Music

Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks or old media new features. Austrian startup Rebeat is certainly trying to prove it isn't the case. Making use of European patent filed way back in 2016 and a $4.8 billion investment, the small company is starting to turn the gears to produce what it labels as "High Definition Vinyl". Why? Because sales of physical media such as CDs and vinyl, for the first time in 7 years, just eclipsed digital sales.

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Now that Spotify has gone public, it may be looking to make some big changes to its free access tier. As many of you probably already know, Spotify currently exists in two different forms: free and paid. Subscribers who pay $9.99 a month get on-demand playback for every song in Spotify's library as well as ad-free listening, two perks that aren't available for those who are listening through free accounts.

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The music streaming market is a pretty vicious one and rivals, more often than not, want to make sure you are pretty much locked into their service. That pretty much means making sure you get your tunes from them and only from them. While some services do allow you to upload some of your own files, Amazon is slowly closing the door on that option. By the end of this month, it will remove music uploaded to its Music Storage locker unless you do one simple thing to postpone the inevitable.

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There's a Hifi music player called HiBy R3 out in the wild this week, and it's made for Tidal alone. This is a mobile music player made by the folks at HiBy Music. It has a touchscreen and connects to Wi-Fi to play music specifically and solely through Tidal. It's not made by Tidal, but it works with its own version of the Tidal app - and that's it. This is the specificity you've been waiting for.

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This week the folks at ROLI revealed their latest in next-gen music making, the ROLI Songmaker Kit. This kit contains the Seaboard Block with the Lightpad Block M with a board that keeps them both in one place. This kit also contains the Loop Block for lovely additional bits and pieces of sound control. Both of the Lightpad Block M and the Seaboard Block were released inside the last year.

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Those who think that interest in old-school CDs or even older school vinyl is just a passing fad should probably sit down for a bit. The Recording Industry Association of America or RIAA has just released its 2017 report detailing last year’s revenue figures. And for the first time since 2011, sales of physical media have surpassed digital downloads. That said, digital is still king when you consider that music streaming remains the biggest source of profit for the industry.

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YouTube plans to purposefully make the music video experience more frustrating, in the hope of infuriating heavy users to the point where they cough up for a paid subscription instead. The Google-owned site is, for many, the go-to place for music, with listeners often ignoring the video altogether. Unfortunately, that's not especially helpful for YouTube's bottom line.

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Today it was revealed that Spotify's newest user interface for Android and iOS is mostly for new users - for the moment. Users discovered this via Reddit, where user experiences are shared and screenshots are compared. We tried a method shared by users there, and surprise! A new account with the newest version of the app yields a new UI, but switching back to an old account brings the UI back to the old look.

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Google's Magenta AI has spawned an unexpected hardware device, the NSynth Super synthesizer that uses machine learning to create new sounds. Based on the Magenta research project, it's built using the NSynth neutral synthesizer that Google released last year, embodying the AI smarts in a tactile physical interface.

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Music streaming no longer seems to be the prized cow it once was but that doesn’t mean the battle has let up in the slightest. It has just changed arenas. While mobile users are still a top priority, service providers, like much of the tech market, have shifted their eyes towards the unstoppable onslaught of smart speakers. And the way things in that market are going, it’s going to be a battle of which music streaming service has a smart speaker or can be on one, leaving the smaller players out in the cold to wither and die.

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Marshall Headphones brand made a lovely little old-school speaker called the Acton Tawny - and it's tight. This speaker is a "special edition" in color combination (Tawny), including "buttery soft camel vinyl exterior and basket weave fret." It's a bluetooth speaker that also works with aux input, and it's part of a collection of sort of similar-looking speakers from the same brand.

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Deezer has a lot standing in its way if it wants to become one of the biggest music streaming services in the US. Though Deezer has been around for quite some time now, it only became widely available in the US back in 2016, at a time when services like Spotify, Amazon, and Apple Music were all duking it out for market share. Still, Deezer has been doing some cool things to garner attention, and today we're seeing the next step in that process.

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