Sonuscore release THE PULSE Sonuscore's latest composition tool draws inspiration from iconic scores such as Tenet, Blade Runner 2049, The Social Network and Stranger Things.

“At that moment, I thought only an idiot would say no”: How an invitation from Pharrell Williams ended Hans Zimmer’s fear of performing liveFor a musician as venerated as Hans Zimmer,  you might not suspect him of being susceptible to fear of live performance. But until some friends helped him snap out of it, he was exactly that.
Those friends were none other than Pharrell Williams and The Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, and they were insistent that he needed to get out of his head.

READ MORE: Brian Eno hates how Auto-Tune “turns a voice into every other voice” – but feels it can be useful for this one reason

“[They] are really my best friends,” Zimmer tells Tom Power in a new interview with Q [via CBC]. “[They said] it came to the point now where I have to look the audience in the eye, where I can’t hide behind a screen anymore, and I need to get out there and confront humanity.”
Hans Zimmer’s decades-spanning career is about as decorated as can be. A two-time Oscar winner, the German composer extraordinaire has created scores for movies like Interstellar, The Lion King and Pirates of the Caribbean, to name just a few.
But it wasn’t until 2015 that Zimmer finally overcame a deep fear of performing live, thanks to an invitation from Pharrell Williams, where he was asked to play guitar for him during his 2015 Grammys performance.
“At that moment, I thought only an idiot would say no,” Zimmer says. “That sort of started the whole thing up.”
He later went on to perform two years later at Coachella, delivering his iconic Lion King, Gladiator and Inception scores accompanied by a full orchestra.
“I said, ‘Well, this is a festival. We’re not going to do The Lion King,’” Zimmer recalls. “And Nile Marr, Johnny Marr’s son, said, ‘Hans, get over yourself. That’s the music of my childhood!’… We played The Lion King and suddenly I’m looking out and there are 80,000 people crying – I mean, crying in a good way.”

Elsewhere, Hans Zimmer recently revealed that “90 percent” of what he does is “done on one software synth”.
“I was one of the first people to really get into computers and music and there came a point where there’s a new operating system every few months,” Zimmer recounts. “I just gave up and I just went ‘I need to concentrate on my music.’”
He continues, “So I started to subtract things out of my life and I started getting very good at the things that I kept. For instance software synthesizers, 90 percent of what I do is done on one software synth.”
The post “At that moment, I thought only an idiot would say no”: How an invitation from Pharrell Williams ended Hans Zimmer’s fear of performing live appeared first on MusicTech.

Spotify debuts Concerts Near You playlist: How To Add EventsSpotify debuts Concerts Near You, a new personalized playlist that surfaces upcoming area concerts and links to buy tickets.
The post Spotify debuts Concerts Near You playlist: How To Add Events appeared first on Hypebot.

Live Music Industry News: Wasserman hires • new UTA CEO • GSPS sneak peak • Venu to share financials • Live Nation • MoreIn the latest live music industry news, global music agency Wasserman Music has added three key executives across its growing Fairs & Festivals, Tour Marketing, and worldwide agent teams.
The post Live Music Industry News: Wasserman hires • new UTA CEO • GSPS sneak peak • Venu to share financials • Live Nation • More appeared first on Hypebot.

Noisebud Purr-LUFSPurr-LUFS is a LUFS-based gain compensation plugin designed to provide accurate loudness compensation for any plugin, hardware, or effects chain. Our perception is easily influenced... Read More

“There’s no reason why DIY artists can’t do this for themselves”: Melody Rights may have a simple solution for music royaltiesFor most musicians, the process of registering a song for royalties summons a bespoke blend of boredom and dread. There’s metadata to be sorted out, a host of different regional copyright bodies to consider, and a number of different royalties and rights to get your head around.
For Bobby Cole, founder and managing director of Melody Rights, the intricacies of music royalties are like bread and butter. With some two decades of experience writing stock music, and thousands of credits to his name, it’s a subject that, out of necessity, he’s had to learn an awful lot about. His expert opinion? The current system is confusing, complex, opaque, barely fit for purpose, and ripe for disruption.
READ MORE: As AI fakes proliferate, we need to draw a clear distinction between human-made music and AI-generated content
“We’re trying to shake things up,” says Cole. “Melody Rights exists to make this side of the industry a hell of a lot easier.”
Launched in January of this year, Melody Rights operates similarly to platforms like DistroKid, CD Baby, and Tunecore, enabling users to manage and distribute their music easily. Crucially, however, the service that Melody Rights offers is aimed at entirely different targets. Rather than focusing on streaming platforms, the company specialises in the less flashy, but lucrative, world of library music — getting users’ tracks onto platforms where they might be synced for video games, film and TV, and other media.
“We don’t touch anything that platforms like DistroKid do, and they don’t touch anything that we do,” Cole emphasises. “We don’t upload to Spotify. We don’t send music to the DSPs. We’ve removed ourselves from that conversation simply because there are so many people already doing it, and they do it faster, better, and cheaper than we ever could.
“But those services don’t do computer game marketplaces,” Cole continues. “They don’t register your royalties, they don’t do neighbouring rights, they don’t do mechanical royalties. We can’t find anyone else that does the full list of things that we do.”
The number of services that Melody Rights can provide is expansive, to the point where it’s hard to characterise the company succinctly. This is something Cole doesn’t shy away from. “Is Melody Rights a distributor?” he asks rhetorically. “Is it a publisher? Is it an administration company? Is it a record label? I don’t think you can pigeonhole us, because there are elements of all these things.”

On the distribution side, the company connects with game asset stores like Game Dev Marketplace and Itch.io, and more traditional music licensing platforms such as Pond5 and AudioSparx. While you can’t send your music to DSPs like Apple Music and Spotify, you can upload to platforms like Bandcamp and Soundcloud. On the publishing and administration side, Melody Rights advertises its capacity to register for and collect various royalty types and to manage YouTube’s Content ID system.
By liberally pulling together a diverse range of services into one hybrid platform, Cole says Melody Rights can offer a simple but powerful hub for managing music. “You’ve got one dashboard,” he says of the user interface. “You can upload all of your content to us and then pick and choose where you send the music to. If you don’t want your music in gaming marketplaces, that’s fine, it’s just a matter of ticking a checkbox.”
The service operates on a subscription basis, with the lowest pricing tier of $5 allowing you to upload five tracks per month. From there, it increases in steps up to 50 songs for $50 per month. Cole defends the pricing, saying: “For most people, opening a Music Publishers Association account costs around £400 and that’s just one account of many. For a DIY musician to open all the accounts that we have would cost them roughly £1,200. So, this is a tool that enables musicians to get all their registrations done correctly, quickly, and cheaply.”
At launch, Melody Rights took a percentage of any royalties generated through the platform — however, this policy was quickly dropped in favour of a model that leaves the full amount of royalties with the creator.
“Places like CD Baby take around 8% [of royalties],” Cole offers as a comparison. “Some of the traditional administration companies can take between 15% and 20%. They have to do that because their system is more manual – ours is completely automated, and this means we can give the artist 100% of whatever money is found.”
Having only launched a few months ago, Cole says the team is still acutely focused on building Melody Rights’ user base. At the same time, he isn’t shy about his future goals for the platform. “We’d like to have our own ecosystem,” states Cole. “We’d like to have tools within the Melody Rights platform that let you automatically master or remix the songs you upload. We’d love to make our dashboard feature rich at no expense to the user.”
Regardless of whether Melody Rights eventually becomes a one-stop shop, what it offers right now is undeniably intriguing. Few musicians are in a position to ignore potential sources of income, yet the world of stock music has remained stubbornly niche even as there has been an explosion of bedroom producers.
This can partially be explained by the huge administrative overheads that come with the territory. A career, or even a side hustle, composing stock music depends on scale. Creators need to be able to make and upload large amounts of music to a wide range of markets and platforms – yet each song requires a painful number of bureaucratic steps before you can ever hope to get paid.
Simplifying and streamlining this notoriously complicated aspect of the music business would not only make the lives of established stock music composers easier – it would help musicians access an often overlooked sector of the industry at a time when traditional streaming platforms deliver a living wage for only a slim minority of artists.
“There was a time when if you signed to a label they’d take care of all this stuff,” Cole reflects. “For most people, those kinds of deals don’t exist anymore. But with these tools, there’s really no reason why DIY artists can’t do this for themselves. Melody Rights is like having the power of an automated record label in your back pocket for $5 a month. We think it’s quite revolutionary.”
Learn more at Melody Rights.
Read more music technology interviews. 
The post “There’s no reason why DIY artists can’t do this for themselves”: Melody Rights may have a simple solution for music royalties appeared first on MusicTech.

“The first synth that made dreaming big accessible to a schlub like me”: Rush’s Geddy Lee teams up with Moog Music on a special-edition, red-finish Minimoog Model DMoog has teamed up with Rush’s Geddy Lee on a special edition of the Minimoog Model D.
This custom-built version of the legendary analogue synth stays true to its classic sound while incorporating modern upgrades and a striking design inspired by the Rush frontman’s stage instruments back in the day.

READ MORE: “The SEM is nothing but a copy of the Odyssey or a copy of the Minimoog, or a little mixture. But I loved it, and so I wanted to do it”: Tom Oberheim on designing synths

To start, the Geddy Lee Minimoog Model D arrives in a lovely custom, satin red finish with metallic flecks that brings to mind Lee’s keyboard rig from Rush’s Grace Under Pressure tour. The synth also sports a special ‘Starman’ logo on its front and back, making it a true collector’s piece.
Image: Moog Music
Features wise, the new Minimoog Model D delivers all the rich, analogue circuitry that made the original a household name. Though it does contain several upgrades, including a hot-rodded VCA circuit, dedicated LFO controls, and modern MIDI integration.
Each purchase also comes with a Rush-themed merch bundle, which includes an exclusive 10” red vinyl featuring Xanadu and Jacob’s Ladder, a collectible poster, commemorative manual, gift box, as well as a certificate of authenticity that’s individually numbered and hand-signed by Lee.

Image: Moog Music“It’s a thrill to see the Minimoog Model D in that stunning red, so representative of one of the most fertile periods in Rush’s creative history,” says Lee of the new release. “I’ve always been mad for custom colour instruments, many inspired by automotive hues, and I’m thrilled with how it turned out — it’s just so beautiful.”
“The Minimoog Model D was the first synth that made dreaming big accessible to a schlub like me. Its intuitive design lets you learn waveforms, blend sounds, and experiment with the modulation wheel. That’s its legacy: a fat, sophisticated sound in a package that’s not daunting to get your hands on.”
In a video accompanying the launch, Lee speaks about Rush’s introduction to synths back in the 70s, saying: “For me I graduated to the Minimoog as a natural part of evolution from the tease that was that little squeaky sound you could get out of the Taurus pedals.”
“I wanted a more substantial tone and then we were writing songs that were quite adventurous like Xanadu and A Farewell to Kings and by the time we were going to write Farewell to Kings I knew I wanted a Minimoog. And I wanted to see if I could figure out how to get a noise out of it.”
Priced at $5,499, the Moog Music Geddy Lee Minimoog Model D is now available exclusively at Reverb (US), Andertons (UK) and Thomann (EMEA/Germany).

Learn more at Moog Music.
The post “The first synth that made dreaming big accessible to a schlub like me”: Rush’s Geddy Lee teams up with Moog Music on a special-edition, red-finish Minimoog Model D appeared first on MusicTech.

Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”Brian Eno has never been one to shy away from conversations about technology’s role in music and society. From pioneering ambient music to his latest generative AI-powered feature film Eno, he’s always found ways to push boundaries. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, the producer says his biggest concern’t isn’t the tech itself — but who controls it.

READ MORE: Brian Eno hates how Auto-Tune “turns a voice into every other voice” – but feels it can be useful for this one reason

Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Eno says [via Stereogum]: “The biggest problem for me about AI is. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people, and I have less and less interest in what those people think, and more and more criticisms of what the effect of their work has been.”
For Eno, AI is part of a broader issue: the concentration of power in the hands of a few tech giants.
“I think social media has been a catastrophe and mildly useful at the same time,” he says. “It’s possible for both things to coexist, but I think in terms of what it’s done to societies, it’s been a catastrophe.”
“Again, that could have been avoided, I think. If it had started out in a not-for-profit regime, it would’ve been different, because ‘maximise engagement’ wouldn’t have been the headline of the whole project,” Eno continues. “Maximising engagement is just another word for maximise profit. If that’s your intention, then you get what we got, just like in the American food industry is maximise profit, which is why you have a lot of very, very unhealthy people.”
Despite his concerns, Eno admits he’s always been fascinated by the creative potential of new tools, and AI is no exception. He sees it as part of a long tradition of musicians repurposing technology in ways its creators never intended.
“Talking about AI itself, I’ve always been happy to welcome new technologies and to see what you could do with them that nobody else thought of doing with them, and what things they could do, other than those that they were designed for,” he says.
“Because with all music technology, it’s always very interesting that stuff is designed for one reason, and then people start to find new things they could do that are completely beyond what the designer was thinking about.”
He points to distortion as a perfect example of this phenomenon: “Distortion is, in a way, the sound of popular music,” Eno explains. “A lot of the things that we find uniquely exciting has to do with equipment kind of going wrong. That’s quite a bizarre thought, isn’t it? That you design equipment to do this. Then, you start using it to do something else, which it doesn’t do very well, and you get to like the sound of the not very wellness.”

Brian Eno’s new ambient record Aurum is now available exclusively on Apple Music.
The post Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people” appeared first on MusicTech.

Moog announce Geddy Lee Minimoog Model D The latest iteration of Moog’s ever-popular Minimoog Model D has been developed in collaboration with Geddy Lee, the bassist, vocalist and synth pioneer of the legendary band Rush.

UMG strikes partnership with HEAT to bring Lil’ Wayne, CG5 music to game developersUMG labels and artists will be 'the first to effectively distribute new tracks into gaming development tools and platforms'
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BMI & White Bear PR to Present "The Art of Music in Horror" at WonderCon 2025WHO: BMI®& White Bear PR are excited to present “The Art of Music in Horror” panel at WonderCon 2025. The discussion will feature BMI composers Charlie Clouser (Saw), Bobby Krlic (Midsommar), Harry Manfredini (Friday the 13th) and Dara Taylor (The Invitation), and will be moderated by White Bear PR’s Chandler Poling. BMI’s Director of Film, TV & Visual Media Louie Stephens will introduce the panel. WHAT: “The Art of Music in Horror” panel will feature an ensemble of renowned BMI composers who will discuss the unique challenges and creative process involved in scoring horror films and television. Discover how music elevates the fright factor and plays a key role in shaping iconic scenes that haunt audiences long after the credits roll. WHERE: Anaheim Convention Center (800 W Katella Ave. Anaheim, CA 92802)                Panel Room: 213CD       WHEN: Saturday, March 29, 2025TIME: 7:00 P.M. - 8:00 P.M. ***Press is invited to conduct one-on-one interviews with panelists prior to the panel, upon request. Contact Chandler Poling (chandler@whitebearpr.com) for more details.*** ABOUT THE PANELISTS:Charlie Clouser is a composer who specializes in dark and moody scores for film and television. He is best known for his intense scores for all ten of the SAW horror movie franchise and has also scored action films like Death Sentence, Dead Silence, Unhuman, and Resident Evil: Extinction, as well as over 250 episodes of television series like Fox’s Wayward Pines, CBS’s Numb3rs, NBC’s Las Vegas and the fan-favorite main title theme for Fox’s American Horror Story.Bobby Krlic is a British musician, producer and composer. In addition to his work collaborating and scoring both film and television with Atticus Ross, Krlic has been releasing his own often harrowing electronic music for the better part of the past decade under the moniker of The Haxan Cloak. Harry Manfredini has scored nearly 250 films and television shows to date. He is best known for his iconic scores on horror films like the Friday the 13th franchise, Wishmaster, Swamp Thing and House. Manfredini’s multi-faceted catalog also includes comedy films like Spring Break, and action films like Deep Star Six, Aces, Iron Eagle, and The Omega Code. Additionally, he’s scored numerous TV dramas for Lifetime and Hallmark, as well as many award-winning children’s films like Corduroy and A Boy, A Dog, And A Frog.  Dara Taylor has emerged as a fresh voice in the world of scoring music to picture. Her credits include Amazon Studios’ The Tender Bar, Universal Pictures’ Strays, Amazon’s The Boys: Diabolical, Warner Brothers’ Scoob! Holiday Haunt, the Lionsgate comedy Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar, which she co-scored with Christopher Lennertz, Netflix’s and Shondaland’s Black Barbie, and Netflix’s Meet Me Next Christmas, The Noel Diary, and Bookmarks.Taylor has received recognition for her works in the Karen Allen-starred drama Colewell, for which she won a 2019 Hollywood Music in Media Award. In 2023, she received an SCL Award nomination for Sony Pictures/Screen Gems’ The Invitation. Next up for Taylor is Tyler Perry’s Straw starring Taraji P. Henson.ABOUT BMI:Celebrating over 80 years of service to songwriters, composers, music publishers and businesses, BMI® is a global leader in music rights management, serving as an advocate for the value of music. BMI represents the public performance rights in over 22.4 million musical works created and owned by more than 1.4 million songwriters, composers, and music publishers. The Company negotiates music license agreements and distributes the fees it generates as royalties to its affiliated writers and publishers when their songs are performed in public. In 1939, BMI created a groundbreaking open-door policy becoming the only performing rights organization to welcome and represent the creators of blues, jazz, country, and American roots music. Today, the musical compositions in BMI’s repertoire, from chart toppers to perennial favorites, span all genres of music and are consistently among the most-performed hits of the year. For additional information and the latest BMI news, visit bmi.com, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @BMI or stay connected through BMI‘s Facebook page. Sign up for BMI’s The Weekly and receive our e-newsletter every week to stay up to date on all things music.ABOUT WHITE BEAR PR:White Bear Public Relations specializes in PR for composers, music supervisors, and film & music festivals around the world. The company is built on relationships and creativity, thrives on innovation, and gets results. Since its inception, White Bear PR has produced award-winning campaigns, represented clients at all major film festivals, and created popular composer-focused panels at Comic-Con and WonderCon. More at www.whitebearpr.com or follow us on social media @whitebearpr.The post BMI & White Bear PR to Present "The Art of Music in Horror" at WonderCon 2025 first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Apple faces lawsuit over Apple Intelligence delaysApple has been sued in federal court over what plaintiffs allege is false advertising of several Apple Intelligence features. Filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, the suit seeks class-action status and damages on behalf of those who purchased Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones and other devices. Plaintiffs claim that device owners haven’t received the […]
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Laser Harp Sets the ToneIn many ways, living here in the future is quite exiting. We have access to the world’s information instantaneously and can get plenty of exciting tools and hardware delivered to our homes in ways that people in the past with only a Sears catalog could only dream of. Lasers are of course among the exciting hardware available, which can be purchased with extremely high power levels. Provided the proper safety precautions are taken, that can lead to some interesting builds like this laser harp which uses a 3W laser for its strings.
[Cybercraftics]’ musical instrument is using a single laser to generate seven harp strings, using a fast stepper motor to rotate a mirror to precise locations, generating the effect via persistence of vision. Although he originally planned to use one Arduino for this project, the precise timing needed to keep the strings in the right place was getting corrupted by adding MIDI and the other musical parts to the project, so he split those out to a second Arduino.
Although his first prototype worked, he did have to experiment with the sensors used to detect his hand position on the instrument quite a bit before getting good results. This is where the higher power laser came into play, as the lower-powered ones weren’t quite bright enough. He also uses a pair of white gloves which help illuminate a blocked laser. With most of the issues ironed out, [Cybercraftics] notes that there’s room for improvement but still has a working instrument that seems like a blast to play. If you’re still stuck in the past without easy access to lasers, though, it’s worth noting that there are plenty of other ways to build futuristic instruments as well.

Orchestral Tools releases Berlin Free Orchestra for SINE Player
We’re just a few months into 2025, and it’s already been a fantastic year for orchestral freebies with the latest offer Orchestral Tools’ Berlin Free Orchestra for SINE Player. Sonixinema’s Delicate Strings and Sona/Chroma by Tempest Audio are two real standouts. If we go back to the end of last year, we can throw in [...]
View post: Orchestral Tools releases Berlin Free Orchestra for SINE Player

Source Elements Source-Connect 4The Highly Anticipated Evolution of the Globally Renowned Source-Connect 4 is Finally Here! Source-Connect 4 marks the arrival of an important update to the remote recording platform.... Read More