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The verdict is in: Music is podcasting’s biggest missed opportunity

Given the podcast titles that typically top the charts, you might assume that true crime and chat shows are the most popular podcast genres in the world. However, according to MIDiA’s recent report, “Defining podcast taste: The universal appeal of music, news, and comedy”, these genres are actually some of the least popular globally. There is only one podcast genre for which global audiences indicate universal preference: music.

Source: The verdict is in: Music is podcasting’s biggest missed opportunity

Bundling Up

Reps. Ted Lieu and Adam Schiff, both Democrats from California and members of the House Judiciary Committee, along with Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee sent a letter to U.S. Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter last week raising “serious questions” as to whether Spotify is abusing the collective licensing system for mechanical rights by bundling its previously standalone audiobook service into its premium music subscription tier. The bundling arrangement has the effect of lowering the royalty rate Spotify pays to music publishers and songwriters under the terms of the most recent rate-setting agreement adopted by the Copyright Royalty Board.

Microsoft Could Be the Big Winner From Apple’s OpenAI Deal

Microsoft, Google and other rivals raced ahead, and jittery with anticipation that the House that Jobs built would soon announce a category-redefining advance of the technology.

What they got at this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference was a clearly articulated but hardly revolutionary implementation of existing AI tools and use cases wrapped up into a very Apple-centric strategy, right down to the attempted rebranding of “artificial intelligence” as “Apple Intelligence.”

You can find the details on Apple Intelligence here. But the main goal of the strategy seems to be to turn AI into an iPhone feature rather than a standalone product or service. Its hallmark is to keep as much AI processing as is possible on the phone itself, which it does largely by limiting what you can do with Apple Intelligence.

SoundLabs and UMG Announce Agreement for AI Voice Modeling

Officially launching this summer, MicDrop is a real-time (AU, VST3, AAX) plug-in compatible with all major digital audio workstations (DAWs). UMG and SoundLabs’ collaboration will enable UMG artists to create custom vocal models that will be available for their exclusive creative use cases, and not available to the general public.

Source: SoundLabs and UMG Announce Agreement for AI Voice Modeling

After raising $125m, AI music generator Suno is now paying its most popular creators

Suno recently said 12 million people have used its platform in the less than a year that it’s been available. Now the company is taking a major step towards building a community – and towards making music creation on its platform commercially viable for its users: it’s launched a program to pay out its most popular music creators.

Source: After raising $125m, AI music generator Suno is now paying its most popular creators

Adobe’s Firefly AI is getting competition at the worst time

For a hot second there, Adobe enjoyed a unique niche within the generative AI industry thanks to its Firefly AI and Stock image hosting platform, which was trained on the company’s proprietary and “commercially safe” dataset of licensed images. Now, Getty Images is getting in on the game and launching a rival model. PicsArt, the AI-powered online image and video-editing service, announced that it will be partnering with Getty to build and train a generative AI based on Getty’s exclusive library of photo and video content.

Source: Adobe’s Firefly AI is getting competition at the worst time | Digital Trends

Why Pop Music Is So ‘Meh’ Right Now

The string of pop flops is the latest evidence of how difficult it has become for the music business to generate the kinds of genuine moments that turbocharge sales and move the cultural needle, music executives say. Making pop hits has always been a crapshoot. But today, with the world awash in content, TikTok rewriting labels’ playbooks and listeners burrowing deeper into their own personalized niches, even avid pop fans don’t recognize what’s in the Billboard top 10.

Source: Why Pop Music Is So ‘Meh’ Right Now

‘Devastating’ potential impact of Google AI Overviews on publisher visibility revealed

The dramatic impact of Google‘s AI-written summaries on search result visibility for publishers has been revealed through exclusive new research. A Press Gazette-led investigation has found that AI-written summaries were returned for nearly a quarter of news-related search queries in mid-May in the US, with the result that organic links to publisher articles were pushed far down the page.

Source: ‘Devastating’ potential impact of Google AI Overviews on publisher visibility revealed

This Is How GenAI Will Transform Media and Entertainment. 

Generative AI “is nothing more than mathematics, probability, and statistics,” I2A2 President & CEO Renard Jenkins said in a recent keynote, attempting to assuage those who might fear that AI will transform Hollywood’s “dream factory” into “a warehouse of nightmares.” Jenkins believes that the transformational nature of this technology is a foregone conclusion for Media & Entertainment.

Source: Renard Jenkins: This Is How GenAI Will Transform Media and Entertainment. (Don’t Freak Out.) – NAB Amplify

What the Apple-OpenAI Deal Means for Four Tech Titans

The new agreement, announced Monday, gives the startup an important role in Apple’s push to bring AI to its vast population of users. At the same time, Apple rival Microsoft—OpenAI’s most important big tech partner—is also trying to make headway in consumer AI. The OpenAI-Apple collaboration deals a setback to Google, which has long paid Apple billions of dollars a year to be its default tool for internet searches.

Source: What the Apple-OpenAI Deal Means for Four Tech Titans

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