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.

The commercial rollout of Waymo's driver-less taxi service in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix with a population of 260,000 people, has more than a thousand customers already signed up -- including the mayor, reports Forbes: Each of the several hundred Waymo One vans in Chandler arrives with a safety driver at the wheel. But that may be more about public relations than technical necessity. During a recent trip, the human in the driver's seat didn't take her hands off her lap during a trip from the library to a shopping mall a few miles away in light, late morning traffic. "Part of it's just education and getting people really comfortable right out of the gate," a Waymo spokeswoman said. There's another piece of the Arizona program that's closer to Waymo's long-term plans of full autonomy. A few hundred people are getting rides in Pacificas with no safety driver through its Early Rider program, an earlier test rollout. Unlike Waymo One users, Early Riders have to sign nondisclosure agreements and aren't allowed to discuss the program.

Early Riders are also a way for the company to observe how people adapt to a robotic service and the options they want. Recently Waymo integrated Google Play music into the Waymo One app to let riders automatically listen to their preferred songs and artists. Video streaming, games and other in-vehicle options that leverage Google's many services are likely additions, though Waymo won't verify that... "Beyond the initial shock of not seeing a person in the vehicle, which we're getting used to, protocols are being established," says Chandler Police Chief Sean Duggan. "As a police officer, one of the first questions that gets asked is 'who gets the ticket? How do you contact whomever?'" There have been a "half a dozen" collisions involving a Waymo vehicle, Duggan says, but not ones where the Waymo vehicle was at fault. In fact, the department hasn't issued any citations to Waymo in the past couple of years...

Ahead of the commercial launch, there were reports that the vans irritate local commuters because they take too long to make left turns and of assaults on Waymo vans including rock throwing, a slashed tire and even an individual who aimed a gun at one. "People tend to be frustrated when a vehicle is actually obeying the law" by stopping completely at intersections and making turns cautiously, Dugan said. "That happens regardless of if it's self-driving or a person."
Forbes describes Waymo's presence in Chandler as "a test case for the entire industry," citing an interesting perspective from Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AgeLab. "The view for companies like Waymo is 'we have to be able to show functional safety. Otherwise, we can't protect our decisions in a court of law, where this will all end up long term.'"

"Elon is working mostly on the deep neural net side where a good chunk of it is a black box. Documenting, defending that in court is going to be tough."

Jason Koebler shares Vice's analysis of demoparties -- "gatherings where programmers showcase artistic audiovisual works, known as demos, after a day- or days-long coding marathon that is part bacchanal and part competition" -- starting with a visit to New York's Synchrony. I had arrived just in time to catch the end of a set by the electronic musician Melody Loveless, who was at a folding table near the front of the room writing code that generated the music. These sorts of live coding performances have been a staple of demoparties -- gatherings organized by and for the creative computing underground -- for decades... Demos are often made by teams of programmers and are almost always rendered in real time (as opposed to, say, an animated movie, which is a pre-rendered recording). Demoparty competitions, or compos, are generally divided into categories where demo submissions must adhere to certain restrictions. For example, some compos only allow demos that were made on a Commodore 64 computer or demos that were created using under 4,000 bytes of data. In every case, however, the point of the competition is to push computing hardware to its limits in the service of digital art...

Given the abundance of digital art institutions in New York -- Eyebeam, Rhizome, LiveCode.NYC, and the School for Poetic Computation -- the lack of demoparties is conspicuous and in stark contrast to the European demoscene, which boasts dozens of annual demoparties, some of which attract thousands of participants. With this discrepancy in mind, I tagged along with the Synchrony crew this year in pursuit of an answer to a deceptively simple question -- who killed the American demoscene...?
The article traces the demo scene back to the "cracktros" which introduced pirated Commodore 64 video games (and their associated "copyparties") on floppy disks in the 1980s. Eventually this even led to police raids, but "The crackdown on software piracy was not evenly spread throughout Europe, however. Countries like the Netherlands, Greece, Finland, Sweden, and Norway didn't have strict software piracy laws, if they had any at all, which allowed the warez scene to flourish there." And by the early 1990s games "became a taboo when the community started defining its borders and aggressively distancing itself from other communities occupying the same computer hobbyist domain," wrote Markku Reunanen, a lecturer at Aalto University, in 2014.

Vice adds that "Although the demoscene has many elements in common with the warez scene from which it emerged, it differentiated itself by emphasizing technically challenging aesthetics. Whereas software cracking was largely pragmatic and gaming was about entertainment, the demoscene was about creating computer art that was difficult to produce at the level of the code, but also visually and aurally pleasing to consume. It was, in short, a competitive form of digital art.... Today, the fundamental aspects of the demoscene are the same. Demoparties are still organized around a competition and remain an almost exclusively European phenomenon. Demosceners still police the boundaries of their discipline vis-a-vis gaming and some sceners continue to work exclusively with retro machines like the C64 and Amiga."

Ben Sisario, American author, academic, and journalist who covers the music industry for The New York Times, shares why he still likes to list to compact discs: I try to keep an eye on all the major platforms out there, which means regularly poking around on about a dozen apps. My go-to sources are Spotify, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and Mixcloud, which has excellent D.J.-style mixes and to me feels more human than most. At home I have a Sonos Play:5 speaker, which plays streaming music and podcasts, and is a piece of cake to use. I also have Google Chromecast Audio, a little plug-in device (now discontinued) that allows me to send high-fidelity streams to my stereo. It sounds better that way, but it's not nearly as easy to use as the Sonos. To be honest, my preferred way to listen to music is on CD, as unfashionable as that might be. You push a button, the music plays, and then it's over -- no ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms! Do you share the same sentiment as Sisario, or have you gone all in on music streaming? Why or why not?

dryriver writes: BBC Culture reports -- with some neat graphs in the article -- on two different scientific studies that both found that chart-topping pop music has been getting steadily sadder and angrier since the 1950s, and that both song lyrics and the musical tone in hit songs are sadder, more fearful, and angrier than ever before in history. Lior Shamir of Lawrence Technical University found the following trends in his algorithmic analysis of Billboard Hot 100 hit song lyrics: "Expressions of anger and disgust roughly doubled over those 65 years, for instance, while fear increased by more than 50%. Remarkably, today's songs are even more aggressive and fearful than in punk's heyday. One probable reason for this is the growing influence of rap music, which, like punk, has reflected social unrest and feelings of disenfranchisement. Sadness, meanwhile, remained stable until the 80s, then steadily increased until the early 2010s, while joy, confidence and openness all steadily declined."

In the second independent study, Natalia Komarova, a University of California Irvine mathematician who had been shocked by the negativity of her daughter's own music taste, found the following: "Looking through half a million songs released in the UK between 1985 and 2015, Komarova and colleagues found that the tone of the music had become less joyful since 1985 -- just as Lior Shamir's analysis of the lyrics had also suggested. Interestingly, Komarova found that the danceability -- as measured by features of the rhythm -- had increased alongside the negative feelings. So, despite the negative feelings they expressed, the songs were also more likely to get people moving. Just consider Robyn's hit Dancing on my Own -- the pulsing synths and percussion belying the lyrics of loneliness and isolation. In terms of albums, Komarova also points to Beyonce's Lemonade and Charlie XCX's Pop 2 mix-tape as being full of dark but danceable tracks."

Vice's "Future Relics" column asks what people 1,000 years from now will think when they keep discovering abandoned Airpods from 2019: For roughly 18 months, AirPods play music, or podcasts, or make phone calls. Then the lithium-ion batteries will stop holding much of a charge, and the AirPods will slowly become unusable. They can't be repaired because they're glued together. They can't be thrown out, or else the lithium-ion battery may start a fire in the garbage compactor. They can't be easily recycled, because there's no safe way to separate the lithium-ion battery from the plastic shell. Instead, the AirPods sit in your drawer forever...

According to the headphones review team at Rtings.com, AirPods are "below-average" in terms of sound quality. According to people on every social media platform, AirPods are a display of wealth. But more than a pair of headphones, AirPods are an un-erasable product of culture and class. People in working or impoverished economic classes are responsible for the life-threatening, exhaustive, violent work of removing their parts from the ground and assembling them. Meanwhile, people in the global upper class design and purchase AirPods.

Even if you only own AirPods for a few years, the earth owns them forever. When you die, your bones will decompose in less than a century, but the plastic shell of AirPods won't decompose for at least a millennia. Thousands of years in the future, if human life or sentient beings exist on earth, maybe archaeologists will find AirPods in the forgotten corners of homes. They'll probably wonder why they were ever made, and why so many people bought them. But we can also ask ourselves those same questions right now.

Why did we make technology that will live for 18 months, die, and never rot?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Amazon is already capable of offering same-day and next-day delivery to 72% of the total U.S. population, including almost all of the households (95% or more) in 16 of the wealthiest and most populated states and Washington, D.C., according to a report published in March by RBC Capital Markets. The vast delivery network is the result of significant investments over the past four years, a period during which Amazon built out fulfillment centers across the country, nearly tripling its U.S. logistics infrastructure, RBC said. Amazon has added roughly double the amount of distribution space Home Depot currently owns.

That means the company has a huge head start in fulfilling its plan laid out in its latest earnings report to shorten the current two-day free shipping plan by one day for Prime members, who pay $119 a year for fast delivery as well as services like unlimited music, access to the video catalog and exclusive deals. The map below from RBC shows the four-year change in Amazon's distribution footprint. It already covers most of the coastal cities, as well as Texas and major metropolitan areas in the Midwest.

The RIAA has obtained a subpoena from a Columbia federal court ordering Cloudflare to hand over the IP and email addresses and all other identifying information related to several allegedly infringing users. The RIAA notes it will use the information it receives to protect the rights of its member companies. From a report: The RIAA has a long history of going after, what it sees as, pirate sites. The problem, however, is that many owners of such sites operate anonymously. The group, therefore, often has to turn to third-party intermediaries to find out more. While some services may be willing to voluntarily share information with the music industry group, many don't. Cloudflare falls into the latter category. While the CDN service does voluntarily reveal the true hosting locations of some of its users, it doesn't share any personal info. At least, not without a subpoena. Luckily for rightsholders, getting a subpoena isn't very hard in the US. Under the DMCA, copyright holders only have to ask a court clerk for a signature to be able to demand the personal information of alleged copyright infringers. That's exactly what the RIAA did last week. In a letter sent by Mark McDevitt, the RIAA's vice president of online anti-piracy, the music group informs Cloudflare that it requests personal details including names, addresses and payment information relating to the operators of six domains, which are all Cloudflare users.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is facing an antitrust investigation that could have been predicted the moment it announced it was getting into the music streaming business four years ago. The company can most likely expect a similar investigation down the road after it launches its video streaming service later this year. The first investigation follows a complaint lodged by music streaming leader Spotify earlier this year, according to the Financial Times. Citing sources, the newspaper reported that the European Commission's competition division has officially opened the case, which will likely involve talking to other services that have been quietly chafing under Apple's App Store rules.

[...] One can debate the relative merits of Apple Music and Spotify in terms of their design, subscription models, and payment to artists. But the reality is that there is nothing revolutionary about Apple Music. Had it been launched by another startup, it certainly wouldn't have 56 million subscribers by now. In Silicon Valley, leveraging one's platform is standard practice and applauded. The EU takes a very different view. European regulators believe it is their job to protect consumers from such practices, which they argue harm innovation, and therefore indirectly limit choice.

The latest addition to Samsung's TV range is the Sero, a 43-inch TV that was designed with the millennial generation in mind and therefore pivots between horizontal and vertical orientations. From a report: It's a much smarter idea than the phrase "vertical TV" would lead you to believe. Acknowledging that most mobile content is vertical, Samsung says the Sero is designed to encourage young people to project more of their smartphone stuff onto the TV by allowing it to go vertical. Throwing in 4.1-channel, 60W speakers along with an integrated navy stand and a minimalist rear design, Samsung seems to hope this TV will function as both a music streaming hub and a handsome piece of furniture. When it's not used as a conventional TV or a phone enlarger, the Sero can also serve as a huge digital photo frame or a music visualizer, and Samsung's Bixby voice assistant will be on hand, too. Samsung intends to put the Sero on sale for 1.89m KRW (around $1,600) in its home market of South Korea at the end of May.

Amazon is in discussion with various large music rights-holders regarding the launch of a high fidelity music streaming platform -- and that at least one major record company has already agreed to license it, news outlet Music Business Worldwide reported this week. sqorbit shares a report: MBW has heard this whisper from several high-placed music industry sources, who say the price of Amazon's new tier will likely be in the region of $15 per month. It's expected to launch before the end of 2019. "It's a better bit rate, better than CD quality," said one source. "Amazon is working on it as we speak: they're currently scoping out how much catalog they can get from everyone and how they'll ingest it." The best known existing hi-def music streaming offering comes from TIDAL, whose TIDAL Hi-FI subscription tier costs $19.99 per month and offers CD-quality lossless streams at 44.1 kHz / 16 bit. In addition, TIDAL also offers a 'Masters' quality offering for pickier audiophiles, which presents thousands of albums at 96 kHz / 24 bit.

Luminary, a $100 million venture-backed podcasting company, will debut its service tomorrow. It offers two tiers to customers: subscription-based shows without ads or podcasts for free but deal with ads as a price. But it has already ruffled some feathers. From a report: When it rolls out to the public on iOS, Android, and the web, Luminary's podcast app will be missing some of the industry's biggest shows, including The New York Times's The Daily and Gimlet Media shows like Reply All and Homecoming. Shows by Anchor's network of smaller creators won't be on the app, nor will series from Parcast, both of which are owned by Spotify. By withholding their shows, the Times and Spotify are setting Luminary up to fail -- or at least struggle to get off on the right foot with users. It certainly seems like the first shot fired in the inevitable premium podcast war and could destabilize one of the first buzzy, well-funded entrants before it can make a dent in the industry. The decisions that happen now will reshape the way podcasts are distributed in the future.

According to a report by Brad Sams at Thurrott, Microsoft is going to expand its range of audio hardware with the introduction of a set of wireless earbuds. They will accompany the Surface Headphones, a premium-priced pair of wireless headphones that Microsoft released last year. Ars Technica reports: Microsoft has shipped earbuds before: the Zune media player came with earbuds with a feature that sounds simple but is actually ingenious: the earbuds were magnetic and would stick together back to back. The result? Much less cable tangling when you put them in your pocket or bag. Surface Headphones seem to be competitive with other noise-cancelling over-the-ear headphones: their wireless range is great, the noise cancelling is solid, and their volume and noise-cancelling dials are a joy to use, but their battery life and Bluetooth audio standard support are both weak. As such, Microsoft is not totally without experience in this area and has shown that it can engineer thoughtful, compelling designs. How the putative earbuds will stand out from the crowd remains to be seen, of course.

The existing Surface Headphones were codenamed Joplin, raising the question: Janis or Scott? The earbuds make the answer to that question clear; they're apparently codenamed Morrison, as in Jim, meaning that the over-the-ear headphones are clearly named for Janis. Sams says that "Surface Buds" has been mooted as their retail name, with a possible launch in 2019.

Freshly Exhumed writes: RCMP officers spotted a man driving with earbuds plugged into his iPhone. The phone was not in his hands nor on his lap, was not playing music or video, and the driver was not using it to talk to someone or navigate. The battery was, in fact, completely dead. Nonetheless, a judge has ruled that "by plugging the earbud wire into the iPhone, the defendant had enlarged the device, such that it included not only the iPhone (proper) but also attached speaker or earbuds," he wrote. "Since the earbuds were part of the electronic device and since the earbuds were in the defendant's ears, it necessarily follows that the defendant was holding the device (or part of the device) in a position in which it could be used, i.e. his ears." On the question of the battery, the judge said he relied on a 2015 precedent set in a Canadian provincial court, which says that holding an electronic device in a position where it could be used constitutes an offense, even if it is temporarily not working.

House lawmakers on Wednesday approved a Democrat-backed bill (alternative source) that would restore rules requiring AT&T, Verizon and other Internet providers to treat all Web traffic equally, marking an early step toward reversing one of the most significant deregulatory moves of the Trump era. From a report: But the net neutrality measure is likely to stall from here, given strong Republican opposition in the GOP-controlled Senate and the White House, where aides to President Trump this week recommended that he veto the legislation if it ever reaches his desk. The House's proposal, which passed by a vote of 232-190, would reinstate federal regulations that had banned AT&T, Verizon and other broadband providers from blocking or slowing down customers' access to websites. Adopted in 2015 during the Obama administration, these net neutrality protections had the backing of tech giants and startups as well as consumer advocacy groups, which together argued that strong federal open Internet protections were necessary to preserve competition and allow consumers unfettered access to movies, music and other content of their choice.

Developer and blogger Guilherme Rambo, writing for 9to5Mac: Fellow developer Steve Troughton-Smith recently expressed confidence about some evidence found indicating that Apple is working on new Music, Podcasts, and perhaps Books apps for macOS, to join the new TV app. I've been able to independently confirm that this is true. On top of that, I've been able to confirm with sources familiar with the development of the next major version of macOS -- likely 10.15 -- that the system will include standalone Music, Podcasts, and TV apps, but it will also include a major redesign of the Books app.

The new Books app will have a sidebar similar to the News app on the Mac, it will also feature a narrower title bar with different tabs for the Library, Book Store, and Audiobook Store. On the library tab, the sidebar will list the user's Books, Audiobooks, PDFs and other collections, including custom ones. The new Music, Podcasts, and TV apps will be made using Marzipan, Apple's new technology designed to facilitate the porting of iPad apps to the Mac without too many code changes. Further reading: Steven Troughton-Smith Thinks iTunes Breakup is Nigh (DaringFireball).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Chinese journalists and netizens recently found that Apple Music's Chinese streaming service censored a song by Hong Kong singer Jacky Cheung that references the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, an extremely politically sensitive topic for the Chinese Communist Party. The incident's 30th anniversary is coming up in June. Sophie Richardson, the China Director at Human Rights Watch, called the reported move "spectacularly craven." The Tiananmen protests are emblematic of a larger pro-democracy movement in China that was snuffed out by the Beijing government. Thousands of protesters were killed, but the exact numbers have themselves been censored by Chinese government officials.

Apple Music has also reportedly censored Anthony Wong and Denise Ho, two pro-democracy singers. After being noticed by Chinese netizens, the removals were reported by the Hong Kong Free Press and The Stand, two Hong Kong-based news outlets. Taiwan News also reported the censorship of Cheung's "Ren Jian Dao." The music remains available on Apple Music's North American products. "By removing a song referring the Tiananmen Massacre, @apple is actively participating in the Chinese Communist Party's agenda of scrubbing the colossal violations it has committed against the Chinese people from collective memory and rewriting history," tweeted Yaqiu Wang, a Chinese researcher with Human Rights Watch.

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: As YouTube battles misinformation catastrophes and discovers new ways people are abusing its system, the company is shifting toward more commercial, advertiser-friendly content at a speed its creator community hasn't seen before. The golden age of YouTube -- the YouTube of a million different creators all making enough money to support themselves by creating videos about doing what they love -- is over... By the end of 2016, when algorithm changes were creating headaches for some of the platform's biggest creators, people started announcing they had to take a break from the site they called home. YouTube wasn't what it was between 2011 and 2016... YouTube was exerting more control over what users saw and what videos would make money...

YouTube faced an escalating crisis of radicalization and sweeping conspiracy theories that had been ignored by executives for years. The company's first small efforts to address these serious issues -- promoting content from musicians, late-night shows, and recommending fewer independent creators -- would have huge secondary effects on the middle-tier creators who had once been the heart of the platform during its golden period. It pushed YouTube toward the exact same Hollywood content to which it had once been an alternative.... Even people outside of YouTube saw what was happening. "YouTube is inevitably heading towards being like television, but they never told their creators this," Jamie Cohen, a professor of new media at Molloy College, told USA Today in 2018....

Individual YouTube creators couldn't keep up with the pace YouTube's algorithm set. But traditional, mainstream outlets could: late-night shows began to dominate YouTube, along with music videos from major labels. The platform now looked the way it had when it started, but with the stamp of Hollywood approval.
It's a contrast from the earliest days of YouTube, the article argues. Rather than user-generated content, "it was something else that helped the site explode in popularity: piracy." But their pivot to user-generated content apparently slowed with what YouTube creators call the "adpocalypse" -- YouTube's aggressive demonetization of "problematic" videos. (A handful of creators had been making more than a million dollars a month, and some even quit their jobs to focus on making videos full-time.)

To be fair, by 2017 YouTube had a problem. Every minute users uploaded 27,000 minutes of new footage, making it difficult to pre-screen. But after adjusting their algorithm, "perceived, secretive changes instilled creators with a distrust of the platform."

The old YouTube "seemed to welcome the wonderfully weird, innovative, and earnest, instead of turning them away in favor of late-night show clips and music videos," writes the Verge. But the new YouTube is different, say two brothers who used CGI to re-create Mortal Kombat's most gruesome kills on their RackaRacka channel. They say the new YouTube now buries their videos for "excessive violence."

"BBC Culture reports on DJ Denniz Pop (born Dagge Volle), who couldn't sing, play an instrument, or write a song but could mathematically craft a song from stitching together electronically programmed sounds and beats," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. "Pop was the musical brains behind acts ranging from the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Ace Of Base to Britney Spears, and trained Max Martin who wrote 22 Billbooard #1 hits for the likes of Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Katy Perry, P!nk, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande and Maroon 5 using a technique called 'Melodic Math.'" From the report: In a basement in Stockholm's suburbs, Pop brought together an elite team of eight songwriters and producers for a new venture -- Cheiron Studios -- in 1992. Over the next eight years they would go on to sell hundreds of millions of records through the likes of Ace of Base, 5ive, Robyn, Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Westlife, *NSYNC and Britney Spears. The secret of their songwriting success was to marry the melody to the beat, not work against it, and to have a big chorus. The team at Cheiron followed Pop's example, experimenting in clubs across the capital with up to a hundred different versions of each new track -- meticulously documenting the combinations of beats and melodies that made the club crowds go wild. Through these experiments, an entirely new genre of music blossomed, one that seemed tailor-made for the age of manufactured boybands and girl groups. Having grown up in socialist Sweden, Pop's approach to writing music was almost utilitarian. Like so many Swedish success stories -- IKEA, H&M, Volvo and Spotify -- the Cheiron team wanted their product to appeal to the maximum amount of people, which in a country with a population of only nine million meant focusing outside the nation's borders. Pop designed his music to reflect the lives of the people who bought more music than anyone else -- American teenagers -- at least as far as he understood them from his basement in faraway Stockholm.

The Internet Archive has come to the rescue once again. The nonprofit digital library this week unveiled the MySpace Music Dragon Hoard, a collection of 490,000 MP3 files from 2008 to 2010 on the long-abandoned social media site. From a report: While the recovered tracks make up less than one percent of the music lost by some 14 million artists, it is still a sizable cache weighing in at 1.3TB. The lost songs were given to the Internet Archive by an "anonymous academic group" that had downloaded the music over a three year period to study. When the group learned of the data loss last month, it offered all it had to be preserved.