Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 22nd, ’23

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002































July 22nd, 2023




Music Streams for 2023 Hit 1 Trillion in Record Time. Latin and K-Pop Artists are Big Reasons Why
Maria Sherman

Is non-English language music the future of the music business? Perhaps.

The global music industry surpassed 1 trillion streams at the fastest pace, ever, in a calendar year, Luminate’s 2023 Midyear Report has found. The number was reached in three months, a full month faster than 2022.

Global streams are also up 30.8% from last year, reflective of an increasingly international music marketplace.

Additionally, Luminate found that two in five — or 40% — of U.S. music listeners enjoy music in a non-English language. And a whopping 69% of U.S. music listeners enjoy music from artists originating outside of the U.S.

According to the report, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Italian, German, and Arabic are the most popular languages for non-Anglophonic music among U.S. music listeners, with Latin genres and K-pop leading the charge.

“Specifically, our streaming data shows that Spanish and Korean language music are the most popular when taking a look at the top 10,000 most streamed songs (audio and video combined) during the first half of 2023,” says Jaime Marconette, Luminate’s senior director of music insights and industry relations.

“Furthermore, Spanish-language music’s share of that top 10,000 has grown 3.6% since 2021, while English-language music’s share has dropped 4.2% in that same time,” he says.

That is reflected in Luminate’s 2023 Midyear Top Albums chart, where Bad Bunny ‘s spring 2022 album “Un Verano Sin Ti” still breaks the top 10 a year later (the chart factors in a combination of album sales, on-demand audio/visual sales, and digital track sales). When “top albums” are defined by physical and digital sales exclusively, K-pop dominates, taking up six of the top 10 spots.

“K-pop fans are, unsurprisingly, some of the most enthusiastic fans across physical formats,” Marconette says.

Luminate found that K-pop fans are 69% more likely to purchase vinyl and 46% more likely to purchase CDs than the average U.S. music listener in the next 12 months. One in four K-pop fans has purchased a cassette in the last 12 months.
https://apnews.com/article/luminate-...8b37b635f76c8b





Plex’s Winamp-Inspired Music Player Plexamp is Now Free
Sarah Perez

Plexamp, the music player originally incubated by the Labs division of media company Plex, is now free, the company announced today. The project was first launched in 2017 as Plex’s own spin on the classic Winamp media player app, offering visualizations to accompany your tunes, tools for programming mixes, and more recently, a ChatGPT-powered “Sonic Sage” feature that builds unique playlists from users’ music libraries. However, after its expansion from desktop to mobile, Plexamp was only available to subscribers.

Now, Plex says the Plexamp app will become free, allowing users to play tracks from their own library or the TIDAL music streaming service with high-quality audio and support for lossless audio. The app also includes gapless playback, loudness leveling, and smooth transitions between tracks, among other things.

In addition to Library Radio, a feature used to rediscover your music, users can create playlists with Plexamp to match their current mood: like “brooding, cathartic, confident, intense, playful, poignant, swaggering, and wistful,” the company says.

Another feature, Decade Radio, lets users play tracks from a given decade, while Time Travel Radio lets you discover older tracks from your library.

However, with the shift to make the app free, Plexamp will keep its more advanced features exclusive to its paying subscribers. That includes the AI-powered Sonic Sage playlist builder, plus downloads, and artist and album mix builders. To access these features, users will need to pay for a $4.99/month Plex Pass subscription. The subscription includes a variety of features to enhance the Plex service itself, including things like DVR recording of Live TV, downloads, the ability to skip movie and TV show credits and intros, premium music features, and other advanced and technical features.

The Plexamp app has been well-received following its debut, maintaining a 4.8 out of 5-star rating on the App Store and a 4.7 rating on Google Play. Plexamp also runs on macOS, Windows, Linus and Headless.

Media software company Plex has always dabbled in side projects and with the 2017 launch of Plex Labs, its internal incubator, it aimed to provide more exposure for its passion projects. Along with Plexamp, Plex Labs features Plex Dash, a dashboard for keeping an eye on your Plex server and Webooks, a way to configure things to happen — like dimming the lights when movie playback starts or automating posts to Twitter.

Unfortunately, Plex, too, has not been immune to the economic downturn impacting startups. The company last month laid off 20% of its workforce, citing the advertising slowdown as the main factor.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/18/pl...mp-is-now-free





Thousands of Authors Urge AI Companies to Stop Using Work Without Permission
Chloe Veltman

Thousands of writers including Nora Roberts, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Michael Chabon and Margaret Atwood have signed a letter asking artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and Meta to stop using their work without permission or compensation.

It's the latest in a volley of counter-offensives the literary world has launched in recent weeks against AI. But protecting writers from the negative impacts of these technologies is not an easy proposition.

According to a forthcoming report from The Authors Guild, the median income for a full-time writer last year was $23,000. And writers' incomes declined by 42% between 2009 and 2019.

The advent of text-based generative AI applications like GPT-4 and Bard, that scrape the Web for authors' content without permission or compensation and then use it to produce new content in response to users' prompts, is giving writers across the country even more cause for worry.

"There's no urgent need for AI to write a novel," said Alexander Chee, the bestselling author of novels like Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night. "The only people who might need that are the people who object to paying writers what they're worth."

Chee is among the nearly 8,000 authors who just signed a letter addressed to the leaders of six AI companies including OpenAI, Alphabet and Meta.

"It says it's not fair to use our stuff in your AI without permission or payment," said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of The Author's Guild. The non-profit writers' advocacy organization created the letter, and sent it out to the AI companies on Monday. "So please start compensating us and talking to us."

Rasenberger said the guild is trying to get these companies to settle without suing them.

"Lawsuits are a tremendous amount of money," Rasenberger said. "They take a really long time."

But some literary figures are willing to fight the tech companies in court.

Authors including Sarah Silverman, Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad recently signed on as plaintiffs in class action lawsuits alleging Meta and/or OpenAI trained their AI programs on pirated copies of their works. The plaintiffs' lawyers, Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, couldn't be reached in time for NPR's deadline and the AI companies turned down requests for comment.

Gina Maccoby is a literary agent in New York. She says the legal actions are a necessary step towards getting writers a fair shake.
Related Story: And the award goes to AI ft. humans: the Grammys outline new rules for AI use

"It has to happen," Maccoby said. "That's the only way these things are settled."

Maccoby said agents, including herself, are starting to talk to publishers about featuring language in writers' contracts that prohibits unauthorized uses of AI as another way to protect their livelihoods, and those of their clients. (According to a recent Authors Guild survey about AI, while 90% of the writers who responded said that "they should be compensated for the use of their work in training AI," 67% said they "were not sure whether their publishing contracts or platform terms of service include permissions or grant of rights to use their work for any AI-related purposes.")

"What I hear from colleagues is that most publishers are amenable to restricting certain kinds of AI use," Maccoby said, adding that she has yet to add such clauses to her own writers' contracts. The Authors Guild updated its model contract in March to include language addressing the use of AI.

The major publishers NPR contacted for this story declined to comment.

Maccoby said even if authors' contracts explicitly forbid AI companies from scraping and profiting from literary works, the rules are hard to enforce.

"How does one even know if a book is in a data set that was ingested by an AI program?" Maccoby said.

In addition to letters, lawsuits and contractual language, the publishing sector is further looking to safeguard authors' futures by advocating for legislation around how generative AI can and cannot be used.

The Author's Guild's Rasenberger said her organization is actively lobbying for such bills. Meanwhile, many hearings have been held at various levels of government on AI-related topics lately, such as last week's senate judiciary subcommittee hearing on AI and copyright.

"Right now there's a lot of talking about it," said Rumman Chowdhury, a Responsible AI Fellow at Harvard University, who gave testimony at one such hearing in June. "But we're not seeing yet any concrete legislation or regulation coming out."

Chowdhury said the way forward is bound to be messy.

"Some of it will be litigated, some of it will be regulated, and some of it people will literally just have to shout until we're heard," she said. "So right now, the best we can do is ask the AI companies 'pretty, pretty please,' and hopefully somebody will respond."
https://www.npr.org/1187523435





Netflix Gains Nearly 6M Subscribers as Paid Sharing Soars
Lauren Forristal

A year ago today, Netflix reported its largest quarterly loss ever, with 970,000 subscribers dropping the service. The company has since crawled out from under the rubble. Netflix revealed Wednesday that, for the second quarter of 2023, the streaming giant saw a jump (or should we say leap) in 5.9 million global subscribers, bringing the total to 238.4 million subs.

The subscriber addition far exceeds industry guidance; analysts forecasted an increase of 1.7 million subs. Netflix ended Q1 with 232.5 million users.

Netflix’s quarterly earnings results arrive a few hours after news broke that the streamer dropped its basic plan in the U.S. and the U.K.

New subscribers can no longer pay $9.99 or £6.99/month for Netflix without ads and instead must cough up $15.99 or £10.99 for the standard plan. Users can also downgrade to the ad-supported tier, which costs $6.99 or £4.99 per month. Netflix pulled the same move for new subs in Canada last month when it quietly axed its $9.99 CAD basic plan.

The removal of the basic plan is just another money-grubbing ploy made by Netflix as it tries to boost its revenue. For instance, the company recently launched its paid sharing rules in the U.S., which prohibits members from sharing their accounts with users outside their households for free. Members now have to pay $7.99/month for an additional membership.

Netflix’s significant subscriber gain this quarter reflects the impact of its paid sharing rules. Netflix wrote in its letter to shareholders, “In May, we successfully launched paid sharing in 100+ countries, representing more than 80% of our revenue base.” The company added that today it’s rolling out paid sharing to “almost all the remaining countries,” including Croatia, Kenya, Indonesia and India.

TechCrunch previously covered the streamer’s success with the launch of the extra member feature, citing a report from Antenna that revealed Netflix gained nearly 100,000 daily signups following the password crackdown.

Moreover, Netflix’s ad-supported tier gives the company an additional revenue stream since it collects money from advertisers for every viewer. Netflix revealed during its first Upfront presentation that its ad plan has nearly five million monthly active users. In a recent Antenna report, 17% to 20% of new Netflix signups during the second quarter were for its ad-supported tier.

Netflix reported $8.2 billion in revenue and a net income of $1.5 billion.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/19/ne...sharing-soars/





Google Raising Price Of YouTube Premium to $13.99 Per Month
Abner Li

The price of an individual YouTube Premium subscription is increasing by $2 to $13.99 per month in the US for new and current customers.

This price increase is live for new subscribers as seen on youtube.com/premium. Instead of $11.99, YouTube Premium now costs $13.99/month. Meanwhile, it’s $18.99 if you’re subscribing from the iOS YouTube app.

“We’re updating the price for YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium subscribers in the US to continue delivering great service and features. We believe this new price reflects the value of YouTube Premium which allows subscribers to enjoy ad-free YouTube with background and offline play and uninterrupted access to over 100M songs with the YouTube Music app.”
YouTube spokesperson

Toward the end of last year, family Premium plans saw a big hike to $22.99/month. That remains the same today. The annual subscription, which was introduced in January of 2022, goes to $139.99 in a $20 increase. Compared to paying monthly, you save $27.89.

YouTube last raised the price of YouTube Premium (previously called “Red”) in 2018 with the relaunch of YouTube Music.
YouTube Premium price increase

YouTube is also increasing the price of Music Premium to $10.99 per month from $9.99. This is unsurprising in the context of Apple and Amazon making similar moves in the past year. Additionally, YouTube is cracking down on ad blockers.

Existing subscribers will start to see the new pricing with their next billing cycle. An upcoming email will explain the changes. Those who were grandfathered in five years ago (with Google Play Music and/or YouTube Red) will get three additional months at their current rate.

Meanwhile, YouTube is not announcing any changes to international pricing today. Any future increase will come with a 30-day notice.

YouTube Premium removes ads (while still supporting Creators), allows audio-only playback for videos, and downloads for offline access. Other features include a 1080p Premium streaming quality, co-watching in Google Meet, the ability to test features ahead of time, and some extended free trials.
https://9to5google.com/2023/07/19/yo...rice-increase/





‘They Found Ways to do the Impossible’: Hipgnosis, the Designers Who Changed the Record Sleeve for Ever

Control director Anton Corbijn’s new film tells the chaotic, tragic story of the creative duo behind some of the most recognisable covers of all time
Lee Campbell

Only at the end of our interview does it dawn on both of us that Anton Corbijn has been sitting in front of his huge vinyl record collection at his home in Amsterdam the whole time. It is fitting: not just because Corbijn, now 68, initially made his name by photographing Joy Division and went on to shoot and make music videos for the likes of Depeche Mode, U2, the Killers and REM, but also because he has just directed a documentary, Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis), about the celebrated record sleeves of Aubrey “Po” Powell and the late Storm Thorgerson.

Hipgnosis was one of the trailblazers of album cover design during the golden age of the late 60s and 70s. It conceived the artwork for hundreds of bands and artists including juggernauts such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel, 10cc and Paul McCartney, all of whom Corbijn has interviewed for this movie. Although they are often more identified with the pre-punk period, their dizzyingly inventive portfolio stretched into 1983, when the partnership ended.

Corbijn is relentless in his own creativity and deeply serious about his art. Along with his portrait photography and music videos, he is known for dramatic movies such as Control, about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. This autumn, he’ll be shooting Switzerland – a drama about the author Patricia Highsmith, starring Helen Mirren – while also continuing to work closely with the resurgent Depeche Mode, designing the stage sets for their current Memento Mori world tour.

Variety is key to his longevity. “I’m so careful not to fall into a predictable direction,” he says. “After Control, I was offered countless biopics. I could have easily fallen into that trap and I am determined not to. I don’t like people calling my photographs rock photography. It’s the portraiture of musicians and many other disciplines. People like to pigeonhole because it’s easy. I like to be a multidisciplinary type of person.”

I ask about the inspiration behind the title of his latest movie. “Squaring the Circle means doing the impossible,” he says, “but it also represents the circular record going into a sleeve.” Doing the impossible is only a slight exaggeration. What Thorgerson and Powell pulled off in terms of design, long before the days of digitisation, was remarkable. Just take a look at Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy cover created at the Giant’s Causeway on the coast of Northern Ireland, or Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here sleeve where a stuntman was set on fire to get that brilliant cover shot.

Corbijn unfortunately never met Thorgerson before his death in 2013, although was clearly intrigued by his reputation for having brilliant ideas and a very sharp tongue. “I would have liked so much to have had a conversation with him,” Corbijn says. “I think [Pink Floyd drummer] Nick Mason summed him up perfectly: ‘Storm Thorgerson was a man who wouldn’t take yes for an answer.’ He seemed at heart a sweet man, just fighting for his thing with a singular focus.”

The genesis of Squaring the Circle came about with an approach to Corbijn, not the reverse, which is how most of his commissions happen. In this case, Powell visited Corbijn in his native Netherlands in late 2020 to sell the project to him. Corbijn describes Powell as having “the gift of the gab”. Powell adopts the role of narrator throughout the film (Corbijn calls him a “natural”). All the interviews are conducted in signature Corbijn black and white, with the animated presentation of the album artwork in vibrant colour, giving the design the spotlight it deserves. The opening and closing scenes are beautifully shot with a steely Powell, walking purposefully through bleak countryside, his art portfolio strapped to his back. As Corbijn points out, it’s a fine line between being celebrated for your art and being endlessly defined by it: “Po is carrying the past with him. He’s very proud of it, but maybe it’s also like a stone around his neck.” The scene was inspired by the famous cover of Led Zeppelin IV, depicting a man in a rural setting with a pack on his shoulders. Corbijn wanted this image to “come alive” in the documentary.

Thorgerson and Powell were very different individuals, but that difference worked perfectly. Corbijn explains their dynamic: “They loved making things,” says Corbijn. “One with great ideas and one with the technical skills to execute these ideas.” He knows first-hand how demanding it is to deliver album design in its entirety: “I have done a lot of record sleeves in my life, but I’ve not designed that many. I may have taken the photo on the sleeve. Hipgnosis however, did everything. It’s amazing they came from nothing in a way. Neither of them were educated in the visual sense. They found ways to do the impossible.”

Listening to the songs throughout the movie – Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Led Zeppelin’s No Quarter, Wings’ Band on the Run – you wonder how vast the music budget for Squaring the Circle must have been. However, it seems the love for Hipgnosis and what they had achieved for so many artists made licensing the soundtrack possible. “There was an enormous amount of goodwill towards Hipgnosis,” Corbijn says. “People just wanted to make it [the movie] work. They were generous. Everyone was proud of their albums and the work they had done with them.”

The documentary is packed with dry English humour, but also moments of poignancy. Powell recalls the profoundly sad sight of an overweight and almost unrecognisable Syd Barrett arriving at Abbey Road studios in 1975 during the recording of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, seven years after he had left the band, an event that clearly upsets the band’s surviving (if estranged) members to this day.

There are interviews, too, with Peter Saville, best known for his sleek and minimalist design work with Joy Division and New Order, and something of a counterweight to Hipgnosis who, after all, mainly worked in a time of great musical excess. And Noel Gallagher provides useful insight as a dedicated consumer and lover of the Hipgnosis album sleeve.

It is Gallagher who, citing his daughter, argues that there is a lack of recognition of the album cover among younger generations, blaming factors including reduced budgets and the smaller picture formats used by streaming platforms. Corbijn is in complete agreement. “The importance of the record sleeve has diminished. In the 70s, for young kids there wasn’t much else to spend money on. Yet you had to save up to buy something, so it was meaningful. Now nothing is meaningful because you can get it at the touch of a button.”

The majority of sleeves discussed during the movie required an enormous amount of thinking outside the box by Hipgnosis. According to Corbijn, much of their success results from their ability to deliver under severe pressure, something he can relate to: “You have your back to the wall and you make it work,” he says. “You become very inventive in these situations. Often, there is a better result than if the conditions had been perfect.”

Even with close to 50 years’ experience and a prime portfolio, Corbijn never wastes an opportunity to learn through his experiences. “I am full of admiration for the thoughts that go into making these album sleeves. It showed me that it’s very important to create a strong idea before you shoot. I normally shoot before I have an idea. I need to think more about what is achievable.”

Hipgnosis’ influence is still being felt in the music industry. The Hipgnosis song fund – unrelated, but named in honour of the studio – has been at the forefront of a £1bn march to buy up the rights to classic artists’ back catalogues. For all that Powell and Thorgerson’s relationship resulted in some amazing pieces of work, things ultimately broke down between the pair – in one of the film’s most moving moments Po breaks down in tears due to the fallout of his friendship with his late creative partner. “I didn’t see it coming,” Corbijn says. “It was a beautiful moment in the film. He clearly misses Storm terribly.”

Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) premieres at the Sundance film festival on Friday, and is in cinemas and on-demand from 14 July.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/202...d-led-zeppelin





Here’s Why the Best IMAX Movies Still Need a Palm Pilot to Work

Oppenheimer is 600 pounds of 70mm IMAX film, and it wouldn’t work so well on-screen if it weren’t for a 21-year-old PDA.
David Pierce and Andrew Marino

The Palm Pilot surely wasn’t the point of the TikTok, but it seemed to be the only thing anybody noticed. Ahead of the release of Oppenheimer, the official IMAX TikTok account posted a video showing the mind-bending size of the 70mm film print and the orange extensions IMAX had to build just to hold the platter in place. To give you some context: Oppenheimer’s film reportedly weighs 600 pounds, and the reel is an outrageous 11 miles long. Director Christopher Nolan told Collider that he thinks he might have hit the “outer limit” for how big a film reel can be.

But anyway, back to the Palm Pilot. Right there, in the foreground of the TikTok video, is a small blue and silver Palm device. (It’s technically not called a Palm Pilot — PalmPilot was the name of the company and devices long before the m130 came out — but everybody calls this class of devices Palm Pilots. So we will, too.) More specifically: a picture of a Palm Pilot, on a tablet, mounted to a white column next to the machine holding the reels. It’s not just a Palm Pilot; it’s a Palm Pilot emulator, running on another device because that’s apparently how important this thing is to getting Oppenheimer on a screen near you.

The emulated device in question is a Palm m130, a device released in 2002. It had a two-inch 160 x 160 display, was powered by Motorola’s 33MHz DragonBall VZ processor, and ran on Palm OS 4.1. Palm said the battery would last a week between charges, and you could even add Bluetooth via a card slot. People liked it, it got good reviews. You probably haven’t thought about it in damn near two decades.

In an IMAX theater, the m130’s job is to control the quick turn reel unit, or QTRU for short. (For many years, it appears, a non-emulated m130 sat holstered in most theaters.) The QTRU’s job is to control the platters, which are those large horizontal shelves where all of a film’s many reels are stitched together, stored, and then quickly spun out to and from the projector. The IMAX 1570 projector moves film at a little under six feet per second, so it’s all happening really fast.

The m130 is apparently crucial to keeping the thing humming — “PALM PILOT MUST BE ON ALL THE TIME,” reads a notice above an image of a different m130 that has since been passed around the internet — but doesn’t often need to be used. “I’ve never had to interact with the Palm Pilot,” says one person familiar with the technology. “It’s really just a status screen.” Its job is to keep the QTRU moving at a consistent speed and to help keep the film’s video in sync with its audio.

If you zoom in on the image, as of course the entire internet did, there are four things it displays. Our knowledgeable source explained each one:

• ProjL and ProjR: Refers to the sides of a 3D projector, L and R meaning left and right. “This is from the days of the 45-minute 3D documentaries, where there was a right eye print and a left eye print which both ran through the projector at the same time.”
• Takeup: Defines which platter is ready to receive the film after it goes through the projector.
• Feed: Defines which platter is feeding film into the projector.
• Locked: “If this is highlighted, this means that the platters are ready to run.”

The Palm-powered QTRU system is actually a relatively high-tech part of an otherwise extremely manual process. Yves Leibowitz, a longtime projectionist, has made a number of popular YouTube videos documenting the process of loading a film, which requires setting up the enormous reels in exactly the right place, manually threading film through a number of rollers and platters, and constantly checking and rechecking to make sure everything’s lined up and ready to go.
https://www.theverge.com/23801118/im...ot-oppenheimer
















Until next week,

- js.



















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