Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 20th, ’24

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January 20th, 2024




The Music Industry Needs a New Growth Story

After years of a streaming boom, record labels are searching for their next big win.
Lucas Shaw

Last year was brutal for the media business, as nearly every major entertainment and technology company fired employees. This year is shaping up to be more of the same.

More than a dozen major corporations across technology, finance and media announced major job cuts this past week, including Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Unity Software Inc. Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company, plans cuts in the first quarter. Animation studio Pixar will let staff go in the second half. All told, media companies have fired more than 70,000 employees since the start of last year, according to Vivek Couto at Media Partners Asia.

Not all of these are for the same reasons. Unity over-hired during the metaverse hype cycle. Alphabet is focusing its attention on artificial intelligence. Amazon’s live streaming site Twitch still loses a lot of money. So does its Hollywood studio, which also has lots of extra staff following the acquisition of MGM.

Amazon video chief Mike Hopkins has one main priority: make the business financially sustainable. (I wrote about a few ways that Hollywood might fix its broken business model for the latest issue of Businessweek.)

While Hollywood has its share of challenges, many of these companies are doing fine; let’s not worry about Alphabet or Amazon just yet. In some cases, their primary businesses (search, e-commerce, music streaming) aren’t growing as quickly as they once were, and investors are demanding higher profits. That means cutting back on side projects that drain resources, or finding new ways to make money from them.

This week, we’ll dive a little deeper into what’s behind some of the recent cuts in music. But first, some (mostly) good news…

The music industry needs a new growth story

For the last several years, Universal Music Group Chief Executive Officer Lucian Grainge has gathered hundreds of music industry heavyweights on the Saturday before the Grammys to tout his company’s rising stars.

Acts from across the Universal family play a few songs for technology executives, advertisers and the press. Past participants include Migos, Maggie Rogers and Stephen Sanchez. The star-studded event is a showcase for rising talent, but it has doubled as a testament to Grainge’s power and a declaration that the music industry, once crippled by piracy, is again flush.

But Universal is skipping the showcase this year, opting for a slimmed-down affair tailored to brands. The optics of throwing such a lavish affair aren’t great when you are about to fire hundreds of employees, the largest bloodletting at the company since it went public a couple years ago.

The cuts, which the company quasi-confirmed after our Jan. 12 story, will occur in the first quarter of the year as part of a larger restructuring. There are a lot of rumors about what that will entail, most of them unsubstantiated so far. We know this will require labels to share more services and resources, but not the outright consolidation of some labels.

(If you know more, you can always email me at lshaw31@bloomberg.net or text me on Signal.)

While the cuts have been rumored for months, they still shook many in the business. After a brutal start to the millennium, the music industry has been growing for nine years thanks to streaming. Universal, the home of the Weeknd, Taylor Swift and Drake, is the industry’s dominant company. Just last week, Grainge told his colleagues that “UMG is the most successful company in the history of the music industry.”

So why is such a successful company firing so many employees?

The streaming boom is starting to slow. While Universal is still growing, its sales increased just 3% in the third quarter. Year over year, its sales growth has slowed five quarters in a row (See the chart below.) If you adjust for currency fluctuations, growth in 2023 was about half of what it was in 2022. Better, but still slowing.

Universal Music's Growth Slows

The largest music company grew revenue at a slower pace in 2023 than the prior two years.

Sales growth Sales growth (constant currency)
Q3 2021 16.1% 17.4%
Q4 2021 19.0 19.0
Q1 2022 19.9 16.5
Q2 2022 25.4 17.3
Q3 2022 23.7 13.3
Q4 2022 16.7 8.8
Q1 2023 11.5 9.3
Q2 2023 6.4 8.8
Q3 2023 3.3
Source: Company filings

Investors in public companies don’t like slowing growth, and Grainge has to answer to those investors since he took the company public in 2021. (His investors include hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, the Bollore family and an affiliate of China’s largest music company, Tencent Music Entertainment.)

Grainge has seen the trend lines and worked to get ahead of it, pushing streaming services to change how they compensate artists under a plan he’s dubbed artist-centric royalties. The specifics of the plan were pretty fuzzy at first, but they have largely boiled down to getting the services to crack down on fraud and give top artists a larger share of revenue.

That campaign has begun to work, as many streaming services have adopted some of the measures. Spotify Technology has adopted new rules that may disqualify more than 80% of the songs on the service from making money, my colleague Ashley Carman wrote this week.

But these adjustments are limited. They don’t help the music industry grow. They reallocate 5% to 10% of sales to professional artists from fraudsters, amateurs and white noise. That amounts to a couple billion dollars industrywide. Good, but not transformative.

Grainge said as much in a recent letter to staff, in which he stressed a different opportunity to grow the pie — making more money from the most-ardent fans. That could mean selling more merchandise, special-edition albums or just doing what the South Koreans do.

The biggest looming threat (and opportunity) for the music business may be artificial intelligence, and Grainge has been participating in a New Yorker story on what could be the industry’s next Napster moment.

But neither of these ideas is likely to produce a huge windfall in the next year or two, which means Grainge and his peers need another move. Their playbook looks similar to what we are seeing across industries, especially in Hollywood.

They fire staff. (Warner Music Group already fired staff last year.) And they raise prices. Or, in the case of a record label, you ask streaming services to raise their prices. Investors seem to like what they see. Universal Music Group shares are up about 15% over the last year and ticked up on the news of the job cuts.

The world is listening to less music in English

Speaking of the music industry, Luminate released its year-end report this week, and I figured I would cherry-pick some of the most interesting points.

English-language music is losing share. Its share of global music listening has declined by 12 percentage points in just a couple of years. That is thanks to the rise of local music in a lot of countries. But it’s not just a foreign phenomenon. English-language music is losing share in the US, mostly to Spanish. (It still accounts for 89% of listening here, compared with 55% globally.)

Could India top the US? The fastest-growing music market in the world is India. That is based on consumption, not dollars. Excluding China, it’s the No. 2 streaming market in the world, and will probably pass the US in the next year or two.

South Koreans buy but don’t stream. South Korean acts accounted for seven of the 10 best-selling CDs in the US, but less than 1% of all listening.

Taylor Swift, my lord. Swift accounted for 1.8% of all music consumption in the US. One out of every 78 songs streamed last year was a Swift song. She also accounted for five of the year’s 10 biggest album, two of its biggest singles and seven of the best-selling vinyl records. (She didn’t have the No. 1 album of the year; that was Morgan Wallen.)

The craziest stat of all? There are 45.6 million tracks that generated ZERO streams last year. There were 10 tracks that had more than 1 billion.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsl...w-growth-story





'1980s Middle School Slow Dance Songs' was the Playlist I Didn't Know I Needed
Linda Holmes

It started with the fact that I really need to stick to a budget, and it ended with "Never Surrender" by Corey Hart.

I was going through a major review of spending and savings this week, just sitting in the living room on my laptop, with the dog snoozing on his bed because it's been much too cold to go outside. It was too quiet in the house for a tedious bout of record-keeping. I'd recently resolved an issue with my satellite radio subscription, so it was at the top of my mind, and I went to look at stations. I've learned from riding a Peloton bike that sometimes I will thrive in '80s-based music environments (I was born in 1970), so I went in that direction. One channel was called 80s Chillpill.

I would describe its vibe as "slow songs for an eighth-grade dance," but that's only because I was in eighth grade at about the right time. "Can't Fight This Feeling" by REO Speedwagon. "Careless Whisper" by Wham!. "Holding Back the Years" by Simply Red. "Lost in Love" by Air Supply. That Kenny G song that I never had any idea was called "Songbird." "Glory of Love" by Peter Cetera, from The Karate Kid Part II, which probably constitutes the greatest cultural footprint of The Karate Kid Part II. The UB40 cover of "Red Red Wine." More than one Kenny Rogers duet: "Islands in the Stream" with Dolly Parton and "We've Got Tonight" with Sheena Easton. (If you are from Philadelphia, I would describe the whole thing as "the softer side of WSTW," which is a pretty sick burn — take my word for it.)

I don't think I owned any of these records or, as they would have actually been, cassettes. (I may have owned the Air Supply one — sue me.) Some I liked and some I didn't, but there's not one that I'd ever have mentioned if asked to list my favorite songs of the 1980s. And yet, the nostalgia that kicked in was so particular. It's a consequence of radio listening, I think; at that time, I certainly spent some time listening to music that I owned, but that was a very limited library, so the rest of the time, I listened to the radio. (It wasn't until probably the middle of the decade that watching MTV began to serve this same function.)

It didn't really matter whether I liked "Can't Fight This Feeling" or not; I listened to it over and over and over, much as people do now with their very favorite songs. Top 40 was relentless (and, you'll notice, rather white), so if that was the direction you went, as it was for me, you heard what you heard and you didn't customize the experience. And, for the record, radio was more genuinely local; this was before the entire structure changed in the 1990s.

I wonder sometimes what the current version of this kind of nostalgia is. Obviously, people who are now the age that I was then will have these pangs about something, but it can be hard to know what. It's not as if it's always Top 40 songs for me. The other week, I was singing to myself a jingle from the Van Scoy jewelry stores. It dates back to at least the early '80s, and it starts, "I'm a lucky girl, hooray, oh boy!" Because, of course, she has a diamond from Van Scoy. I always found this music extremely annoying, but now, if you sing it, I will fully belt along. (And I am not alone. I had no idea, but this delighted me.)

It's the same thing with the music from Action News in Philadelphia. "Move closer to your world, my friend! Take a little bit of tiiiiiime!" Back then, was this music important to me? Of course not; it was the theme song to the news. But now, it seems that it's one of the most beloved bits of cultural currency from people who grew up around Philly at the time.

It makes me suspect that what we tend to refer to as nostalgia, which is officially defined as something along the lines of a painful longing for a time in the past, is really two things. One is a longing for the things we loved themselves: the vacation spots we went to, the friends' houses we played at, the book series we devoured, the best meals we ate at home with our families. But the other is more of a gut-punch reaction to hearing (or seeing or smelling) something that is bound up with a segment of our lives — here, my adolescence and teenager-hood, the development of my adult personality, the development of my taste, the time when I worried less about the world in spite of all the good reasons to have done so.

Perhaps that's the appeal of 80s Chillpill. Perhaps because I was rarely hearing these songs by choice, they are stapled indifferently to the widest variety of memories: being sad, happy, bored, frantic, lonely, with friends, in the car, in my room, studying, reading, hanging out. Doing things that were meaningless, but doing them in good company.

I remember one of my friends at a slumber party lying across her bed on her back so her head hung upside down, looking at a poster on her wall, and saying, "Did you know that Duran Duran spelled backwards is Narud Narud?" My brain has held tightly to that; its insignificance, in and of itself, is irrelevant. I'm not remembering Narud Narud; I'm remembering the friends, the slumber party. In the same way, when a switch inside me flips during "Never Surrender," I'm not having a painful longing for the song. I'm having a painful longing for versions of myself and my life — and all the people in it — that don't exist anymore.
https://www.npr.org/1225560129





Plex is About to Launch a Store for Movies and TV Shows

You’ll apparently be able to rent and buy movies and TV shows in early February.
Jay Peters

Plex, known for its media server software and as a place to watch ad-supported content, is going to launch a store for to buy and rent movies and TV shows in early February, executives told Lowpass’ Janko Roettgers.

“Most studios” are lined up for the store’s launch, and there are “plans to complete the catalog soon after,” Roettgers says. The store will also integrate with Plex features like its watchlists for movies. Roettgers points out that that Plex has announced plans in both 2020 and 2023 to launch a movie / TV store — hopefully Plex is truly ready to do so this time.

The new store will mark a major addition for Plex, especially following the company’s layoff of 20 percent of its staff in June 2023. At the time, the company’s CEO told staffers that Plex’s ad business had been “significantly impacted” by a downturn in global advertising markets, but chief product officer Scott Olechowski told Roettgers that its ad business is growing.

There are more changes coming to Plex down the line, Roettgers reports. Olechowski said that the company has a “pretty major UX refresh” in the works to help support the many people using Plex to watch ad-supported movies and TV shows and FAST (free, ad-supported streaming) channels.

Plex is also planning to add more social features like public profiles this year — even after concerns popped up about its activity sharing feature late last year. (Roettgers says that Plex updated some of the feature’s onboarding processes, and Plex senior product and design director Jason Williams told him that the backlash “kind of vanished pretty quickly afterwards.”)
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/18/2...ovies-tv-shows





Have You Discussed Pirating Media on the Internet? These Film Studios Might Like a Word

First Amendment rights have protected these piracy-discussing redditors from identification up until now, but that hasn't stopped studios from trying.
Andy Edser

Piracy is, and shall likely forever remain, a topic of hot-debate. Whatever your views on the morality of pirating copyrighted works, be they games, films or otherwise, it would seem reasonable to assume that you could talk about it on the internet without getting yourself into hot water.

That might not be the case, at least if these two film studios get their way. Via Ars Technica, film studios Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures have filed a motion to compel Reddit to respond to a subpoena which asked the company to provide the IP address log information for six anonymous Reddit users who discussed pirating media on its platform.

This is the latest move in a series of copyright infringement cases in the past year from multiple studios attempting to demand Reddit hand over user information, in order to legally pursue the ISPs that these redditors discussed as being unable, or at the very least unwilling, to prevent them from pirating media using the connections provided.

Two previous attempts have been unsuccessful, with the first quashed by a US District Court due to the First Amendment rights of the users to anonymous speech, meaning that Reddit didn't have to disclose information including names, email addresses and account information for the users in question. This didn't stop those same companies trying again, this time in an attempt to sue another ISP over alleged copyright infringement over its network.

Again, Reddit was subpoenaed for user account information including IP addresses and logs, and again a court ruled against it, citing First Amendment rights.

However, two of the studios involved in these initial cases seem to have decided that the third time might be the charm, as both have now filed a motion in yet another attempt to make Reddit hand over users IP address log information in order to pursue an ISP. The target this time is Frontier Communications, which several of these Reddit users discussed as being ineffective at stopping them from pirating media.

In 2022, one user mentioned in a post regarding a different ISPs piracy protections that they'd "been using Frontier DSL for years" and that "Despite the shitty internet, they didn't give a shit what I downloaded". Another reported that they'd received a total of 44 emails from Frontier in regards to downloading torrents, and a threat to terminate the service, but as yet no action had been taken.

The studios argue that in these and other identified posts "The Reddit users do not have a recognized privacy interest in their IP addresses" and that the IP address logs are "clearly relevant and proportional to the needs of the case".

Whatever your take on the legality and ethics of the great piracy debate, or perhaps even the wisdom of discussing an illegal activity openly on a public forum, it's troubling that these studios feel it necessary to demand sensitive user data from a third party in order to pursue legal action, simply for the crime of discussing the activity itself.

There's no doubt that the posters involved here were, at the very least unwise in their decision to post so openly about the illegal activity they had partaken in, but using it as cause to legally demand that the site hosting these posts hands over identifying user data seems extreme.

While it remains to be seen whether this particular attempt will be successful, it does serve as a reminder that your online posting does not remain in a digital vacuum, whatever the subject, and that organisations are on the lookout for these sorts of discussions.

It should go without saying, but your posts on a public forum are, well, public, and so caution in what you discuss is most certain to be advised.
https://www.pcgamer.com/have-you-dis...t-like-a-word/





Reddit Must Share IP Addresses of Piracy-Discussing Users, Film Studios Say

Reddit says First Amendment rights protect it from having to disclose users' info.
Scharon Harding

For the third time in less than a year, film studios with copyright infringement complaints against a cable Internet provider are trying to force Reddit to share information about users who have discussed piracy on the site.

In 2023, film companies lost two attempts to have Reddit unmask its users. In the first instance, US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler ruled in the US District Court for the Northern District of California that the First Amendment right to anonymous speech meant Reddit didn’t have to disclose the names, email addresses, and other account registration information for nine Reddit users. Film companies, including Bodyguard Productions and Millennium Media, had subpoenaed Reddit in relation to a copyright infringement lawsuit against Astound Broadband-owned RCN about subscribers allegedly pirating 34 movie titles, including Hellboy (2019), Rambo V: Last Blood, and Tesla.

In the second instance, the same companies sued Astound Broadband-owned ISP Grande, again for alleged copyright infringement occurring over the ISP’s network. The studios subpoenaed Reddit for user account information, including "IP address registration and logs from 1/1/2016 to present, name, email address, and other account registration information” for six Reddit users, per a July 2023 court filing.

In August, a federal court again quashed that subpoena, citing First Amendment rights. In her ruling, Beeler noted that while the First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, the film producers had already received the names of 118 Grande subscribers. She also said the film producers had failed to prove that “the identifying information is directly or materially relevant or unavailable from another source.”

Third piracy-related subpoena

This week, as reported by TorrentFreak, film companies Voltage Holdings, which are part of the previous two subpoenas, and Screen Media Ventures, another film studio with litigation against RCN, filed a motion to compel [PDF] Reddit to respond to the subpoena in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The studios said they're seeking the information concerning claims they've made that the “ability to pirate content efficiently without any consequences is a draw for becoming a Frontier subscriber” and that Frontier Communications “does not have an effective policy for terminating repeat infringers." The film studios are claimants against Frontier in its bankruptcy case. The studios are represented by the same lawyers used in the two aforementioned cases.

The studios are asking that the court require Reddit to provide “IP address log information from 1/1/2017 to present” for six anonymous Reddit users who talked about piracy on Reddit; although, Reddit posts shared in the court filing only date back to 2021.

Reddit responded to the studios' subpoena with a letter [PDF] on January 2 stating that the subpoena “does not satisfy the First Amendment standard for disclosure of identifying information regarding an anonymous speaker.” Reddit also noted the two previously quashed subpoenas and suggested that it did not have to comply with the new request because the studios could acquire equivalent or better information elsewhere.

As with the previously mentioned litigation against ISPs, Reddit is a non-party. However, since the film companies claimed that Frontier had refused to produce customer-identifying information and Reddit responded with a denial to the requests, the film companies filed their motion to compel.

The studios argue that the information requests do not implicate the First Amendment and that the rulings around the two aforementioned subpoenas are not applicable because the new subpoena is only about IP address logs and not other user-identifying information.

“The Reddit users do not have a recognized privacy interest in their IP addresses,” the motion says.

Redditor says Frontier “didn’t give a shit what I downloaded”

In this week's filing, the film studios claim that six Redditors' IP address logs are “clearly relevant and proportional to the needs of the case" because the Reddit users all made comments that either establish “that Frontier has not reasonably implemented a policy for terminating repeat infringers sufficient for a safe harbor affirmative” or that “the ability to freely pirate without consequence was a draw to becoming a subscriber of Frontier."

Last year, a Reddit user wrote that they received 44 emails from Frontier threatening to cut off their service due to torrent downloads, but “if they didn’t do it after 44 emails ... they won’t."

In 2022, another Reddit user said that they had used Frontier DSL for years and “despite the shitty internet, they didn’t give a shit what I downloaded.”

A different Reddit user reported that Frontier confirmed to them that it had failed to send DMCA notices to the customers' email. That Reddit user said Frontier was terminating their account. Another Redditor cited claimed that they had used two different places to find torrents and received DMCA notices from Frontier despite the user claiming that they had “been torrenting unprotected for like a decade” on Frontier “and never [got] one" before.

Another user admitted on the FrontierFios subreddit in 2021 that they “torrent every once in a while."

Reddit users didn’t discuss movies owned by film studios

Another reason Reddit refuses to comply with the film producers' request is that “none of the posts depicted in Exhibit A to the subpoena appear to relate to movies that we understand are the subject of" the copyright infringement claims.

The studios' response said:

A core issue is Frontier’s safe harbor defense—whether Frontier has reasonably implemented a policy for terminating the account of repeat infringers. The issue of whether or not Frontier has a safe harbor is not limited to [the platintiffs’] Works but is evaluated in view of Frontier’s response to all copyright holders.

Similarly to the other two subpoenas Reddit recently faced, the studios in this week's motion claimed that they “are not seeking to retaliate economically or officially against" the Redditors whose IP address logs they seek but only want to "use their comments as evidence that Frontier has no meaningful policy for terminating repeat infringers and this lax or no policy was a draw for using Frontier’s service." The court filing did not explain why the IP address logs of people who talked about piracy on Reddit were essential to that.

The film producers said Reddit "has not identified any potential harm to these users by disclosing the requested information."

The studios seem in dire need of evidence as their discovery cutoff date is June 13, and they "already propounded nearly a hundred [requests for proposal] and have not received information from Frontier concerning their subscribers choosing its service for the ability to pirate without consequence." A virtually identical statement was made in film studios' motion to compel filed in relation to the Grande lawsuit.

The lawsuit against RCN is ongoing. The lawsuit against Grande was dropped, with no explanation, in October. Grande claimed it did not pay out any money, TorrentFreak reported.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...acy-on-reddit/





VIDEO: Actress, Toyin Abraham Arrests 5 For Pirating Her N500m Movie ‘Malika’
kacy lee

A recent video of Nigerian actress and director Toyin Abraham chatting with media about having some individuals jailed aroused outrage online.

In the popular video, the actress discusses how her latest film, Malaika, was copied and circulated over several Telegram channels.

Toyin Abraham stated that she experienced significant panic attacks when she discovered that Malaika had leaked on several sites.

She said that she was obliged to go on several Telegram groups and request the moderators to halt the illicit downloads.

During the press conference, the director said that it was heartbreaking to witness a film that cost her N500 million to develop leak and be illegally downloaded.

Toyin was spotted with her FilmOne movie distributor discussing the arrests of several people who were found pirating Malaika and other Nollywood films.

Here are some of the reactions to Toyin Abraham’s interview:

@starboy_fb: “Voters whose votes were stolen and got robbed had more than panic attack but were also physically attacked ! Let’s channel the same energy on votes hijackers!!!”

@potable_ty: “Toyin u do too much, always arresting people see her head like her ex boyfriend she wanted to be more than Funke ni, God catch her lmaoooooo.”

@femicummins: “500 million ko 500 billion ni.”

@adukeskitchen_koko.lounge: “Aunty funke’s own also got leaked.

@big.boldfabulous: “Awon oloriburuku…you want to spoil my baby’s work olorun o ni gba fun yin oo.world best no fear you will never know sorrow.God gat your back my love.”

@skitsandmemes4: “I don’t understand, your movie is not even pirated, you are already complaining, the one that got pirated on YouTube and telegram, didn’t even complain.”

https://www.gistmania.com/talk/topic,583143.0.html





30TB Hard Drives are Nearly Here — Seagate’s Mozaic 3+ HAMR Platform to Provide the Next Jump in HDD Capacities

Seagate plans to ship HAMR HDDs for cloud customers in Q1 2024.
Anton Shilov

Seagate on Wednesday introduced the industry's first hard disk drive (HDD) platform that uses heat-assisted media recording (HAMR). The new Mozaic 3+ platform relies on several all-new technologies, including new media, new write and read heads, and a brand-new controller. The platform will be used for Seagate's upcoming Exos hard drives for cloud datacenters with a 30TB capacity and higher.

The Mozaic 3+ Platform

Heat-assisted magnetic recording is meant to radically increase areal recording density of magnetic media by making writes while the recording region is briefly heated to a point where its magnetic coercivity drops significantly.

Seagate's Mozaic 3+ uses 10 glass disks with a magnetic layer consisting of an iron-platinum superlattice structure that ensures both longevity and smaller media grain size compared to typical HDD platters. To record the media, the platform uses a plasmonic writer sub-system with a vertically integrated nanophotonic laser that heats the media before writing. Because individual grains are so small with the new media, their individual magnetic signatures are lower, whereas magnetic inter-track interference (ITI) effect is somewhat higher. As a result, Seagate had to introduce its new Gen 7 Spintronic Reader, which features the "world's smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors," according to the company.

Because Seagate's new Mozaic 3+ platform deals with new media with a very small grain size, an all-new writer, and a reader that features multiple tiny magnetic field readers, it also requires a lot of compute horsepower to orchestrate the drive's work. Therefore, Seagate has equipped with Mozaic 3+ platform with an all-new controller made on a 12nm fabrication process. This controller is three times more powerful than its predecessors, according to the company. Seagate did not disclose the number and type of processing cores it uses for the controller or its transistor count, but, being a RISC-V supporter, the company might be using its own custom cores to control its HAMR HDDs.

"The Mozaic 3+ platform represents more than just HAMR technology," said Seagate CEO Dave Mosley. "It comprises several industry-first innovations that we have integrated to help us scale areal density."

Seagate implies that its Exos hard drives based on the Mozaic 3+ platform are drop-in compatible with existing cloud servers. In addition to higher capacity, these drives also enable considerably higher sequential read and write speeds, and reduce power consumption per TB. However, they also lower IOPS per TB performance, which will require their users — such as cloud server providers — to mitigate this somehow in a bid to make these HDDs compliant with their quality-of-service (QoS) and other requirements.

Shipping This Quarter, Addressing Many Applications

Seagate said that its Exos hard drives featuring 30TB and higher capacity points would ship in volume later this quarter after the company's clients complete their qualifications of the new HDDs. In addition, HAMR-based Mozaic 3+ storage technology will enable a wide range of products — including enterprise HDDs, NAS drives, and video and imaging applications (VIA) markets. This means that IronWolf and SkyHawk HAMR-powered HDDs are planned.

"As AI use cases put a premium on raw data sets, more companies are going to need to store all the data they can. To accommodate the resulting masses of data, areal density matters more than ever," Mosley said.

The industry has worked on HAMR technologies for decades and it is believed that it will enable drives featuring capacities of 80TB — and maybe higher. It remains to be seen when other hard drive makers, such as Toshiba and Western Digital, will follow — but, for now, Seagate has an indisputable lead in HAMR.

Seagate is also working on its Mozaic 4+ platform that will enable 40TB+ HDDs and is due in a couple of years (2026), as well the Mozaic 5+ platform that will power 50TB+ hard drives and will launch in 2028 or later.

For now, Mosley says Seagate is "the world's only hard drive manufacturer with the areal density capability to get to 3TB per platter and with 5TB on the horizon."
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-comp...dds-and-beyond





Verizon Won’t Stop Charging $3.30 “Telco Recovery” Fee, May Raise it Again

Users will get up to $100 each in refunds, but Verizon fee isn't going away.
Jon Brodkin

Verizon Wireless customers may get up to $100 each as part of a $100 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit over Verizon's monthly "Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge."

But as is typical in class-action settlements, Verizon isn't admitting any wrongdoing. It also plans to keep charging the monthly fee and says it may raise it in the future.

Settlement notification emails with unique codes for submitting claims have been going out to eligible Verizon customers over the past week. The emails were still being distributed as of last night, so you might still be in line for a payout even if you haven't received one yet. Postcard notices are also being sent.

Verizon's Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge for wireless phones and other devices is $3.30 per line after being raised from $1.95 in mid-2022. It was originally called the "Administrative Charge" but was renamed to include "telco recovery" at around the same time as the price increase.

"Verizon has denied and continues to deny that it did anything wrong and that the lawsuit has any merit," the settlement notification emails say. "Verizon states that it will continue to charge the Administrative Charge and that it has the right to increase the Administrative Charge."

The emails direct customers to the settlement website. US-based customers "who received postpaid wireless or data services from Verizon and who were charged and paid an Administrative Charge between January 1, 2016 and November 8, 2023" are eligible and must file a claim by April 15, 2024, to receive a payment.

Verizon fee covers taxes, normal business costs

Like other vaguely explained telco fees, the Verizon charge makes the real price paid by consumers higher than the rates Verizon advertises. The fee is not mandated by the government, but Verizon tells customers that it covers regulatory obligations, taxes, and various expenses that are just part of the cost of doing business for an operator of a nationwide cellular network.

As Verizon's website states, the charge helps cover a wide range of expenses, such as the "costs of complying with regulatory and industry obligations and programs, such as E911, wireless local number portability and wireless tower mandate costs; property taxes; and costs associated with our network, including facilities (e.g., leases), operations, maintenance and protection, and costs paid to other companies for network services."

The class-action complaint filed in a New Jersey Superior Court alleged that "the Administrative Charge is never adequately or honestly disclosed to customers... Verizon utilizes the Administrative Charge to unlawfully charge its customers more per month for Verizon wireless services without having to advertise the higher monthly rates."

The charge was introduced in 2005 at a rate of $0.40 per month, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit did not try to force Verizon to stop charging the fee but said Verizon should "honestly and adequately disclose the Administrative Charge and its true nature and basis in Verizon's customer bills and in communications with Class members at or before the time the wireless services contract is created," and reimburse users "for any and all undisclosed (or inadequately disclosed) extra-contractual fees they were forced to pay."

Verizon claims fee was adequately disclosed

As the settlement agreement states, Verizon agreed to pay $100 million into a fund "to avoid further expense, inconvenience, and interference with its business operations, and to dispose of burdensome litigation." But the carrier still "contends that the 'Administrative Charge' was adequately disclosed to consumers at the time they signed up for Verizon services since Verizon advertisements listing the monthly rates stated: 'Plus fees & taxes.'"

Verizon also argues "that Plaintiffs' claims are subject to a 'voluntary payment' defense in that few Verizon customers ever complained" about the fee and that most people continued their month-to-month service after the charge started appearing. The company further claims that "proposed class members have contractually waived their right to sue Verizon in court and are instead subject to mandatory arbitration."

One of the plaintiffs' allegations is that Verizon posted "deceptive language on its bills and website which stated that the Administrative Charge was a surcharge imposed on subscribers 'to cover the costs that are billed to us by federal, state or local governments.'" Plaintiffs say that their lawsuit spurred Verizon to remove that language.

Despite Verizon's insistence that it did no wrong, the settlement notes that "Verizon agreed to amend its My Verizon Wireless Customer Agreement" to include a new, more detailed explanation of the charge, which is as follows:

In addition to the cost of your plan or any features to which you may subscribe, our charges may also include an Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge, in addition to the other fees described in this Agreement.

The Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge isn't a tax, it isn't required by law, is not necessarily related to anything the government does, and it is kept by us in whole or in part. The amount of the Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge and what it pays for may change over time.

Date of settlement payments unknown

While you have until April 15 to submit a claim, it isn't known when the payouts will arrive to customers. On March 22, a few weeks before the claims deadline, the court is holding a hearing on whether the settlement is fair, reasonable, and adequate.

The maximum settlement payment would be $100 for one account, but "the final amount may be lower depending on how long you were a Verizon subscriber and how many Settlement Class Members file valid claims," the settlement email says. The payments are expected to be at least $15 for each account, plus $1 for each month that a user bought service and paid the charge. Those amounts would be lowered if the number of valid claims is particularly large compared to the settlement fund size.

A final approval of the settlement is needed before claims are paid. The agreement received preliminary approval on December 15, 2023.

"If there are timely objections, the Court will consider them. After the hearing, the Court will decide whether to approve the settlement. We do not know how long these decisions will take," the settlement website says.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...aise-it-again/
















Until next week,

- js.



















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