Spotify hits 306 million subscribers and expects 316 million by year end
Spotify hits 306 million subscribers and expects 316 million by year end

Spotify ended the third quarter with 306 million paying subscribers, up 9% from a year earlier, according to its third-quarter update, published on Thursday. Monthly active users rose 11% to 788 million. Revenue grew 16% to €4.97 billion, or 14% at con…

Apple Music has a new logo
Apple Music has a new logo

Apple is officially launching a rebrand of Apple Music. Following the appearance of a redesigned wordmark in a video and an updated app icon in an iOS 27.2 beta, Apple introduced the new “identity” for Apple Music today. There’s a new logo, the updated wordmark, and a new sound composed by British producer Fred Again […]

Now Serato DJ works on your iPhone
Now Serato DJ works on your iPhone

Serato DJ for iOS is finally bringing the company’s pro-level DJ suite to the iPhone and iPad. Until now, the company had only dipped its toes into mobile software, with apps like Pyro that basically just added some autofades between songs in a playlist. This is the first time most of the features of its […]

Spotify pulls 50M AI slop and spam tracks from its recommendations
Spotify pulls 50M AI slop and spam tracks from its recommendations

Spotify says it has taken more than 50 million AI-generated “slop” and spam tracks out of its recommendations this year, on top of 75 million spam tracks it has deleted. It found these were the tracks listeners skipped or rejected most. Spotify did not…

Arturia’s MiniFreak 49 makes its Freak synths more professional
Arturia’s MiniFreak 49 makes its Freak synths more professional

Arturia is adding to its Freak line of proudly weird digital synths with the MiniFreak 49. Under the hood, it’s almost identical to the current MiniFreak, but it adds a number of more professional features and some interface improvements. The most noticeable change is that, rather than the MiniFreak’s 37 minikeys or the MicroFreak’s 25 […]

Spotify pulled 50 million AI slop and spam tracks from its recommendations
Spotify pulled 50 million AI slop and spam tracks from its recommendations

Spotify says it has removed more than 50 million songs considered AI-generated slop or spam from user recommendations over the past year. That’s according to an announcement on Tuesday that says Spotify has also made changes to its recommendation system to highlight more music made by human artists. “Our editors hold the same standard and […]

Vibe coding is turning the music gear world upside down
Vibe coding is turning the music gear world upside down

If you spend any time on r/synthesizers or watch a lot of synth videos on YouTube, you’ve probably noticed the explosion of custom firmware for hardware synthesizers, samplers, and grooveboxes. What unites almost all of them is that they were made possible by increasingly sophisticated vibe-coding tools. These sorts of custom firmware were exceedingly rare […]

J Mascis has nothing better to do
J Mascis has nothing better to do

Dinosaur Jr. frontman J Mascis is known as something of a slacker guitar god. He stands stoically onstage, barely moving, as he seemingly effortlessly works through deft guitar solos and lopsided riffs. Unfortunately, Mascis has developed a similar reputation as an interview subject, quietly sitting and offering deft nonanswers. That’s not to say that Mascis […]

We can finally hear some of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon A Time in Shaolin album
We can finally hear some of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon A Time in Shaolin album

Wu-Tang’s Once Upon A Time in Shaolin album has, for the most part, been extremely difficult to listen to, but you can now hear two snippets of the album thanks to the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, which just published an episode all about the exclusive record. Once Upon A Time in Shaolin has a […]

YouTube sticks new labels on AI-generated songs
YouTube sticks new labels on AI-generated songs

YouTube is adding a “Made with AI” label to tracks that were “altered or fully generated” using AI, with a similar approach to its existing process for applying AI labels to videos. It doesn’t sound like this will apply to any and all use of AI tools in making music, but according to YouTube, it […]