The new label, which will begin to be applied next month, is an effort by the streaming service to be more transparent about A.I.-generated music on its app.
Atop an ancient grain storage building, in a settlement of the local Yampara elite, archaeologists Sonia Alconini and Walter Sánchez-Canedo have uncovered an exceptional find: a set of six copper bells folded into a pyramidal shape, deposited as a ritual offering more than five centuries ago, during the expansion of the Inca Empire through the […]
Spotify will soon label AI artists and remove their music from your recommendations. The change, which will start rolling out in mid-September, means you'll see an "AI Persona" badge on an artist's profile across the app if they do "not represent a real person."
The music streaming platform will allow artists to disclose that they're an AI persona starting today, but it won't rely solely on self-identification. Spotify says it will use human review and AI tools to determine whether someone's profile, including their name and image, "appears to represent photorealistic AI-generated identities." If Spotify determines that an artist's identity …
Researchers believe they've found evidence that brain signals reveal the pitches of notes in imagined musical melodies, reports Medical Express:
Study participants were 10 epilepsy patients with electrodes on the surfaces of their brains for clinical monitoring. Participants quietly listened to the first bars of children's tunes, then imagined the melodies of subsequent bars before humming their imagined melodies. Brain activity from the patients carried information about relative pitches within the imagined melodies. Combining note-level pitch predictions over time allowed the research team to recreate melodic changes that reflected the structure of the imagined songs...
"The model we created decodes relative pitch classes — such as do, re, mi, fa, sol, and la — rather than exact, absolute pitches," [said tudy co-lead Jii Kwon of Seoul National University]. "This is useful because people often recognize melodies by the relationships between notes, even when the same melody is played in a different key."
Tom Vek burst onto the scene in 2005 with his album We Have Sound, which garnered a solid 7.6 from the tastemakers of the day over at Pitchfork. His undeniably catchy brand of dancy indietronica landed him an appearance on The OC and placement on the Grand Theft Auto IV soundtrack. His follow-up, Leisure Seizure, had a lengthy gestation period, but arrived in 2011 to similar success, reaching No. 79 on the UK charts.
Vek has continued to release music at regular intervals over the last 15 years, dropping Newer Symbols in 2022. But in 2020 he started toying with this idea he had for a music player called Sleevenote. Inspired by viny …
Bayreuth festival theatre, Bayreuth For the festival’s 150th anniversary, the creative team have turned to AI to generate visuals reflecting Wagner’s tetralogy’s past, present – and future. The hyperactive result is a dismal, mindless mess
Unveiled the same week in which tech company Anthropic admitted that its AI model Claude had gone rogue during testing, Bayreuth festival’s new AI-generated staging of Wagner’s four-part Ring of the Nibelungen is at least timely. But anyone who assumes that the cycle’s obsession with knowledge, power and possession might make it an ideal forum for reflection on AI as a major contemporary frontier will be disappointed, as will anyone hopeful about AI’s creative potential within opera.
Commissioned to mark the festival’s 150th anniversary, the production is “curated” – emphatically not “directed” – by a team led by German stage director Marcus Lobbes. He apparently spent weeks in dialogue with AI models about possible interpretations of the Ring. According to the programme book, “power structures, capitalism, mythology, gender roles, nationalism”, all came up. So far, so mainstream Wagner reception. But if these human-machine exchanges were revelatory, you wouldn’t know it from the resulting staging, which uses AI “as an extension of a cultural memory that is never complete”.
Jérôme Dupras is a member of one of Quebec’s most popular folk rock bands. Now, as the province’s chief scientist, he will help shape its environmental destiny.
That cover art is almost certainly AI, too. | Image: Fenix Flexin
Fenix Flexin is best known as a member of Shoreline Mafia, a rap duo from Los Angeles. But he's recently found solo success with the track "Rubberz," which has climbed to number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100. Almost immediately, though, questions were raised about the song's origins, with many speculating that it was largely, if not entirely, generated by AI. Fenix has denied those accusations, but done little to dispel them.
Part of the suspicion is certainly due to the fact that the song is a dramatic left turn. Fenix has primarily trafficked in trap-influencedWest Coastrap. "Rubberz," on the other hand, is heavily influenced by '80s UK s …
Advances in A.I. are making it possible to create all kinds of music from scratch, but they also raise questions about what is legal and who will actually listen.
Apple has raised prices for Apple Music and most Apple One bundles, citing rising licensing costs. AppleCare+ prices also increased, presumably to keep pace with rising component costs.
The price increases for Apple Music come after Spotify announced its own round of price hikes earlier this year, which Apple poked fun at on social media. Even with today’s price hikes, though, Apple Music remains cheaper than Spotify.
Apple Music no longer makes sense when I’m already paying for YouTube Premium. Apple Music goes up to £11.99, YouTube Premium is £12.99 and on top of a good music service you get no ads on YouTube.
Distilling my longtime argument down to its simplest bit, I’d ask “do you want to pay $10 a month for music for the rest of your life?”
But truly, it was never going to just be $10 per month. The price was going to go up over time. It was going to get more expensive to have access to the same music.
If you purchase your music, though, I think most people would reach a point in their life where they stop buying new music entirely or they’re only buying a few albums per year. The cost of music would go down for you over time.
That was my thinking, too, but then I found that music I’ve purchased from Apple won’t work on my HomePod. I refuse to condone that behavior, so now I have two solid reasons not to subscribe to Apple Music.
While the monthly and annual prices of AppleCare+ plans for Macs and iPads received a slight increase this week, AppleCare One continues to start at $19.99 per month in the U.S., making the multi-device plan even more valuable.
The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers, as well as Stripe payment information, they said.
[…]
As part of these legal proceedings, Suno previously admitted that it was trained on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet,” which included a total of “tens of millions of recordings.” Suno has been making the argument that it is allowed to train on copyrighted works as fair use in those cases, one of which has been settled.
Suno has long acknowledged that its AI music generator relied on the scraping of millions of songs available across the internet, but a new hack reveals just how the company pulled from streaming services and websites[…] all while user information remained vulnerable.
[…]
“Our goal has always been to help people create original new music, not replicate someone else’s. That’s why we build our models around what we call ‘Original Creation, By Design,’” the spokesperson said in a statement. “For example, we intentionally do not use artist names as a category of training metadata because we want our models to help people create brand new songs, not music that replicates other artists’ existing work. It’s also why we built Suno with detection filters that block or prevent a user from using specific artist, song, or album names as prompts, and prevent users from uploading lyrics or sound recordings that match existing works.”
Apple has increased the monthly subscription prices for its Apple Music streaming service in the United States and other markets, marking the first hike in nearly four years. The changes took effect today.
New Apple Music pricing:
• Individual plan: $11.99 per month (up from $10.99)
• Family plan: $19.99 per month (up from $16.99)
• Student plan: $6.99 per month (up from $5.99)
Select Apple One bundles have also seen increases:
• Family plan: $27.95 per month (up from $25.95)
• Premier plan: $39.95 per month (up from $37.95)
The Apple One Individual plan remains unchanged at $19.95 per month.
In a statement to Music Business Worldwide, Apple explained the move: “As a result of rising licensing costs, Apple Music is increasing its subscription price beginning today.”
This increase follows Spotify’s earlier 2026 price adjustment in the U.S., which Apple had publicly highlighted. Despite the hikes, Apple Music’s new Individual rate of $11.99 remains lower than Spotify Premium’s current $12.99.
The last Apple Music price rise occurred in October 2022, when the Individual plan moved from $9.99 to $10.99. Apple has periodically adjusted prices for other services like Apple TV and components within Apple One bundles since then.
MacDailyNews Take: The timing aligns with broader industry trends of streaming services adjusting prices amid rising content and licensing expenses. Existing subscribers will see the changes on their next billing cycle.
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!
Audiofile Engineering’s Fidelia plays your music collection with bit-perfect accuracy and lets you shape the sound through Audio Units, equalization, and headphone virtualization. It’s not for everyone—but audiophiles will appreciate its depth.
Login
