Bookshop.org and Libro.fm have emerged as alternatives to Amazon, sharing a cut of sales with independent bookstores around America. But for e-book readers, it’s been challenging to buy new titles without going through Amazon’s ecosystem. Bookshop.org’s expansion into e-books gives consumers a long-awaited option to buy these digital books while also supporting small businesses.
Source: Bookshop.org challenges Amazon with new e-book platform | TechCrunch
Digital borrowing of e-books, audiobooks, and digital magazines rose to more than 739 million checkouts at the libraries and schools who use OverDrive’s Libby and Sora apps. Some 366.2 million e-books were borrowed last year, the most of any format, but the rate of increase, 7%, was the slowest among all formats. Downloads of digital audiobook rose 19%, to 278.3 million checkouts.
The new platform, scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2025, will allow music rights owners “to securely fractionalize royalty revenue from their songs and sell shares, enabling fans to earn alongside them,” Roc Nation said on Thursday (January 23). Musicow purchases the copyright of a song from its original creator and splits the rights into smaller portions, allowing members on the platform to buy shares in the copyright royalties.
Spotify and Universal announced a new deal that sources say improves the payment structure for the streamer’s controversial music-audiobooks ‘bundle.’ A Spotify rep said in a separate statement, “Spotify maintains its bundle, but with this direct deal [with UMPG], it has evolved to account for broader rights, including a different economic treatment for music and non-music content.”
Source: Spotify and Universal Unveil Far-Reaching Deal That Improves ‘Bundling’ Payment Structure
France-headquartered music streaming service Deezer has launched a new AI detection tool – after filing two patent applications for the technology in December. On Friday (January 24), the company revealed that its new tech has already discovered that roughly 10,000 ‘fully AI-generated tracks’ are being delivered to its platform every day.
On January 20, hours after President Donald J. Trump was inaugurated, thousands of readers lined up for one of the 1,100 midnight release parties held across the country for Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros. The book, which is the third in the TikTok-beloved Empyrean series, received a 2.5 million copy first print run according to the book’s publisher, Entangled Publishing. Today, many in the industry are wondering: will we see its like again?
Source: TikTok Uncertainty Prompts the Book Business to Envision an Even Better Future
MakersPlace, a digital art platform specializing in non-fungible tokens, is shutting down amid a sharp drop in the NFT market. The company, launched in 2018, announced its closure on Jan. 15 after six years of operations. “Ongoing market challenges and funding difficulties have made it impossible to sustain operations while fulfilling our mission,” MakersPlace’s content manager, Brady Evan Walker, said in the announcement.
Source: Digital art venue MakersPlace shuts down amid NFT market decline
And along with the opening of the platform itself, the company is now unveiling the proprietary framework they’ve developed, AI Rights, which is at the core of the service, currently offering rights for AI model training and reference via RAG models. Adler says the team has plans to add more rights soon to the framework. “We’ve raised more funding,” he says. “The product is great shape. It’s really pretty polished and looking really good.
When “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” an AI-generated artwork, won first prize at a prestigious competition in 2022, the backlash was swift and visceral. For many in the art world, it wasn’t just a controversial winner—it was a direct threat to the human essence of creativity. Generative AI was dismissed as a novelty at best and a cheap imitation at worst. Now, one of the industry’s most influential authorities is challenging that assumption.
Source: Is Art Basel’s AI embrace a turning point for the art world?
How many artists are releasing music right now? Analytics firm Chartmetric has a new figure: 11.3 million. That’s how many its platform is now tracking, and it represents a 1.7m increase from a year ago according to its annual report. “On average, 4.6k artists were added to our platform every day,” noted the company. “Alongside artists, a total 25.7 million tracks were ingested into the Chartmetric system in 2024.”
Source: Chartmetric tracks 11m Spotify artists. Fewer than 1.6m have over 10 listeners