Culture / Music

Starting today, the sounds on TikTok might be getting a little quieter. That’s because Universal Music Group is planning to remove its catalog from the video-sharing app after the massive music company failed to reach a licensing agreement…

If anyone can rally up a base, it’s Taylor Swift.When sexually explicit, likely AI-generated images of Swift circulated on social media this week, it galvanized her fans. Swifties found phrases and hashtags related to the images and flooded…

Kaytranada and Kehlani. Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” Sheck Wes’ “Mo Bamba.” The commonalities these artists and songs share is neither region nor genre but platform. SoundCloud was their origin point. “It sparked so many careers once upon a…

Kindle libraries; troves of infinitely streamable songs on Spotify and Apple Music; scores of shows and films on Netflix, Max, and Hulu. Even the Criterion Collection is online now. Cultural archives now live on server farms, so much so…

Just days after people gleefully posted their Spotify Wrapped, bad news came for the music streaming giant. Spotify announced today that it would cut 17 percent of its workforce, a chunk that equates to an estimated 1,500 people. It’s the…

At first it looked unbelievable, but Henry Kissinger had died. At 100 years old, news outlets—and the world—had been preparing for the passing of President Nixon’s secretary of state for a while. Still, when people were finding out via…

Your first gift of the holiday season has arrived: It’s Spotify Wrapped time.The annual packaging of people’s most-listened-to tracks and artists begins rolling out this morning. An unofficial start to the gifting season, Wrapped has proved…

Vinyl records are everywhere now. What was once considered a niche hobby just a few years ago, when records started to make a comeback, are now widely available again, even at major retail stores like Target and Walmart. Record sales are up…

When Texas-based copywriter Dustin Ballard released a cover of Aqua’s 1997 Europop hit “Barbie Girl” this summer using an AI-generated version of Johnny Cash’s voice, he was surprised by its reception. “I actually expected more of a…

“Copyright is meant to be an incentive for creation, and AIs don’t need that incentive,” says Merkley. “I think if you let AIs make copyright, it will be the end of copyright, because they will immediately make everything and copyright it.”…