Media

Copilot, Microsoft’s family of AI-powered chatbots and assistants, is getting a few new upgrades timed with a flashy Super Bowl LVIII ad campaign. In a post on the official Microsoft blog, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, outlined what users can expect.

Spotify renewed its contract with podcaster Joe Rogan this weekend, but with a twist. After almost four years, “The Joe Rogan Experience” is no longer a Spotify-exclusive podcast. This might seem like a concession on Spotify’s part, as exclusive deals have long been a part of the

Spotify, a notable Apple critic, unsurprisingly came out swinging after Apple announced how it was complying with the EU’s new regulation, the Digital Markets Act, or DMA, calling Apple’s plan “extortion” and a “complete and total farce.” But on its Q4 2023 earni

Late last year, Spotify began offering 15 hours of monthly audiobook listening to its Premium subscribers in select markets, including the U.S. Now the company says the new service is the second-largest audiobook provider behind Amazon-owned Audible — something Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said was

The complex world of royalties and rights management is a huge pain point for artists. With the rise in the number of record labels and streaming platforms around, it could be tricky for artists to track where their work is being used and how they are earning from different platforms. Mogul wants t

Controversies and PR headaches weren’t enough to dissuade Spotify from re-upping its agreement with podcaster Joe Rogan, whose show over the past couple of years drove divisions among music fans and artists alike and even prompted some big names, like Neil Young, to pull their catalogs from t

Podcastle, a podcasting platform that has boosted its product with various generative AI-driven features, has raised $13.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Mosaic Ventures. Also participating were existing Podcastle investors RTP Global, Point Nine Capital, Sierra Ventures and Andrew Ng&#

As GenAI tools begin to transform the music industry in incredible — and in some cases ethically problematic — ways, Google is ramping up its investments in AI tech to create new songs and lyrics. The search giant today unveiled MusicFX, an upgrade to MusicLM, the music-generating tool

Taylor Swift deepfakes be damned, Google is releasing a new AI-powered tool, ImageFX, for image creation. Underpinned by Imagen 2, a GenAI image model developed by Google’s DeepMind team, ImageFX offers a prompt-based UI to create and edit images. That’s no different than tools like Ope

Reliance-backed Viacom18 has reached an agreement to buy 60% of Disney’s India unit, WSJ reported Thursday citing unnamed sources, creating a pathway for the Indian conglomerate to form a $10 billion media giant in the South Asian market. The deal, which WSJ says will close this month, values

Wattpad, a Toronto-based storytelling platform owned by Naver’s Webtoon Entertainment, confirmed it laid off around 20 staff, or less than 10% of its workforce, according to a spokesperson of Wattpad. The outfit recently reorganized a number of teams and now it has a total of 200 employees,

Universal Music Group (UMG), the label representing artists such as Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande, says that it’ll pull its music from TikTok tomorrow at midnight after failing to reach a deal with the platform’s parent company, ByteDance, over royalties. UMG won’t

Three months after completing its $68.7 billion acquisition of gaming company Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees in its gaming divisions. This amounts to about 8.6% of 22,000 Microsoft employees in gaming. Blizzard president Mike Ybarra also announced he will step down, no

Apple will pay additional royalties starting this month to artists if they have a spatial audio version on Apple Music, according to multiple reports. The company will pay up to 10% additional royalty if an artist has all their songs in spatial audio, per a report by 9to5Mac. The extra money doesn&