Over the weekend, Google Search was caught allegedly copying song lyrics from Genius.com. In response, Google published a long explanation of how lyrics in Search work and said that they will add attribution to note which third-party service is supplying the lyrics. 9to5Google reports: When you look up a song in Search, Google often returns a YouTube video with the Knowledge Panel featuring lyrics, links to streaming services, and other artist/album/release/genre info. A query that explicitly asks for "lyrics" will display the full text as the first item at the top of Google.com. The Wall Street Journal over the weekend reported on an accusation that Search was taking content from Genius. According to Google today, it does "not crawl or scrape websites to source these lyrics." When available, Google will pay music publishers for the right to display lyrics. However, in most cases, publishers do not have digital transcripts, with the search engine instead turning to third-party "lyrics content providers."

Google today reiterated that it's asking partners to "investigate the issue," with the third-party -- and not Google directly -- likely at fault for scraping Genius content. Meanwhile, Knowledge Panels in Search will soon gain attribution to note who is supplying digital lyrics text. "Google today reiterated that it's asking partners to 'investigate the issue,' with the third-party -- and not Google directly -- likely at fault for scraping Genius content," Google said in a blog post. "Meanwhile, Knowledge Panels in Search will soon gain attribution to note who is supplying digital lyrics text."

There's now a new $175 million remake of Godzilla: King of the Monsters. I loved it, Msmash walked out of it, and BeauHD didn't bother to go see it. The movie performed poorly at the box office, but I'm not the only person who still likes Godzilla. There's also a new anime version on Netflix. And critic Matt Zoller Seitz (once a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism) is calling the new film "a frequently astounding movie... its imperfections are compensated by magnificence."

For all its crash-and-bash action, this is a real science fiction movie that goes to the trouble of not merely creating a world, but thinking about the implications of its images and predicaments. It cares what the people in it must feel and think about their situation, and how it might weigh on them every day even when they aren't talking about it amongst themselves. It's also suffused with a spiritual or theological awareness, and takes it all as seriously as recent DC films took their comparisons of caped wonders to figures from the Old Testament and ancient mythology...

[A]t the level of image, sound and music, "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" is a frequently brilliant film that earnestly grapples with the material it presents... It deploys state-of-the-art moviemaking tools to try to return audiences to a stage of childlike terror and delight. Arthur C. Clarke famously observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This movie is magic.
No expense was spared. For fans of the franchise there was even a quick Easter egg about what happened to the Mothra twins when they grew up. And of course the film-makers included Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla" song in the closing credits -- an over-the-top remake featuring a chanting Japanese taiko drum group, members of the band Dethklok from Metalocalypse, and heavy-metal drumming legend Gene Hoglan. The film's composer called it "perhaps the most audacious piece of music I have ever produced, jammed to the breaking point...It is complete musical madness."

But was it all for nothing? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.

Does anyone still like Godzilla?

"Genius.com says its traffic is dropping because, for the past several years, Google has been publishing lyrics on its own platform, with some of them lifted directly from the music site," reports the Wall Street Journal: Google denies doing anything nefarious. Still, Genius's complaints offer a window into the challenges small tech companies can face when the unit of Alphabet Inc. starts offering competing services on its platform... Genius said it notified Google as far back as 2017, and again in an April letter, that copied transcriptions appear on Google's website. The April letter, a copy of which was viewed by the Journal, warned that reuse of Genius's transcriptions breaks the Genius.com terms of service and violates antitrust law.

"Over the last two years, we've shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius," said Ben Gross, Genius's chief strategy officer, in an email message.... Genius said it found more than 100 examples of songs on Google that came from its site. Starting around 2016, Genius made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics' apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song. When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words "Red Handed."

Genius is a privately held company, and its investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Emagen Investment Group and the rapper Nas... Genius clients include the music streaming website Spotify Technology SA and Apple Inc.
The article also notes March study from web-analytics firm Jumpshot Inc. which found 62% of mobile searches on Google now don't result in the user clicking through to a non-Google web site.

An anonymous reader quotes Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan: Ambient computing is real. It's the next megatrend in computing.... To interact in an "ambient computing" context means to not care and not even necessarily know where exactly the devices are that you're interacting with. When IoT devices and sensors are all around us, and artificial intelligence can understand human contexts for what's happening and act accordingly and in our interests, then ambient computing will have arrived...

As with many technology revolutions, including augmented reality and AI, the buzzword ambient will precede the actual technology by many years. In fact, the marketing buzzword is suddenly here in full force. The actual technologies? Not so much. Instead, we're on the brink of a revolution in what you might call "semi-ambient computing...."

Rumors are circulating that Google's next smartphones, the Pixel 4 line, may come with Soli built in. I told you in January about Google's Project Soli, which may be called the "Aware" sensor or feature in the Pixel 4 -- again, according to unconfirmed rumors. Soli or Aware capability means the Pixel 4 may accept in-the-air hand gestures, such as "skip" and "silence" during music playback. The new Google "wave" is a hand gesture. The ability to wave away music with a hand gesture brings the smartphone into the semi-ambient computing era. It basically adds natural hand gestures to natural-language processing.... Google also briefly talked last year about a healthcare assistant called Dr. Liz., which was described by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as an ambient computing virtual assistant for doctors. We'll see if Google ever ships a Dr. Liz product...

Yes, ambient computing is real, and the Next Big Thing, showing up first in business, enterprises and healthcare. But for now, the term ambient computing will be misapplied. It's a buzzword that will be stapled to every semi-ambient computing product and service that comes out over the next few years.
The article predicts we'll eventually see ambient computing arriving in cars, grocery stores, smart glasses -- and notes a Microsoft job listing for its "Ambient Computing & Robotics team" describing "the era where computer vision, AI-based cognition, and autonomous electro-mechanicals pervade the workplace."

Computerworldd adds that Microsoft "was mocked for its 'Clippy' assistant, which the company released in 1996 as a way to provide friendly help for people using Microsoft Office. In the future, Microsoft may release what will essentially be a Clippy that works, because it will understand human context through AI."

In the future, we won't be listening to our favorite bands or artists, we'll be listening to custom made sounds that are tailored to our mood. At least, that's what billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla believes. From a report: "I actually think 10 years from now, you won't be listening to music," is a thing venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said onstage today during a fireside chat at Creative Destruction Lab's second annual Super Session event. Instead, he believes we'll be listening to custom song equivalents that are automatically designed specifically for each individual, and tailored to their brain, their listening preferences and their particular needs.

Shazam, the Apple-owned app that helps users identify songs playing around them, can now recognize songs you're listening to through your headphones when using an Android phone or tablet. From a report: Acquired by Apple for $400 million last year, the company introduced a feature called 'Pop-Up Shazam' to its Android app recently, which when enabled, works with any other Android app to track and identify songs playing externally or internally on the phone. It's a feature that many users have requested for years. Prior to this, when a user would chance upon a music track in say a YouTube video, they only had two inconvenient ways to shazam the song. They could either unplug the earphones from the phone and let the audio play through the built-in speakers, or draw an earpiece close to the mic of the phone. The new feature enables Shazam to track the audio signal beaming off of other apps, thereby not completely relying on just output from the surrounding and a phone's speaker. The app is tapping the audio signal by using a persistent notification that floats around and could be dragged -- like the ones from Facebook Messenger -- and can be activated by a single tap.

Radiohead have released a vast collection of unreleased tracks made during the sessions for 1997 album OK Computer, after a MiniDisc archive owned by frontman Thom Yorke was hacked last week by an unnamed person, who reportedly held the recordings to ransom for $150,000. From a report: The band have now made the 18 MiniDisc recordings, most of them around an hour in length, available on Bandcamp for $23. Proceeds will go to climate activists Extinction Rebellion. The band's guitarist Jonny Greenwood confirmed the hack, and said: âoeInstead of complaining -- much -- or ignoring it, we're releasing all 18 hours on Bandcamp in aid of Extinction Rebellion. Just for the next 18 days. So for $23 you can find out if we should have paid that ransom. Never intended for public consumption (though some clips did reach the cassette in the OK Computer reissue) it's only tangentially interesting. And very, very long. Not a phone download." Thom Yorke wrote of the 1.8 gigabyte collection: "It's not v interesting. There's a lot of it 0... as it's out there it may as well be out there until we all get bored and move on."

The Supreme Court will consider whether a black television producer can pursue racial discrimination claims against Comcast for declining to carry his programming channels on its cable system (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). The Wall Street Journal reports: The Comcast case stems from the cable operator's decision not to carry Pets.TV, Recipes.TV and other channels from Entertainment Studios Networks Inc. The Los Angeles company is solely owned by Byron Allen, who gained celebrity as co-host of "Real People," a 1980s reality show. Comcast has carried channels owned mostly or substantially by African-Americans, such as Magic Johnson's Aspire and Sean "Diddy" Combs's music channel, Revolt TV, as well as Black Entertainment Television, whose African-American founder, Robert Johnson, sold to Viacom in 2001.

The suit, filed under Reconstruction-era law affording "the same right" to contract "as is enjoyed by white citizens," alleges, however, that Comcast discriminated against "100% African American" owned media such as Entertainment Studios. A federal appeals court in San Francisco allowed the suit to proceed. "If discriminatory intent plays any role in a defendant's decision not to contract with a plaintiff, even if it is merely one factor and not the sole cause of the decision, then that plaintiff has not enjoyed the same right as a white citizen," Judge Milan Smith wrote for the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Comcast denies the allegations and says it was concerned the Entertainment Studios programming wouldn't draw enough of an audience to justify allotting it bandwidth. The cable operator argues that federal law requires the plaintiff to show that he or she would have gotten the contract absent racial bias.

Most people know all too well that it's against the law to share a pirated copy of a movie or TV-show. Law and ethics are not always in sync. Not even among those who are schooled as lawyers. From a report: This is the conclusion of an intriguing new study conducted among Harvard lawyers by Prof. Dariusz Jemielniak and Dr. Jerome Hergueux. The research, published in The Information Society journal, found that many lawyers believe that casual piracy is ethically acceptable. The researchers polled the perceptions of more than 100 international Masters of Law (LL.M.) students at Harvard, who all have a law degree. They were asked to evaluate how acceptable various piracy scenarios are, on a five-point scale going from very unacceptable to very acceptable.

The piracy scenarios ranged from downloading a TV-show or movie which isn't legally available, through pirating music to simply save money, to downloading content for educational or even commercial purposes. In total, 19 different alternatives were presented. While the researchers expected that lawyers would have conservative ethical positions when it comes to piracy, the opposite was true. The average of all answers was 3.23, which means that it leans toward the "acceptable" point of the scale. "We find that digital file sharing ranks relatively high in terms of ethical acceptability among our population of lawyers -- with the only notable exception being infringing copyright with a commercial purpose," the researchers conclude.

Technology services provider Probrand has carried out a study at a cyber expo attended by UK security professionals, where attendees voluntarily shared sensitive data including their name, date of birth and favourite football team -- all to get their hands on a free donut. From a report: "We wanted to put this theory to the test and see just how willing people were to give up their data," says Mark Lomas, technical architect at Probrand. "We started by asking conversational questions such as 'How are you finding the day? Got any plans for after the event?' If someone happened to mention they were collecting their kids from school, we then asked what their names and ages were. One individual even showed a photograph of their children." As part of the task, Probrand also asked more direct questions such as, 'Which football team do you support?', 'What type of music are you into?' and 'What is your favourite band?' Whether asking questions transparently as part of a survey, or trying to adopt more hacker-type methods, they were alarmed to find how easy it was to obtain personal data -- which many people may be using as the basis of their passwords.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Apple on Monday announced the next version of MacOS. Called Catalina, the next major revision of the MacOS will replace the iTunes app with three dedicated media apps: Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and Apple TV. The update coming this fall will also let Mac users run iPad apps they can download through the Mac App Store. Using the new Project Catalyst development tool, third-party iPad developers will be able to easily bring their iPad apps for the Mac, Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said. Apple's goal for developers is to help them build apps without a lot of extra effort that can run on both iOS and MacOS devices. And Mac users will benefit by getting access to an expanded collection of MacOS apps. MacOS Catalina will also let you use an iPad as a second screen. Developer betas for MacOS Catalina and iOS 13 will be available today. Public betas will come in July, and both desktop and mobile OSes will ship in the fall.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After long anticipation, Apple finally announced today that it's killing iTunes at its developer conference WWDC held in San Jose. Instead, it will be replaced by three new apps: Music, TV, and the Podcasts app. You can sync your iPhone directly through the finder app.

samleecole writes: Apple's AirPods are a tragedy. Ecologically, socially, economically -- they're a capitalist disaster. The opposite of AirPods, then, is this extremely punk pair of DIY wireless earbuds that someone on Reddit hacked together using an old pair of wired Apple headphones and some hot glue. "I started this project roughly two months ago when my friend got a new pair of AirPods for his birthday and I thought to myself, 'that's quite a lot of money for something I can make at home,'" Sam Cashbook, who is 15, told Motherboard in a Reddit message.

Cashook started watching videos of people making their own AirPods, but mostly found people chopping the wires off of Apple headphones as a joke. He decided to take his own approach. He bought a hands-free bone conduction headset from eBay, and took apart the casing to reveal the electronics. Then, he desoldered the wires from the original speaker in the headset, and connected his old Apple earbud speaker to the headset's printed circuit board. Maybe a little uglier, but the headphones work well, he said. The set has buttons for power, pausing music, volume controls and skipping tracks, and the battery is rechargeable.

While it was initially reported that iTunes would live on in macOS 10.15, it now looks like the app will be retired, over 18 years after it was introduced by the late Steve Jobs at Macworld on January 9, 2001. MacRumors reports: Apple will be replacing iTunes with standalone Music, TV, and Podcasts apps in the next major version of macOS, expected to be unveiled at WWDC 2019 next week, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman: "iTunes has been the way Apple users listen to music, watch movies and TV shows, hear podcasts, and manage their devices for almost two decades. This year, Apple is finally ready to move into a new era. The company is launching a trio of new apps for the Mac -- Music, TV, and Podcasts -- to replace iTunes. That matches Apple's media app strategy on iPhones and iPads. Without iTunes, customers can manage their Apple gadgets through the Music app."

This information lines up with a recent report from 9to5Mac's Guilherme Rambo, who claimed that iTunes will be renamed to "Music" on the Mac. In other words, iTunes is going away and will be replaced by the new Music app, which is expected to become the new utility for syncing and managing Apple devices.

From a report: Recently, a musician signed to a major indie label told me they were owed up to $40,000 in song royalties they would never be able to collect. It wasn't that they had missed out on payments for a single song -- it was that they had missed out on payments for 70 songs, going back at least six years. The problem, they said, was metadata. In the music world, metadata most commonly refers to the song credits you see on services like Spotify or Apple Music, but it also includes all the underlying information tied to a released song or album, including titles, songwriter and producer names, the publisher(s), the record label, and more. That information needs to be synchronized across all kinds of industry databases to make sure that when you play a song, the right people are identified and paid. And often, they aren't.

Metadata sounds like one of the smallest, most boring things in music. But as it turns out, it's one of the most important, complex, and broken, leaving many musicians unable to get paid for their work. "Every second that goes by and it's not fixed, I'm dripping pennies," said the musician. Entering the correct information about a song sounds like it should be easy enough, but metadata problems have plagued the music industry for decades. Not only are there no standards for how music metadata is collected or displayed, there's no need to verify the accuracy of a song's metadata before it gets released, and there's no one place where music metadata is stored. Instead, fractions of that data is kept in hundreds of different places across the world. As a result, the problem is way bigger than a name being misspelled when you click a song's credits on Spotify. Missing, bad, or inconsistent song metadata is a crisis that has left, by some estimations, billions on the table that never gets paid to the artists who earned that money.

As it faces both an antitrust lawsuit with huge implications and a formal EU investigation over its App Store tactics, Apple today defended itself against Spotify and other critics of the company's massively successful software storefront. From a report: "Today, the App Store is more vibrant and innovative than ever, offering equal opportunities to developers to deliver their apps and services across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch," reads a new page at Apple's website titled "App Store -- Principles and Practices." "We're proud of the store we've built and the way we've built it." Apple says it has paid out $120 billion to App Store developers worldwide since the platform launched, and the company again touts the quick approval process and efficient work of its app review team, which now "represents 81 languages across three time zones." Sixty percent of the approximately 100,000 apps and app updates reviewed each week are approved, with rejections mostly stemming from "minor bugs, followed by privacy concerns." Apple notes that anyone who feels that they were unjustly rejected can have their situation looked at by the App Store Review Board.

But the most interesting parts of this new site relate to competition. In one section, Apple goes over the core, built-in apps on iOS and lists the many popular third-party options that are available from the App Store in each category as alternatives. The company fails to mention that none of these apps can be chosen as the default messaging app, maps service, email client, web browser, or music player. That limitation isn't always a deal-breaker -- just ask WhatsApp, which is more popular than iMessage in many countries -- but it still gives Apple's services an advantage. [...] The message here seems to be that if companies don't like Apple's policies, they've got other options. Go find your riches on Android or make a Roku app.

Three iTunes customers have filed a lawsuit against Apple accusing the company of sending personal user data to third parties to boost its revenues. "It is alleged that Apple is selling, renting or disclosing full names, addresses, genres of music and specific titles of songs purchased on the iTunes Store app on iPhones without consent or notification," reports CNET. From the report: According to documents filed with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday, Apple does this "to supplement its revenues and enhance the formidability of its brand in the eyes of mobile application developers," the lawsuit alleges. "None of the information pertaining to the music you purchase on your iPhone stays on your iPhone," the lawsuit further alleges. "While Apple profits handsomely from its unauthorized sale, rental, transmission and/or disclosure of its customers' Personal Listening Information, it does so at the expense of its customers' privacy and statutory rights."

First reported by Bloomberg, the plaintiffs -- Leigh Wheaton from Rhode Island, and Jill Paul and Trevor Paul from Michigan -- allege third parties then use this data to append several more categories, including age, gender, income, educational background and marital status. This "enhanced" data is then allegedly sold on to other third parties, the lawsuit says. The plaintiffs are representing other iTunes customers in their respective states, seeking $250 for Rhode Island class-action members under the Video, Audio, And Publication Rentals Privacy Act and $5,000 for Michigan class-action members under the Preservation of Personal Privacy Act.

harrymcc writes: In the 1960s, Bob Moog helped invent electronic music as we know it by popularizing the synthesizer. He died in 2005, but Moog synthesizers are still widely used by top musical acts. And now his life, work, and legacy are the subject of a new museum in Asheville, NC, his hometown. Over at Fast Company, Sean Captain took a look at the museum, Moog's accomplishments, and the history of music produced with his instruments -- from the classical blockbuster "Switched-On Bach" onwards.

Does the overcrowded and cut-throat music streaming business have room for an additional player? The world's most valuable startup certainly thinks so. From a report: Chinese conglomerate ByteDance, valued at more than $75 billion, is working on a music streaming service, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The company, which operates popular app TikTok, has held discussions with music labels in recent months to launch the app as soon as the end of this quarter, one of the sources said. The app will offer both a premium and an ad-supported free tier, one of the sources said. Bloomberg, which first wrote about the premium app, reported that ByteDance is targeting emerging markets with its new music app. Further reading: Chinese Video Sensation TikTok Surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube in Downloads in October 2018.

Four years after announcing a 9% tax on streaming entertainment services, the city has collected $2 million in sales tax from Sony and two online ticketing services, making it the first major city to collect such a tax successfully. CBS News reports: The city collected $1.2 million from Sony in January, on services including PlayStation Video live events and purchases of music and video, according to Bloomberg. It also collected nearly $800,000 from Eventbrite and $70,000 from Fandango, the outlet said. The levy has been dubbed the "Netflix tax" because it targets streaming video services in addition to gaming and other digital entertainment.

While Chicago seems to be the first city to successfully tax streaming services, it probably won't be the last. Rhode Island's governor proposed a budget this year that includes new sales taxes on digital videos, books and music. Pennsylvania enacted a similar tax in 2016 and is set to start enforcing it this summer. Chicago's expanded digital entertainment and services tax could raise up to $12 million per year, according to estimates issued at the time it passed in 2015. A lawsuit filed by a libertarian group on behalf of Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime customers is currently in the appeal stage.