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Tag: music

  • Napster to become a music-marketing metaverse firm after being sold for $207M – Ars Technica

    After that, the Napster brand changed hands multiple times, including with Roxio, which made Napster an iTunes rival in 2003. The early 2000s saw Napster try various business ventures, including a Flash-based site that let you stream for free but without playlists and a subscription model. Best Buy owned Napster for a bit in 2008 but eventually sold it to Rhapsody, which relaunched the Napster brand as a streaming service in 2016. UK-based MelodyVR paid $70 million for the brand founded by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning in 2020 before selling it in 2022 to the blockchain firms.

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  • The media platforms that just won’t die – Axios

    Infinite Reality’s plan is to reimagine Napster as “a social music platform” that prioritizes active fan engagement over passive listening. Similar to companies like Spotify, it says the new platform will allow artists to “connect with, own, and monetize the relationship with their fans.” The company will introduce features like 3D virtual concert spaces, merchandise and event commerce as well as AI-powered customer service and sales tools.

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  • Napster pioneered music sharing over 25 years ago. It just got bought for $207 million – CNBC

    Since 2016, Napster has been a music streaming service offering on-demand streaming of licensed tracks, currently for $11 per month. It’s a small player in a world dominated by Spotify and Apple Music. In 2022, Napster was bought by blockchain company Algorand, whose investors brought in Vlassopulos.

    Napster holds official licenses to stream millions of tracks, agreements that were attractive to Infinite Reality, which says that its version of Napster will “disrupt legally.” And Algorand’s background in blockchain technology was intriguing to Infinite Reality, which also develops Web3 technology, Acunto said.

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  • Steve Reich: ‘We all wish art could counter the direction of US politics. But it can’t’ – The Guardian

    How did it feel to play with Philip Glass again in 2014 after such a very long time? Was it significant that the first work you performed that evening was Four Organs?
    Phil and I had been at Juilliard together, but much later [in 1967] he came to my concert at the Park Place art gallery in New York and said: “I really like what you’re doing. Would you like to come over and see what I’m doing?” The following year, he wrote Two Pages for Steve Reich, basically taking a set of patterns, repeating them and making them longer, which was the breakthrough for him in the way phasing was for me. After that, we travelled and toured together, shared an ensemble – and then at some point it got a little close for comfort and suddenly my best friend became somebody I didn’t talk to.

    That persisted from the early 1970s until 2014, when Nonesuch Records’ Bob Hurwitz wanted to do something where we shared the evening. He took us out for dinner and I said [to Glass]: “Hi. How are you?” The deal was I’d play a piece of Phil’s and he’d play one of mine. He played Four Organs, which we’d both played on in 1970, and I played Music in 12 Parts, one of the early pieces I’d played in his ensemble. The whole thing went very well and we … we don’t hang out, but it broke the ice and just made things a lot more humane.

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  • Der Ring des Nibelungen review – less is more in Regents Opera’s whittled-down Wagner – The Guardian

    But declare it a knockout too. For, although the Regents Ring is a very different experience from Wagner in the opera house, the intensity and involvement is remarkably undiminished and even enhanced. […] With the cycle’s 150th anniversary approaching in 2026, Regents Opera’s Ring is the only British performance of Wagner’s cycle about power and renewal this year. Hats off to them. With deluded megalomania so topical right now, this Ring could hardly be more timely.

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  • CD-ROMS in 1994: Bowie, Prince, Gabriel, and Cybermania ’94 – Cybercultural

    “Brian and I are developing something from which the user will genuinely feel he has had a full participation creatively,” Bowie said in an online chat on 1st July 1994, when asked about his multimedia plans. Clearly he and Eno had been discussing how music would evolve in the digital technology era; in addition to their March recording sessions, the pair swapped creative ideas over email regularly. Bowie was convinced “interactive multimedia” was the key, going forward. “Everything seems to have crossed through the mediums a lot more,” he told the New York Times later in July, “and I’m not quite sure what it is we’re doing, but it’s not just making records anymore. It’s got a lot further than that, and we keep translating everything to be interactive. The medium that we are working in is not actually CD-ROM. The medium is interactive multimedia, and I think that the CD-ROM is only the best delivery system currently available.” […]

    Overall, Gabriel’s CD-ROM has a much better logic than Bowie’s Jump (there are no random barking dogs, for a start) and it’s less confusing to navigate than Prince’s Interactive. From the vantage point of thirty years later, it must be said that XPLORA1 looks dated — with its tiny video screens and boxy graphics. But at the time, it got relatively positive reviews and no doubt deserved the three awards it got at Cybermania ’94.

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  • Hate music practice? How you can learn to love your instrument again in 100 days – Classical Music

    The strange alchemy of #100daysofpractice is how things seem to get better all by themselves. If you play something through a few times carefully, focusing intently on the result – just noticing rather than negatively self-talking – and then leave it, coming back the next day and the next, the chances are it will be better. Consistency is everything. This is a lesson it’s taken me too long to learn. As a teenager I would not pick up my violin all week and then expect to catch up by practising three hours on a Friday night before my lesson at Junior Guildhall the next morning. Tears and tantrums ensued, not to mention frustrated teachers. Of course, it’s not that they didn’t explain this to me, but youth is indeed wasted on the young, and I wasn’t listening.

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  • Daniel Barenboim reveals he has Parkinson’s Disease – Classical Music

    Barenboim has stated that he intends to continue working as much as his health allows. His top priority remains securing the future of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he co-founded in 1999 to bring together young musicians from Israel and Arab nations. Describing the mission of the orchestra, which has been a BBC Proms regular since 2003, Barenboim has observed, ‘It has very flatteringly been described as a project for peace. It isn’t. It’s not going to bring peace, whether you play well or not so well.

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  • Ge Wang: GenAI art is the least imaginative use of AI imaginable – Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence

    The technology is new, but what GenAI music companies like Suno are doing is not. Like the recording industry before them (and without whom, ironically, there would be no training data for GenAI), companies like Suno commodify creative expression as part of an aesthetic economy based on passive consumption. Thus it is in Suno’s core interest to usher people away from active creation, and toward a system of frictionless convenience that strives to lower the effort of production — and the effort of imagination beyond vague concepts to type into prompts — to zero. And while no doubt prompting-AI-systems will be a new kind of “muscle” for us all to build, one has to ask: what other muscles will atrophy? There is always a price to pay; the danger of living in a world of frictionless convenience might well be cultural and individual stagnation.

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  • LPO announces Sky Arts documentary series – London Philharmonic Orchestra

    The series showcases the meticulous preparation and routines of each section of the Orchestra, getting under the skin of the LPO’s talented musicians and processes which combine to create an orchestral masterpiece. Viewers will get to know the players personally, hear their inspiring stories of getting into professional music, see their deep knowledge of their instruments and learn about their specific roles within the Orchestra. Viewers will also hear Gardner and the players’ own insights into Mahler’s detailed score, allowing the listener to fully experience the final performance – which featured 118 musicians, 131 instruments and 200 members of the London Philharmonic Choir – during the fourth episode.

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  • Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra – Cadogan Hall

    Programme: Schubert Symphony No. 8, ‘Unfinished’; Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No. 1; Ferit Tüzün Nasreddin Hoca Humoresque; Beethoven Symphony No. 6, ‘Pastoral’

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  • January 1, 2025 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924 – Duke University School of Law

    On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon.[2] 2025 marks a milestone: all of the books, films, songs, and art published in the 1920s will now be public domain. The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx Brothers star in their first feature film, and legendary directors from Alfred Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films. From comic strips, the original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Ravel’s Bolero, Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number Singin’ in the Rain.

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  • The ghosts in the machine – Harpers Magazine

    Around this time, I decided to dig into the story of Spotify’s ghost artists in earnest, and the following summer, I made a visit to the DN offices in Sweden. The paper’s technology editor, Linus Larsson, showed me the Spotify page of an artist called Ekfat. Since 2019, a handful of tracks had been released under this moniker, mostly via the stock-music company Firefly Entertainment, and appeared on official Spotify playlists like “Lo-Fi House” and “Chill Instrumental Beats.” One of the tracks had more than three million streams; at the time of this writing, the number has surpassed four million. Larsson was amused by the elaborate artist bio, which he read aloud. It described Ekfat as a classically trained Icelandic beat maker who graduated from the “Reykjavik music conservatory,” joined the “legendary Smekkleysa Lo-Fi Rockers crew” in 2017, and released music only on limited-edition cassettes until 2019. “Completely made up,” Larsson said. “This is probably the most absurd example, because they really tried to make him into the coolest music producer that you can find.

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  • Three-armed robot conductor makes debut in Dresden – The Guardian

    Her two performances in the eastern German city are intended to show off the latest advances in machine maestros, as well as music written explicitly to harness 21st-century technology. The artistic director of Dresden’s Sinfoniker, Markus Rindt, said the intention was “not to replace human beings” but to perform complex music that human conductors would find impossible. […] The composer Andreas Gundlach wrote the aptly named Semiconductor’s Masterpiece for 16 brass musicians and four percussionists playing wildly diverging time signatures. Some begin slowly and accelerate while the others slow down. Gundlach told the local public broadcaster MDR that MAiRA’s technical skills ensured the music sounded smooth, “like it came from a single source”.

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  • National Gallery mixtape – Google Arts & Culture

    Mix a personalized soundtrack inspired by paintings from the National Gallery with the help of Google AI.

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  • Nixon in China libretto – Opera Arias

    Act One Scene 1: Nixon’s arrival. (The airfield outside Peking. It is a very cold, clear, dry morning; Monday, February 21, 1972; the air is full of static electricity. No airplanes are arriving; there is the odd note of birdsong. Finally, from behind some buildings, come the sounds of troops marching. Contingents of army, navy and air force – 120 men of each service – circle the field and begin to sing “The Three Main Rules of Discipline and the Eight Points of Attention”)

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