The music industry is at a tipping point [MIDiA’s Mark Mulligan]Artificial intelligence, underpaid artists, and tens of thousands of new tracks released daily are just a few of the major problems facing the music industry. “There is still time for. Continue reading
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How to commit music career suicide with just two words [Rick Beato]The music business is a community, and you will cross paths with other members of that community repeatedly throughout your career. So what you say and how you treat them. Continue reading
The post How to commit music career suicide with just two words [Rick Beato] appeared first on Hypebot.

Will an explicit label impact your song streams?Learn about the truths and myths surrounding explicit music and how it may affect your streaming success. by Philip Kinsher of Disc Makers Blog Musicians have long loved the freedom. Continue reading
The post Will an explicit label impact your song streams? appeared first on Hypebot.

Vicious Antelope Synclavier Sympan - Synclavier V and Analog Lab V Synclavier Sympan contains 50 dystopic cinematic presets for Arturia Synclavier V and Analog Lab V synths. With its 37 evolving pads and 13 guitar pads all based on the custom samples that... Read More

CLOCKstep: MULTI from JMK Music Pedals CLOCKstep: MULTI is a MIDI Clock, transport control and metronome source with +5V outputs that allow it to be used with Eurorack and other compatible modular synth systems. 

Canada's court deem 👍 emoji valid as a contract agreement: ReportThe case sought to determine whether a Canadian farmer had agreed to sell tons of flax to a grain buyer in 2021 by replying with a thumbs-up emoji.

The best e-bikes for every type of rider and where Chinese EV makers are headedWelcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Reporter Rebecca Bellan is back in the driver’s seat the next couple of weeks as I stash my laptop and head out for some adventures (planes, ferries and bikes included).
Micromobbin’

India has been leading the shift to electric two-wheelers, but the rollback of a popular government incentive has caused sales to nosedive, Jagmeet Singh reports.
In May, the Indian government revised its incentive scheme, reducing subsidies from $183 per kWh (up to 40% of the vehicle price) to $122 per kWh of battery capacity (up to 15% of vehicle price). Changes to the scheme resulted in a sudden sales disruption. In June, sales dropped more than 56%, and it marked the lowest sales month in about a year.
This not only affects consumers, but it could also cause consolidation in the industry and even exits of some players. It just goes to show, government subsidies help people buy green alternatives, and they can boost nascent industries.
In other news . . .
We did a big e-bike roundup, so you can find the best electric bike to suit your needs — whether you’re a commuter or a delivery worker, a parent or a senior, a bargain hunter or a mountain biker. And the best part is, MANY of these companies are holding sales at the moment, so get in now for some great midsummer deals!
Former Aston Martin boss Andy Palmer wants his Hilo One to “be the Volvo of scooters.”
NYC is inviting delivery workers to apply for the city’s e-bike trade-in program to get potentially fire-causing e-bike batteries off the streets.
Upway is partnering with Super73 to handle reselling all pre-owned e-bikes.
A 12-year-old boy died while riding a Voi e-scooter in Birmingham, U.K., prompting the city to require selfie checks from riders in order to avoid underage riding.
Deal of the week

Deal of the week? More like no deal.
Troubled British commercial EV maker Arrival has killed off what would have been its second SPAC deal with Kensington Capital Acquisition Corp. The company announced a plan to de-SPAC (it debuted publicly via SPAC with CIIG Merger Corp. in 2021) in April 2023, but it appears that plan for liquidity has fallen through.
As regular readers of The Station might recall, this whole double SPAC business raised a few of our eyebrows. Wejo was the first double SPAC, meaning a company that went public via a SPAC merger and then made a second SPAC merger in search of more capital.
It’s not clear what prompted the death of the second Arrival SPAC. Was it the terms? And was it Arrival or Kensington that backed out?
Other deals that got my attention . . .
Finn, a German car subscription company with operations in the U.S., has signed a €25 million asset-backed facility with Avellinia Capital, to help fund its vehicle purchases. The company says this means it can dedicate future capital to growth initiatives instead of fleet financing.
Moove, an African mobility fintech startup raised $8 million from Absa Corporate and Investment Banking. It’s raised a total of $28 million to date.
NEU Battery Materials, a Singapore-based lithium-ion battery recycling startup, raised $3.7 million in a seed round led by SGInnovate. The round was also joined by ComfortDelGro Ventures, Shift4Good, Paragon Ventures I and other angel investors.
Nikola failed yet again to get enough shareholders to vote on a proposal that would allow it to issue more shares, and thus raise more capital. But a new law may soon help the company bypass the need to secure more than 50% of all outstanding shares. The company also managed to secure a $41.9 million grant from the California Transportation Commission to build six heavy-duty hydrogen refueling stations across Southern California.
RapidFlight, an unmanned aircraft manufacturing company headquartered in Virginia, acquired the intellectual property portfolio of defunct Local Motors. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Urban SDK, a company that sells cloud-based traffic management systems to state and local governments, raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round led by GOVO Venture Partners. DeepWork Capital, Florida Opportunity Fund, Techstars and venVelo also participated.
Notable reads and other tidbits

Autonomous vehicles
A group of safe street activists in San Francisco have been disabling Cruise and Waymo robotaxis by putting traffic cones on their hoods. The now-viral prank is done in protest of the vehicles that many accuse of malfunctioning and disrupting traffic flow, emergency vehicles and public transit.
Volkswagen has launched an autonomous vehicle test program in Austin using a fleet of 10 all-electric ID Buzz vehicles equipped with Mobileye’s technology.
China’s WeRide has secured the first countrywide autonomous driving license from the United Arab Emirates to test and deploy its robotaxis, delivery vans, and other autonomous vehicles on public roads.
Electric vehicles, charging and batteries
EV chargers can be hacked pretty easily, and that poses a catastrophic risk that can threaten drivers and the power grid.
We cannot get enough of Fiat’s adorable Topolino EV. The automaker said this week that the quadricycle will feature a series of odd accessories, including a little shower, “designed for those days spent on the beach along the Italian coast.” Totally, totally, the Italian coast.
Fisker fell short of its own production expectations in the second quarter. The EV upstart produced 1,022 Ocean SUVs, when it had expected to produce between 1,400 and 1,700. The company blamed a shortage of components from its sub-suppliers.
Panasonic says it needs to build four more battery factories to reach its target of boosting annual EV capacity to 200 GWh by early 2031.
Polaris is working on building off-road EV charging infrastructure in Michigan.
Rivian has begun rolling out its electric delivery vans for Amazon in Europe. The first 300 will be seen on the streets in Germany. The automaker also recorded a threefold increase in deliveries in the second quarter — 12,640 units to be exact — which sent shares flying 16%. Rivian said it’s on track to deliver on its previous guidance of 50,000 units this year.
TC+ reporter Tim De Chant weighs in on the seven things every EV fast-charging network needs.
Gig economy
Uber, DoorDash, Grubhub and Relay are suing New York City to block minimum pay standards for gig workers. They say regulators used faulty data to calculate new compensation rules. The new $18 minimum wage for delivery workers was set earlier this month.
Hailing an Uber in Saudi Arabia is a nightmare, and that’s due to state regulations about who is allowed to work for ride-hailing apps.
Miscellaneous
Konux, a Munich-based deep tech AI scale-up, is building out a predictive maintenance SaaS business to upgrade railway infrastructure. Its mission, as Natasha Lomas reports, is to drive digitization and transformation in the most sustainable mass transit option using AI plus IoT.
Tesla
Tesla is getting its own section this week. Here we go.
Tesla has begun hiring “ADAS Test Operators” outside of Europe as it works to expand its FSD (Full Self-Driving) beta and Autopilot suite outside of North America. Apparently, Australia is next up.
There have been increasing Cybertruck sightings, and the Tesla bros are freaking out about it.
The company delivered a record 466,140 units in the second quarter, which is up 10% YoY. Investors will be looking out on earnings day for healthy margins, since many of Tesla’s sales were fueled by price cuts.
Speaking of price cuts…Tesla is slashing prices of Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in Japan now.
The Elon Musk–owned automaker started a price war in China, and now the company is trying to calm the waters. Tesla joined Chinese automakers, including its biggest rival BYD, in signing a letter pledging to enhance “core socialist values” and compete fairly in the country’s car market.
But then…Tesla went ahead and rolled out a global referral program, giving $500 in cash back to buyers who purchase the Model 3 or Model Y. The program was rolled out in Tesla’s largest markets, including the U.S. and, you guessed it, China. (Also Germany, France, Canada, Mexico, Hong Kong and Singapore.)
Tesla has more converts to its North American Charging Standard (NACS). Mercedes-Benz is the latest to adopt NACS, joining a handful of other automakers like GM, Ford, Volvo and Polestar. Mercedes EVs will have access to Tesla’s supercharging stations by 2024. The automaker also plans to expand its own charging network, with more than 2,500 chargers in North America.
And Kentucky now requires that EV charging companies include Tesla’s charging plug, as well as the standard CCS, if they want to secure federal dollars from a state program to electrify highways. Kentucky is the first to go through with it, but Texas and Washington are thinking about it.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has demanded that Tesla provide more information on its driver-monitoring system as part of an ongoing probe into the safety of Autopilot.

Beep beep! TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place in San Francisco on September 19–21, is where you’ll get the inside scoop on the future of mobility. Come and hear from today’s leading mobility entrepreneurs on what it takes to build and innovate for a more sustainable future. Save up to $600 when you buy your pass now through August 11, and save 15% on top of that with promo code STATION. Learn more.

The best e-bikes for every type of rider and where Chinese EV makers are headed by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Witch Pig Seven String Synth Seven String Synth is based on samples recorded from a Schecter JL7 seven string guitar, going through an emulation of the Electro-Harmonix Micro Synthesizer guitar pedal. Four versions... Read More

Ambient’s new extensions for Sennheiser mics Ambient’s latest audio technology accessory allows the use of large windsheilds and microphone flags with Sennheiser's current range of handheld transmitters. 

BlackRock bullish on Bitcoin, Gemini CEO’s ‘delusion,’ and CEXs’ unhappy staff: Hodler’s Digest, July 2-8BlackRock’s PR campaign for a Bitcoin ETF, Gemini’s fight with DCG over Earn program funds, and CEX employees’ sentiment.

Meta’s Threads goes live, OpenAI launches GPT-4 and Pornhub blocks accessHey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular roundup of the week in tech. Been too slammed to follow the news cycle as closely as you’d like? Not to worry. That’s why WiR exists. We’ll get you up to speed in no time.
Thanks to the July 4th holiday, the workweek was somewhat disrupted. But plenty still happened. Meta released Threads, its Twitter competitor, which quickly grew to tens of millions of users. Meanwhile, Twitter quietly removed the login requirement for viewing tweets that it’d imposed only days before. Somewhere in the midst of it all, secretive hardware startup Humane revealed the details of its first product. And OpenAI made its GPT-4 generative AI model generally available.
Read on for more of the top stories from the week — and if you haven’t already, sign up here to get WiR in your inbox every Saturday.
Most read
Threads goes live: This week, Instagram announced the highly anticipated launch of its text-based social networking app, Threads, which allows Instagram users to authenticate with their existing credentials in order to post short tweet-like updates. Within 24 hours, the app, which is available for iOS and Android in around 100 countries (but not the EU, reportedly due to local data privacy regulations), passed 30 million sign-ups.
Twitter takes the gloves off: With the success of Threads, Twitter is threatening to sue Meta, which it accuses of poaching former Twitter employees to create the new platform. Shortly after Threads launched, a lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the social media giant of engaging in unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.
A tough thread to delete: In more Threads news, turns out that deleting a Threads account requires deleting the linked Instagram account as well. The rationale, Meta elaborates on the policy page, is that a Threads profile is part of the user’s Instagram account. The discovery of this stipulation has surprised many users, unsurprisingly.
OpenAI launches GPT-4: OpenAI this week announced the general availability of GPT-4, its latest text-generating model, through its paid API. GPT-4 can generate text (including code) and accept image and text inputs — an improvement over its predecessor GPT-3.5, which only accepted text — and performs at “human level” on various professional and academic benchmarks. But it’s not perfect, as we note in our previous coverage.
Humane unveils the Ai Pin: Humane, the startup launched by ex-Apple design and engineering duo Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, this week revealed details about its first product: the Ai Pin. Humane’s product is a wearable gadget with a projected display and AI-powered features — like a futuristic smartphone, but in a vastly different form factor.
Pornhub blocks access: Pornhub is blocking access to users in Mississippi, Virginia and Utah, which have recently passed laws that require age verification to access adult websites. Internet privacy advocates have long been critical of these age checks, which require users to share personal information like their government ID in order to use the internet.
Reddit’s valuation gets cut, again: Fidelity has further slashed the estimated worth of its holding in the social media giant Reddit. Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund valued its holdings in Reddit at $15.4 million as of May 31, according to the fund’s monthly disclosure released last Friday. That’s down 7.36% from the $16.6 million mark at April’s closure and altogether a slide of 45.4% since its investment in August 2021. The updated share value suggests a $5.5 billion valuation for Reddit.
Goldman looks to ditch Apple: Four years after partnering with Apple on the launch of the Apple Card, Goldman Sachs may be eyeing the exits. The Wall Street Journal reports that Goldman is “looking for a way out” of its high-profile deal with Apple, which recently expanded to include savings accounts for Apple Card holders. The investment banking firm is apparently in talks to offload the partnership to American Express, the WSJ report added, but so far nothing seems to be set in stone, nor is it clear whether Apple would support the handoff.

Audio

Need a podcast to pass the time? You’ve come to the right place. TechCrunch offers a growing roster of quality shows, and this week, there’s lots in the way of new material.
Equity featured Immad Akhund, the CEO and co-founder of Mercury, which made headlines earlier this year for how it stepped in to help fill the business banking void left in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse.
And the Found crew interviewed Charles Baron, the co-founder and CMO at Farmers Business Network, a startup that offers a suite of online services to farmers.
TechCrunch+
TC+ subscribers get access to in-depth commentary, analysis and surveys — which you know if you’re already a subscriber. If you’re not, consider signing up. Here are a few highlights from this week:
Europe, the fuzzy tech cloud: Haje writes about the differences between the U.S. and European startup environments. The latter, he writes, has an appetite for experimentation that fails to fully settle into a coherent whole — in contrast to the handful of major hubs in the U.S. attracting the bulk of the talent and investment.
Moving to save cash: For company founders and shareholders with an exit on the horizon, a move for tax reasons can make a lot of financial sense. However, many times it’s not that simple. Peyton Carr, managing director of Keystone Global Partners, expands on this.
Being a Black founder in France:  The French startup ecosystem for Black founders is shrouded in mystery, but Dom attempts to pull back the curtains. She finds that deep-seated racial stereotypes and prejudices still fester in the country, manifesting in the form of economic discrimination against Black entrepreneurs.

Get your TechCrunch fix IRL. Join us at Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco this September to immerse yourself in all things startup. From headline interviews to intimate roundtables to a jam-packed startup expo floor, there’s something for everyone at Disrupt. Save up to $600 when you buy your pass now through August 11, and save 15% on top of that with promo code WIR. Learn more.

Meta’s Threads goes live, OpenAI launches GPT-4 and Pornhub blocks access by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Getting It Done: The Week in D.I.Y. and Indie MusicThis week, our tips and advice for the independent, do-it-yourselfers out there covered how to use ChatGPT to your advantage, common AI music myths, and more… Five essential tips for. Continue reading
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REWIND: The new music industry’s Week in ReviewA busy week by any definition, the music industry was no exception, with Spotify adding more video content features, Anime music taking over the world, and more… Tidal joins Apple. Continue reading
The post REWIND: The new music industry’s Week in Review appeared first on Hypebot.

WA Production release InstaComposer 2 The latest version of WA Production’s AI-powered MIDI generator now allows users to organise their ideas and song parts into eight scenes, as well as deliver a range of improvements and enhancements. 

Toolife Studio SaxHorn SAXHORN gives you saxophones, trombones, trumpets, tuba, and flugelhorn. 38 pre-arranged section presets for all popular styles get you started right. customize your horn section... Read More