.S, while digital music downloads now earn even less than vinyl records. It remains to be seen whether movement building from all stakeholders, from musicians to fans, will be able to force platform monopolies to give creators just compensation. But the winds are shifting in Washington around Big Tech, and a united front of artists could prove key to raising public sympathies against exploitation and toward basic fairness.

Artists would rather think of themselves as outside the system. "The wonderful thing about the DIY vision is also its weakness," noted Astra Taylor, a writer, filmmaker, and activist whose husband, Jeff Mangum, fronts the lo-fi rock band Neutral Milk Hotel. (Astra has occasionally played with the group.) But the system has come for them, and toppled the structures that allowed them to create. Everyone loves music, and most of us now have the capacity to listen to anything, anywhere, at any time. We can't hear through the noise that the people who brought us this musical bounty are in trouble.
In the article Marc Ribot, a guitarist who has played with Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, complains that "The same neoliberals in anarchist drag boosting indie labels in the '90s are now boosting Bandcamp. I love Bandcamp. I love the food co-op too. They've been around since the 1930s, they're 3 percent of the market, will never be any bigger... We need to either tear the whole thing down and create real socialism where I get an apartment for my good looks, or a functioning market."

When the Star Trek franchise was awarded a special Emmy in 2018, it was William "Captain Kirk" Shatner who'd co-delivered its acceptance speech, remembers ComicBook.com. "Thank you so much. 52 years. What a gift. We're grateful... Star Trek has endured because it represents an idea — one that's greater than the sum of our parts... we watch and we reach to see the best version of ourselves..."

And now three years later, they report that Shatner "will celebrate his 90th birthday back on the bridge of the USS Enterprise." Sort of... Shatner will partake in a two-day event at the Star Trek: The Original Series Set Tour site in Ticonderoga, New York. The exhibit is famed among fans for its replica of the bridge set where Shatner gave orders as Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek: The Original Series.

The two-day event begins on July 23rd (a belated celebration coming a few months after his actual birthday in March), with the COVID-19 mask and social distancing rules still in effect... The limited $1500 all-inclusive packages will let fans participate in Shatner's 90th Birthday Dinner Celebration, take a set tour with Shatner, plus a Bridge Chat, a photo, and an autograph. Regular admission is $80 for a standard tour with a la carte photos and autographs available... The replica set is likely the closest fans will ever come to seeing Shatner return to a Starfleet bridge.
So what is William Shatner doing on Monday, the actual date of his 90th birthday? The New York Daily News reports: He's got a series airing on the History channel, he's heading overseas to shoot an episode of a television show, and is in the middle of promoting his latest feature film, a romantic comedy called "Senior Moment..."

The indie film features Shatner as Victor, a former test pilot who dates younger women and loves burning rubber behind the wheel of his beautiful 1955 Porsche.
The movie also stars Watchmen actress Jean Smart, along with Christopher Lloyd (who memorably played a Klingon in the 1984 movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.)

And meanwhile Priceline.com plans a special series of deals this week to honor Shatner's years as their spokesperson (as well as his singing in their earliest dotcom-era commercials, which revived Shatner's spoken-word singing career).

In Captain Kirk's final appearance in 1994's Star Trek: Generations, one of the last things he says is "It was fun." But it looks like in real life, William Shatner is living long and prospering.

Here's that great moment in Slashdot history when Shatner actually answered questions from Slashdot's readers. Have your own favorite William Shatner memory? Share it in the comments to help celebrate his 90th birthday!

Monty Python alumnus John Cleese "is going to be selling an illustration of the Brooklyn Bridge he did on his iPad as an NFT," reports Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair.

So far the highest offer is $50,000, though Cleese's "buy it now" price has been set higher — at $69,346,250.50. But marveling at the wild popularity of NFTs, Bilton muses (hyperbolically?) that "The crazy thing is, he actually might get it..." The rapper Ja Rule recently launched an NFT platform on which he's selling a painting from the disastrous Fyre Festival with a starting bid of $600,000. Collectible NBA trading cards called "Top Shots," which are essentially digital trading cards of basketball players, are selling (and people are buying them) for as much as $240,000 ($208,000 is the highest price sold so far). And Beeple, a 39-year-old man from Charleston, South Carolina, whom you had never heard of until three weeks ago but who is now all anyone can talk about, a guy who makes dark and atramentous memeified "works of art," including pieces featuring a naked Elon Musk riding a Dogecoin dog and an image of a postcoital Santa Claus after — one assumes? — he's just cheated on Mrs. Claus, managed to sell a random pixelated artwork to another cryptocurrency investor at auction this month for $69,346,250 — exactly 50 cents less than John Cleese, I mean the Unnamed Artist, hopes to sell the Brooklyn Bridge for...

[T]hese odd things called NFTs have done the miraculous and created scarcity in a digital world where there is, by default, no such thing. As such, like any collectible or limited number of artworks, people have gone crazy to get a slice of this new fortune. The insanity around NFTs, and what is now for sale as an NFT, has whiplashed from obscurity to frenetic hysteria in just a matter of weeks. While Ja Rule and trading cards and Beeple's "artwork" are often talked about with perplexity, there are countless NFTs hitting the specialized trading markets almost hourly.

Some are stunts, some are pitched as real art, and there's everything in between. A company that specializes in blockchain technology, for example, purchased a real, physical print by the artist Banksy for $95,000, then lit the print on fire until it was destroyed, and then sold a digital version of it as an NFT for almost $400,000. Grimes, the musician, sold about $6 million worth of music-and-video NFTs last month. Jack Dorsey's first tweet is currently at auction with a high bid of $2.5 million. A poker player is selling his most famous quotes as NFTs. The TV show American Gods is shilling trading cards of the show's characters as NFTs. The website Quartz is offering a news article about NFTs as an NFT itself. There's an NFT house for sale, nudes of the actor Katie Cassidy at auction as NFTs, and there are all sorts of digital collectibles ranging from pixelated punks to impish kitty cats with wings. Now an Unnamed Artist has a bridge to sell you...

It's almost like we're living in a simulation that has sped up and no one knows where the pause button is. But that, sadly, is by design. Bitcoin, which is only a little over a decade old, was first adopted by the video game culture: nerds who thought it was cool to mine on their computers and collect these odd little coins, but who are now Bitcoin billionaires. They are using that money, like Monopoly money that turned real overnight, to dictate what is considered art culturally. In doing so, they are — some believe — destroying the culture.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has discontinued its original HomePod after four years. It says that it will continue to produce and focus on the HomePod mini, introduced last year. The larger HomePod offered a beefier sound space but the mini has been very well received and clearly accomplishes many of the duties that the larger version was tasked with. The sound is super solid (especially for the size) and it offers access to Siri, Apple's assistant feature.

Elon Musk is getting in on the NFT gold rush by selling a new electronic music track he's apparently produced as an NFT. The Verge reports: Yes, you've heard that right -- it's a song about non-fungible tokens, which Musk appears to have minted (or plans to mint) on the blockchain. Musk did not include a link to the NFT, so it's not clear if it's already live or if Musk plans to initiate the sale at a later date. It's also not clear on which platform Musk intends to sell the NFT.

We also don't know if the song has a name, but we have some clues. The looping video attached to the song Musk posted to Twitter on Monday displays the words "Vanity Trophy" orbiting around a golden orb affixed to the top of a literal trophy reading "HODL," short for the phase "hold on for dear life." [...] At various points in the short video, the words along the trophy shift from "computers" to "never sell" while a female vocalist sings lyrics over top like "NFT for your vanity" and "computers never sleep." Did I mention that the trophy also has little gold dogs, or "doges" if you will, rotating around it, too? The techno song drop is appropriate considering Musk named himself the "technoking" of Tesla in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. Meanwhile, chief financial officer Zach Kirkhorn's new position is "Master of Coin."

Both Elon and Zach "will also maintain their respective positions as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer," the filing concludes.

The CBC Radio show Quirks and Quarks shares an interesting theory: If you find yourself pondering the marvel of aerodynamics when you fly on a plane, or if you concentrate on the structure of music as it plays, rather than simply listening, you may score high on measures of "systemization," according to University of Cambridge neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen.

And if so this may reflect abilities that he thinks may have first evolved in humans between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago, when our human ancestors took a cognitive leap forward. This new capacity enabled them to analyze and understand patterns in the world that would, among other things, facilitate the invention of complex tools from bows to musical instruments. In Baron-Cohen's new book, he argues that humans became "the scientific and technological masters of our planet" because of our brain's "systemizing mechanism."

Also, some individuals — particularly those with Autism Spectrum Disorder, are the "hyper-systemizers" of our world. He suggests this should cause us to re-evaluate the capacities and strengths of people with autism... "[F]or the longest time, autism has been really just characterized as a disability, which it is, but with a focus on all the things that autistic people find difficult, what they struggle with. But we know that autism is more than just a disability, that autistic people think differently. Sometimes they have strengths...

"The fact that we can now see a link between those strengths in autism and human invention may change the way we look at autistic people. We might want to see them for who they are, people who think differently and have contributed to human progress."

Regulators in Brussels are struggling to gather enough evidence to bring antitrust charges against Amazon, despite working on the landmark case for nearly two years,
Financial Times reported Thursday, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter. From a report: In July 2019, EU regulators accused the online retailer of manipulating its algorithm to boost its own products "artificially" over its rivals'. As a result, they alleged, users often end up buying lower-quality products at a higher price. But EU officials are still struggling to understand how Amazon's algorithm works, despite sending a series of detailed questions to the company about the criteria used to boost a product's visibility, according to people familiar with the matter.

These people added that officials are also unlikely to be able to view the online retailer's proprietary code directly to build their case, owing to legal barriers around trade secrets. Antitrust investigators frequently face hurdles in navigating the "black boxes" of technology companies' code. "Cases involving algorithms are complex," said a Brussels-based legal expert. "But the EU doesn't have to dictate how a computer code works. It is for the company that uses the algorithm to deliver a fair result." However multiple people noted that the EU's case against Amazon is proceeding more slowly than other comparable investigations. The bloc is already set to bring charges against Apple over alleged abuse of its dominant platform in music streaming, for instance, after a two-year-long probe.

nickwinlund77 shares a report from NPR: Lou Ottens, who put music lovers around the world on a path toward playlists and mixtapes by leading the invention of the first cassette tape, has died at age 94, according to media reports in the Netherlands. Ottens was a talented and influential engineer at Philips, where he also helped develop consumer compact discs. Ottens died last Saturday, according to the Dutch news outlet NRC Handelsblad, which lists his age as 94. The cassette tape was Ottens' answer to the large reel-to-reel tapes that provided high-quality sound but were seen as too clunky and expensive. He took on the challenge of shrinking tape technology in the early 1960s, when he became the head of new product development in Hasselt, Belgium, for the Dutch-based Philips technology company.

"Lou wanted music to be portable and accessible," says documentary filmmaker Zack Taylor, who spent days with Ottens for his film Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape. Ottens' goal was to make something simple and affordable for anyone to use. As Taylor says, "He advocated for Philips to license this new format to other manufacturers for free, paving the way for cassettes to become a worldwide standard."

"The new Google Pay app came out of beta this week, and it marks the first step in a major upheaval in the Google Pay service," writes Ars Technica, complaining "Google is killing one perfectly fine service and replacing it with a worse, less functional service." The fun, confusing wrinkle here is that the new and old services are both called "Google Pay...." The old Google Pay service that has been around for years is dying. The app will be shut down in the U.S. on April 5...

- If you want to continue using New Google Pay, you'll have to go find and download a totally new app.

- NFC tap-and-pay functionality won't really change once you set up the new app, but the New Google Pay app won't use your Google account for P2P payments anymore. You'll be required to make a new account.

- You won't be able to send any money to your new contacts until they download the new app and make a new account, too.

- On top of all that, the Google Pay website will be stripped of all payment functionality in the U.S. on April 5, and New Google Pay won't support doing anything from the web. You won't be able to transfer money, view payment activity, or see your balance from a browser.

- In addition to less convenient access and forcing users to remake their accounts, New Google Pay is also enticing users to switch with new fees for transfers to debit cards. Old Google Pay did this for free, but New Google Pay now has "a fee of 1.5% or $.31 (whichever is higher), when you transfer out money with a debit card..."

The worst part of it all is that, like the move from Google Music to YouTube Music, there is no reward at the end of this transition.
Besides sending out an email, Google also created a support page and a notice at the top of pay.google.com, Ars Technica reports.

But they call it "yet anothre annoying transition... an occurrence that's getting more frequent and more annoying in recent years, thanks to similar Google shutdowns of Google Play Music, Cloud Print, Inbox, Works with Nest, the ongoing Hangouts situation, and many others."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: It's rare that apps come back from the dead, but it seems like that may be what's happening with Turntable.fm, a site that let users create their own radio stations and DJ sets with music they curated before it got shuttered in 2014. Even rarer, it seems like there are two versions involved in the revival: the original Turntable.fm site is back up and running (with the involvement of its original founder, Billy Chasen), but there's also Turntable.org, which will reportedly be launching in beta this April.

The two sites seem to be taking different directions: Turntable.org, the new version, mentions there will be a subscription fee, while the original seems to be largely unchanged from the one that shut down in 2014. While the original founder has confirmed he's involved with the .fm version, the .org version also has OGs working on it: the Our Team section mentions an original Turntable founding member as well as the artist who designed the original avatars in 2011.

The original app, and the current Turntable.fm, lets you create a virtual room, then select what music you want to play for anyone listening. At the moment, the song selection seems to be limited to what's available on YouTube, so you probably won't be able to sneakily slide in your mixtape. There appears to be a SoundCloud integration that's not working yet. Also, the whole site seems to be phasing in and out of existence, perhaps due to word of its return getting around. Assuming you can find your way in, the audience can chat about your great (or awful) song selections. You can also co-DJ with collaborators, if you feel like riffing off a friend, or co-worker.

It turns out that Apple's iOS 14.5 update won't actually let you change your default music service that you use with Siri. Engadget reports: Beta users had originally noticed that it appeared as if early versions of the update might allow you to change the default service that launches when you ask Siri to play a song. This meant that rather than specifying a third-party music app with each request, Siri would remember your preference and launch with the service you had originally specified.

While all that still seems to be the case, TechCrunch reports that Apple has apparently "clarified" that it "doesn't consider this feature the equivalent to 'setting a default.'" That's because the feature relies on "Siri intelligence," which can track your music-listening habits over time and predict which app you're more likely to want at that moment. For users, that may certainly feel as if you've changed your default music player, but there's still no way to do that on iOS.

Apple could face an EU antitrust charge sheet in the coming weeks following a 2019 complaint by music streaming service Spotify, Reuters reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The charge could force changes to Apple's lucrative business model, they said. The European Commission could send the statement of objections setting out suspected violations of the bloc's antitrust rules to Apple before the summer, one of the people said. The case is one of four opened by the EU competition enforcer into Apple in June last year. The EU charge sheet usually indicates whether a fine is merited and what companies have to do to halt anti-competitive practices.

Square has agreed to buy a majority stake in Tidal, the streaming music service led by rapper Jay-Z, as part of an effort to expand the company's suite of financial tools to musicians and emerging artists. From a report: Square will pay $297 million in a mix of cash and stock to become Tidal's "significant majority" owner, though Jay-Z and Tidal's other existing artist-shareholders will retain some ownership in the company. Tidal will operate independently within Square, according to a company release, and Jay-Z will join Square's board of directors. "New ideas are found at intersections, and we believe there's a compelling one between music and the economy," Square Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said in a prepared statement. Bloomberg News previously reported that Dorsey and Jay-Z, who are friends, had discussed a potential deal. It's not immediately clear how Square will help Tidal build its business, but there is a lot of overlap between the music industry and Square's existing market, which includes payments and commerce, says Jesse Dorogusker, the Square executive who will serve as interim leader of Tidal inside its new parent company.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Have you ever bought a movie or TV show through the PlayStation Store? Me neither. As a result, Sony announced today it will remove them, starting August 31, 2021. "We've seen tremendous growth from PlayStation fans using subscription-based and ad-based entertainment streaming services on our consoles," Sony wrote in a post over on the PlayStation Blog. "With this shift in customer behavior, we have decided to no longer offer movie and TV purchases and rentals through PlayStation Store." As a multimedia company producing movies and TV alongside music and games, it made sense for Sony to sell all of it through various iterations of the PlayStation's digital storefront, in theory at least. In practice, it seems like console owners were mostly just interested in buying games, especially following the rise of Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Dustin Curtis, writing on his blog: About ten days ago, when I went to update a few apps in the App Store on my Mac, I was met with a curious error: "Your account has been disabled in the App Store and iTunes." The internet is filled with stories from people whose Google accounts were locked for unexplained reasons, causing them to lose all of their data, including years of email, so I was somewhat concerned. But I'd never heard of similar cases involving Apple's services, and I wouldn't expect such behavior from a customer-focused company like Apple, so I figured it was a glitch and made a mental note to try again later. The next day, Music.app stopped working: "You cannot login because your account has been locked."

Now I was genuinely worried. I checked my phone and neither the App Store nor Apple Music would work there, either. A few minutes later, Calendar popped up an error â" it had stopped syncing. I immediately tried to call Apple Support from my Mac, but Apple's Handoff feature had been disabled as well. The first person I spoke to at Apple spent a while researching the issue and then told me there was nothing she could do but escalate the issue, and that I should expect a call "hopefully" within the next day. I asked what the problem might be, and she seemed as confused as I was. Although some Apple services were still working, like iMessage (thank God) and Photos, I was terrified that more services would suddenly become inaccessible or that I would lose the considerable amount of data I have stored in iCloud.

A couple of days later, I became impatient and contacted Apple Support again. This time, the representative mumbled something about Apple Card before saying that he also had no power to help me. Apple ID was a different department, he said, and they could only be contacted by email. He emailed them. I continued to wait. The next time I tried to use my Apple Card, it was declined. Strange. I checked the Wallet app, and the balance was below the limit. I remembered the Apple support representative mumbling about Apple Card, so I did some digging through my email to see if I could find a connection. As it turns out, my bank account number changed in January, causing Apple Card autopay to fail. Then the Apple Store made a charge on the card. Less than fifteen days after that, my App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple ID accounts had all been disabled by Apple Card. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, which is fighting a legal battle with Apple, offered some commentary on this: "It's terrifying how much leverage Apple has over consumers and developers by integrating everything, locking us all in, and exerting total control. Normal companies respect the natural boundaries that exist between platforms and services. Apple does not! For Apple, every choke point they create is both a profit center and a lever to exert control. After blocking Fortnite updates from over a billion iOS users, Apple threatened to block Sign in With Apple -- which they forced us to adopt -- affecting Fortnite players on 7 platforms."