When the Kansas City Chiefs romp to a Super Bowl victory on February 11, tight end Travis Kelce will bring his superstar girlfriend onto the field, drop to one knee, and propose. Their engagement will unleash a media maelstrom and create the conditions for Taylor Swift’s hugely significant endorsement of …
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This weekend, dozens of artists are set to descend on Los Angeles for the 66th annual Grammy Awards. Trevor Noah will tell jokes, musicians will get trophies—and somewhere on the internet, someone will be downloading their music for free. There were more than 17 billion visits to music piracy websites …
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#SwiftTok had a rough day. Early Thursday, after Universal Music Group and TikTok failed to reach an agreement on licensing music from UMG artists on the app, sounds from those artists—including Taylor Swift, Drake, and others—went silent. “Some of my most viewed videos are ones talking about Taylor Swift that …
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Starting Thursday, the sounds on TikTok have gotten a little quieter. That’s because Universal Music Group has removed its catalog from the video-sharing app after the massive music company failed to reach a licensing agreement with TikTok. Taylor Swift, Drake, Ariana Grande, and Billie Eilish are just a few of …
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If anyone can rally up a base, it’s Taylor Swift. When sexually explicit, likely AI-generated, fake images of Swift circulated on social media this week, it galvanized her fans. Swifties found phrases and hashtags related to the images and flooded them with videos and photos of Swift performing. “Protect Taylor …
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Ed Newton-Rex says generative AI has an ethics problem. He ought to know, because he used to be part of the fast-growing industry. Newton-Rex was TikTok’s head AI designer and then an executive at Stability AI until he quit in disgust in November over the company’s stance on collecting training …
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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 time,” says Stonie Blue, a New York-based DJ and cofounder …
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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 that the value of physical media seems ever-shifting. While there’s some …
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The best albums of 2023 were actually released in 2022. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé dominated the year through global stadium tours, blockbuster movies, and countless digital column inches. Beyoncé began the year by performing a lucrative and divisive private concert in Dubai and ended it in Kansas City when her …
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Perhaps the most iconic instrument in modern rock is the guitar. It's really just a bunch of strings stretched across a board, which you can strum to make awesome tunes, thanks to the physics of waves and sound. A Wave Pulse on a String Let's start with a demo you …
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