Sonos is reversing course on a plan to brick all trade-in devices, so if someone wants to give or sell you a used speaker, it will still work. For now. Ars Technica reports: Sonos launched its "trade up" program last October. Consumers who owned a handful of older devices would receive a 30 percent discount on newer models if they traded in their old versions -- a fairly typical program for expensive electronics, all things considered. The company drew customers' ire with one important deviation from others' trade-in programs, though. Although the company does indeed sell refurbished equipment, devices users traded in through the program were destined not to become part of that cycle. Instead, Sonos straight up bricked them.

Completing the trade-in process required putting your device in "recycle mode," which not only wipes all of the user's personal data but also permanently deactivates the product. Once a Sonos product has been deactivated, the company says, "the product cannot be re-added to any system or used to set up a new Sonos system, even if the product has been reset to its factory settings," and the decision to deactivate it is irreversible. Instead of bringing in old products and refurbishing or reselling them, Sonos tells users to bring them to an e-waste center or send it back to Sonos for component recycling. In recent days, however, Sonos quietly removed the recycle mode option from its app, replacing it with a prompt to call customer service. Additionally, the company now says it's working on posting a new trade-in flow to its website, which will remove recycle mode from the process.

South by Southwest, the annual tech, film and music conference held in Austin, Texas, has been canceled due to concerns surrounding the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. From a report: Local government officials announced the update at a press conference Friday afternoon discussing the status of the outbreak and events in the city. Austin's Mayor Steve Adler said he had declared a local disaster in the city and issued an order canceling the conference. In a statement on its website, SXSW said it would "faithfully follow the City's directions." "We are devastated to share this news with you," organizers wrote in a statement on the SXSW website. The show must go on is in our DNA, and this is the first time in 34 years that the March event will not take place. We are now working through the ramifications of this unprecedented situation." Austin officials said there are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Travis County, where Austin is located. But confirmed cases around the world passed 100,000 Friday.

TikTok, the hugely popular social media app, found a lot of early traction by giving users a way to create funny lip-synced versions of clips from well-known songs and then share them with friends (its predecessor in the West was even called Musically). Now at long last, TikTok's owner, China's ByteDance, is doubling down on the music connection with the release of its first standalone full music streaming app, starting first in India. From a report: Today, the company is launching Resso, which describes itself as a "social music streaming app": users are encouraged to share lyrics, comments and other user-generated content with each other, alongside full-length tracks of music that they can consume and also share with others. And the music begins to auto-play as soon as you open the app. Unlike its sister app TikTok, which is free to use and is built on an ad-based model, Resso is following the freemium route that a number of other big music apps, such as Spotify, have taken. A free tier includes ads and limits streaming quality to 128 Kbps; a premium, ad-free tier boosts streaming to 256 Kbps, includes downloads and the ability to skip tracks and costs INR 99/month ($1.35/month) on Android and INR 119/month ($1.62) on iOS.

AmiMoJo writes: Freedb, the community-generated database of music CD metadata, is shutting down on March 31, 2020. The service was set up as a free alternative to CDDB. Many CD-ripping applications pull metadata from Freedb to save the user having to type it in manually, but the service has some major limitations and has now been superseded by MusicBrainz. This wouldn't be the first time Freedb shut down. In 2006, the site shut down due to a disagreement among its developers, only to be brought back to life a few months later.

It's unclear why Freedb is shutting down after all these years.

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: The music industry was in crisis just a few years ago. Sales were cut in half from their peak as single downloads, YouTube and piracy made the CD album go virtually extinct. But music has found its white knight: streaming. Last year, recorded music revenues in the United States went up by 13% to $11.1 billion — the highest level since 2006... "The music industry today is healthier than it's been in more than a decade," Josh Friedlander, the senior vice president of research at the Recording Industry Association of America, told CNN Business.

"Revenues from streaming services are more than offsetting decreases in physical sales and digital downloads." Friedlander added "it's hard to overstate the impact streaming music has had on the music industry...." Music streaming — which includes paid streaming, ad-supported streaming and streaming radio — represented about 5% of the music industry's revenues in the US in 2009.

In 2019, that number had grown to roughly 80%, according to the RIAA.

With the next version of Windows 10, coming this spring, Microsoft's Cortana digital assistant will lose a number of consumer skills around music and connected homes, as well as some third-party skills. From a report: That's very much in line with Microsoft's new focus for Cortana, but it may still come as a surprise to the dozens of loyal Cortana fans. Microsoft is also turning off Cortana support in its Microsoft Launcher on Android by the end of April and on older versions of Windows that have reached their end-of-service date, which usually comes about 36 months after the original release. As the company explained last year, it now mostly thinks of Cortana as a service for business users. The new Cortana is all about productivity, with deep integrations into Microsoft's suite of Office tools, for example. In this context, consumer services are only a distraction, and Microsoft is leaving that market to the likes of Amazon and Google .

Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued. From a report: Programmer, musician, and copyright attorney Damien Riehl, along with fellow musician/programmer Noah Rubin, sought to stop copyright lawsuits that they believe stifle the creative freedom of artists. Often in copyright cases for song melodies, if the artist being sued for infringement could have possibly had access to the music they're accused of copying -- even if it was something they listened to once -- they can be accused of "subconsciously" infringing on the original content. One of the most notorious examples of this is Tom Petty's claim that Sam Smith's "Stay With Me" sounded too close to Petty's "I Won't Back Down." Smith eventually had to give Petty co-writing credits on his own chart-topping song, which entitled Petty to royalties.

Defending a case like that in court can cost millions of dollars in legal fees, and the outcome is never assured. Riehl and Rubin hope that by releasing the melodies publicly, they'll prevent a lot of these cases from standing a chance in court. In a recent talk about the project, Riehl explained that to get their melody database, they algorithmically determined every melody contained within a single octave. To determine the finite nature of melodies, Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers use to guess passwords: Churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained. Riehl says this algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second. Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it's considered copyrighted. And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.

DevNull127 writes: Let me get this straight. Peloton's main product is a stationary bicycle costing over $2,000 with a built-in touchscreen for streaming exercise classes. ("A front facing camera and microphone mean you can interact with friends and encourage one another while you ride," explained the Kickstarter campaign which helped launch the company in 2013, with 297 backers pledging $307,332.) Soon after they went public last summer, Bloomberg began calling them "the unprofitable fitness company whose stock has been skidding," adding "The company is working on a new treadmill that will cost less than the current $4,000 model, as well as a rowing machine."

Last March they were also sued for $150 million for using music in workout videos without proper licensing, according to the Verge — which notes that the company was then valued at $4 billion. And then this week Vice reported on what happened to one of their competitors.

"Flywheel offered both in-studio and in-home stationary bike classes similar to Peloton. Peloton sued Flywheel for technology theft, claiming Flywheel's in-home bikes were too similar to Peloton's. Flywheel settled out of court and, as part of that settlement, it's pointing people to Peloton who is promising to replace the $2,000 Flywheel bikes with refurbished Pelotons... When Peloton delivers these replacement bikes, it'll also haul away the old Flywheels."

The Verge reports that one Flywheel customer who'd been enjoying her bike since 2017 "received an email from Peloton, not Flywheel, informing her that her $1,999 bike would no longer function by the end of next month."

"It wasn't like Flywheel gave us any option if you decide not to take the Peloton," she says. "Basically it was like: take it or lose your money. They didn't even attempt to fix it with their loyal riders. It felt like a sting."

Apple is considering giving rival apps more prominence on iPhones and iPads and opening its HomePod speaker to third-party music services after criticism the company provides an unfair advantage to its in-house products. From a report: The technology giant is discussing whether to let users choose third-party web browser and mail applications as their default options on Apple's mobile devices, replacing the company's Safari browser and Mail app, according to people familiar with the matter. Since launching the App Store in 2008, Apple hasn't allowed users to replace pre-installed apps such as these with third-party services. That has made it difficult for some developers to compete, and has raised concerns from lawmakers probing potential antitrust violations in the technology industry.

The web browser and mail are two of the most-used apps on the iPhone and iPad. To date, rival browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox and mail apps like Gmail and Microsoft Outlook have lacked the status of Apple's products. For instance, if a user clicks a web link sent to them on an iPhone, it will automatically open in Safari. Similarly, if a user taps an email address -- say, from a text message or a website -- they'll be sent to the Apple Mail app with no option to switch to another email program. The Cupertino, California-based company also is considering loosening restrictions on third-party music apps, including its top streaming rival Spotify, on HomePods, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing internal company deliberations.

Software developer Steve Streza: Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and iCloud data subscriptions, they expanded to Apple Music a few years ago, only to dramatically ramp up their offerings last year with TV+, News+, Arcade, and Card. [...] If you don't subscribe to these services, you'll be forced to look at these ads constantly, either in the apps you use or the push notifications they have turned on by default. The pervasiveness of ads in iOS is a topic largely unexplored, perhaps due to these services having a lot of adoption among the early adopter crowd that tends to discuss Apple and their design. This isn't a value call on the services themselves, but a look at how aggressively Apple pushes you to pay for them, and how that growth-hack-style design comes at the expense of the user experience. In this post, I'll break down all of the places in iOS that I've found that have Apple-manufactured ads.

YouTube says it paid the music industry more than $3 billion last year. "YouTube offers twin engines for revenue with advertising and subscribers, paying out more than $3 billion to the music industry last year from ads and subscriptions," YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki wrote in a blog post Friday. From a report: The latest figure hints at how much of the Alphabet-owned company's ad revenue goes back to music industry and creators. The data has been largely unknown to investors who have wondered how much money the company is actually pocketing at the end of the day.

Around the world, the most popular tunes this month will be depressing ones [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled.]. From a report: Residents of the northern hemisphere might think that their moods are worst in January. Christmas is over, the nights are long and summer is a distant prospect. Newspapers often claim that "Blue Monday," in the third week of January, is the most depressing day. To create a quantitative measure of seasonal misery, The Economist has analysed music consumption. Our calculations use data from Spotify, which offers 50m tracks to 270m users in over 70 countries, mostly in Europe and the Americas. The firm has an algorithm that classifies a song's "valence," or how happy it sounds, on a scale from 0 to 100. The algorithm is trained on ratings of positivity by musical experts, and gives Aretha Franklin's soaring "Respect" a score of 97; Radiohead's gloomy "Creep" gets just 10.

Since 2017 Spotify has also published daily tables of the 200 most-streamed songs, both worldwide and in each country. We gathered data for 30 countries around the globe, including 46,000 unique tracks with 330bn streams, to identify the annual nadir of musical mood. Drum roll, please. The global top 200 songs are gloomiest in February, when their valence is 4% lower than the annual average. In July, the perkiest month, the mood is 3% higher. The most joyful spike comes at Christmas. Strikingly, this February slump occurs in some countries near the equator, such as Singapore, and far south of it, such as Australia -- even though their musical tastes differ. A few Latin American countries lack such a dip, perhaps because the algorithm sees Latin music as mostly happy. The icy north shows the biggest seasonal swings. Finland's mood in July is 11% happier than usual. Overall, on days when a country gets one more hour of sunlight than its annual average, the valence of its streams increases by 0.6%. In contrast, wet days bring particularly downcast tunes.

Apollo Masters, one of two plants in the world that manufacture lacquers that are imperative to the process of making vinyl records, sustained a major fire yesterday and burned down. Loudwire reports: The Desert Sun confirmed that the fire began in the 15,000-square-foot building at 8am Feb. 6. There were multiple explosions reported, and 82 firefighters responded to the scene. The company posted a statement on their website addressing the event, as well as the uncertainty of its future: "To all our wonderful customers. It is with great sadness we report the Apollo Masters manufacturing and storage facility had a devastating fire and was completely destroyed. The best news is all of our employees are safe. We are uncertain of our future at this point and are evaluating options as we try to work through this difficult time. Thank you for all of the support over the years and the notes of encouragement and support we have received from you all."

The only other plant, MDC, is located in Japan. While there has not been an immediate impact, an eventual shortage of lacquers can lead to disruptions in the vinyl production process for companies all over.

China's Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo and Vivo are joining forces to create a platform for developers outside China to upload apps onto all of their app stores simultaneously, in a move analysts say is meant to challenge the dominance of Google's Play store. From a report: The four companies are ironing out kinks in what is known as the Global Developer Service Alliance (GDSA). The platform aims to make it easier for developers of games, music, movies and other apps to market their apps in overseas markets, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The GDSA was initially aiming to launch in March, sources said, although it is not clear how that will be affected by the recent coronavirus outbreak. A prototype website says the platform will initially cover nine "regions" including India, Indonesia and Russia.

For the first time, Google revealed that YouTube generated $15.1 billion in ad revenue in fiscal 2019, including $4.7 billion in the fourth quarter. The company disclosed the numbers in its quarterly earnings report, which also included fiscal 2019. From The Hollywood Reporter: Until now, Google and parent company Alphabet had folded YouTube's revenue in with Google. "To provide further insight into our business and the opportunities ahead, we're now disclosing our revenue on a more granular basis, including for Search, YouTube ads and Cloud," said Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat in a statement. Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts Monday on the company's quarterly earnings call that its YouTube TV streaming bundle now has more than two million subscribers, and that YouTube Music and YouTube Premium now have more than 20 million paid subscribers. The unit's subscription revenue now has a $3 billion annual run rate, Pichai said.

YouTube has seen enormous growth, according to the newly-released numbers. In fiscal 2017, YouTube generated $8.15 billion in ad revenue, followed by $11.15 billion fiscal 2018. In other words, YouTube's ad revenue has nearly doubled over the past two years. Google said that YouTube saw $3.6 billion in revenue in Q4 2018. The disclosure reveals just how big of a business YouTube is. The ad-supported video site, which was founded in 2005 and sold to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, has long been viewed as one of Google's crown jewels, with an enormous share of the ad-supported streaming video market. Netflix, for comparison, had $20.1 billion in revenue in fiscal 2019, almost entirely from subscriptions. Alphabet also broke out revenue from its Google Cloud unit for the first time, revealing that the division generated $8.9 billion in revenue last year. Overall, Alphabet hit $161.8 billion in revenue in fiscal 2019, including $46.1 billion in Q4.

At a Chicago coffee shop, "the cashier wouldn't take my order until I took off my AirPod!" complained a patron named Kevin. "And it was only in one ear! Am I the asshole here?"

ZDNet's "Technically Incorrect" column shares the answer he got from the "Salty Waitress" etiquette columnist at a foodie site called The Takeout: She replied, in part: "I am trying hard here to give you the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps you were in the middle of a very important phone call/podcast/guitar riff that could not be paused for the 30 or so seconds it takes to order a cup of coffee. In which case, you very politely step aside to conclude your business and then order your coffee...."

The Salty Waitress was undeterred in her resistance. She explained that if Kevin wanted to embrace technology, he could push off to Starbucks or Dunkin', order via an app and pick up his coffee without the burden of any human interaction. She then warmed to her theme, mustering a fine froth: "Because that's the thing, sweetie pie. THE CASHIER IS A HUMAN BEING! JUST LIKE YOU! Their role in your life may be temporary and functional, but they've got feelings and hopes and dreams and aspirations. And like you (probably) they would like your full and undivided attention while you ask them to perform a service for you."

She explained that this is true for all service workers and should, indeed, work both ways.

I was glad she said that, as I've had two visits to AT&T stores where the salespeople were wearing a single AirPod and listening to their own music.

CNET shares "the latest, strangest news from the world of Elon Musk...electronic dance music?" It's the second song he's released on Emo G Records' Soundcloud page following 2019's RIP Harambe.

On Thursday, Musk posted a series of tweets suggesting he'd written a song he was calling "Don't doubt yer vibe" and was releasing it on Emo G Records. There was a hint that we should expect some EDM coming our way. Never one to shy away from a meme that will undoubtedly be plastered across the internet, it seems Musk has followed through. "Don't Doubt ur Vibe" was posted to his Twitter account at 10:20 p.m. PT on Jan. 30.

Musk later tweeted he both wrote the lyrics and performed the vocals. Those lyrics are:

"Don't doubt your vibe,
because it's true.
Don't doubt your vibe,
because it's you...."

The album art also ties into Musk's passions -- it depicts a Cybertruck soaring over Mars, the planet he wants to put a million people on by 2050.
According to a retweet on his Twitter feed, Musk has also been telling his life story in the "Third Row Tesla" podcast. Part 1, which aired last week, was two hours and 16 minutes long, and Part 2 -- aired Thursday -- was another 76 minutes.

Online subscriptions sure sound cheap, but what do a few bucks a month to watch TV shows, store photos online and stream music add up to? Quite a lot, it turns out. From a report: In 2019, we each spent $640 on digital subscriptions like streaming video and music services, cloud storage, dating apps and online productivity tools, according to an analysis for The New York Times by Mint, the online budgeting tool owned by Intuit, using data from millions of its users. That was up about 7 percent from $598 in 2017. We increased our spending the most last year on streaming TV services, paying $170 to subscribe to the likes of Netflix, Hulu and new entrants like Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus. While that was far cheaper than most traditional cable TV packages, which cost roughly $1,200 a year, it was up 30 percent from the $130 we spent on streaming TV services in 2017. Our spending on digital subscriptions is likely to only rise as more of our possessions become connected to the internet, like our television sets, home security systems and cars. At the same time, it will become harder and harder to keep track of all of the services we pay for.

At a press event in San Francisco today, Google announced a feature that'll let people use their phones to both transcribe and translate a conversation in real time into a language that isn't being spoken. The tool will be available for the Google Translate app in the coming months, said Bryan Lin, an engineer on the Translate team. CNET reports: Right now the feature is being tested in several languages, including Spanish, German and French. Lin said the computing will take place on Google's servers and not on people's devices. The search giant announced the tool at a press event in San Francisco, where the company showed off other artificial intelligence projects, including initiatives in health tech and touch controls for fabrics.

The search giant has also talked a lot lately about how AI should be developed in the future. Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said last week that he thinks AI should be regulated, to prevent the potential negative consequences of things like deepfakes and facial recognition. "There is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated," Pichai wrote in an op-ed for the Financial Times. "It is too important not to. The only question is how to approach it." [...] At the event, Google also previewed a handful of other AI initiatives. One project is called I/O Braid, which lets people control a device by interacting with a wire. For example, you could start, stop and control the volume of music on your phone by twisting or pinching the fabric wire of the earbuds. Another project, part of Google Health, was aimed at trying to detect anemia in patients.

Longtime Slashdot reader SpaceGhost writes: Per Engadget, Ms. Eilish and her older brother (Finneas O'Connell) produced her massively popular album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? with minimal studio gear out of a bedroom studio in their parents' house. They used equipment that many aspiring artists could afford (about $1,000 worth of Yamaha monitors for instance, and at first a $100 microphone.) The 18-year-old singer swept all four of the night's biggest prizes -- Best New Artist, Song of the Year, Record of the Year and Album of the Year -- along with honors for Best Pop Vocal Album.

According to a Pro Sound Network interview with O'Connell, their production setup included a pair of $200 Yamaha HS5 nearfield monitors with a $450 H8S subwoofer, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 interface and Apple's Logic Pro X. The duo reportedly used to record with a $99 Audio Technica AT2020 mic. "The stems (that is, individual layers of instruments and music) were then sent to mix engineer Rob Kinelski to compile," adds Engadget.