Audio Pro refreshes its A28 multi-room speaker system with a new finishSwedish brand Audio Pro, best known for its varying speakers, is relaunching its A28 multi-room speaker system in a new finish.
The A28 was first launched back in 2022, and will soon be available in a new Walnut Veneer style. The brand says it is suitable ​​for use with a TV or games console, as well as listening to music, and is an ideal partner for a turntable.

READ MORE: Audio-Technica’s new ATM355VF clip-on microphone is designed for “high-accuracy, balanced capture” of string and woodwind instruments

Following its predecessor (the A26), the A28 system was branded as a “soundbar killer”, with Audio Pro claiming it could provide even better sound for TV playback. It offers three different systems; AirPlay 2, Google Cast and Audio Pro’s own multi-room system. The multi-room function allows users to easily connect the A28 to speakers placed in other rooms, in order to play the same music throughout the home.
Audio Pro has become synonymous with Scandinavian, minimalist design style, which is often accompanied by standard colours such as black, white and grey, so to shake things up, the refresh sees the A28 with visible wood grain inspired by styles from the 1960s and 70s.
Jens Henriksen, CCO at Audio Pro, states, “We strongly believe that our Scandinavian, minimalistic style is the recipe for our success. Our aim is to keep our design as clean as possible, without any frills or embellishments.
“However, we have recently seen a demand in the market for a surface that highlights the wood structure and its beautiful grain and diverse colour scale. We feel that this does not mean that we have to compromise with our minimalist and plain design, but that it can be combined nicely. We have therefore decided to launch one of our very popular speakers, the A28, in a beautiful walnut veneer.”

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The A28 will be available at the end of February at a suggested retail price of €650/$650/£580. Find out more over at Audio Pro.
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Spotify And UMG Rigged The Game a Long Time AgoThe news broke this past Sunday that Universal Music Group and Spotify have struck a new, multi-year licensing deal.

Live Music Industry News: AEG expands Int’l • Live Music Survey • Bookclub opens in ChicagoIn the latest live music industry news, AEG announced a realignment of its international business divisions as part of an effort to expand in major international markets. Adam Wilkes will. Continue reading
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Taylor Swift’s Spotify streams have the same carbon emissions as 20,000 households, claims new reportDo you think about the carbon footprint of your music streaming? Without a physical product, plastic CD cases, vinyl or the notoriously hard to recycle shrink wrap it comes in, it’s easy to assume that streaming would be more environmentally friendly than physical music.
However, this is actually not the case. Storing and processing music in the cloud is reliant on on vast data centres which use huge amounts of resources and energy. Now, a new report has shed light on just how big the carbon footprint of streaming music is.

READ MORE: Björk calls Spotify “the worst thing that has happened to musicians”

The report, conducted by Utilities Now, breaks down the energy impact of music streaming across genres and artists. To estimate the carbon footprint associated with numerous high-profile artists’ music, researchers considered the total number of streams on Spotify, the average duration of a song (in hours), the energy consumption rate for music streaming per hour (0.055 kg CO2) and the average carbon intensity of electricity (0.385 kg CO2 per kWh).
It’s perhaps not a surprise given how popular she is that Taylor Swift was found to have racked up the greatest carbon footprint through streams of her music. Her total streams have generated 127.9 million kg of CO2, equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of over 20,100 households or driving 319.8 million miles in an average passenger vehicle.

Drake ranks second, with a carbon footprint of 106.2 million kg CO2, closely followed by Bad Bunny at 97.5 million. Rounding out the top five are The Weeknd with 84.5 million kg of CO2 and Ed Sheeran with 70.3 million. The other artists in the top 10 are Eminem, Ariana Grande, Kanye West, Justin Bieber and Coldplay.
The report also compared the carbon footprint of different genres of music. Latin and pop were found to have the highest average energy impact, while electronic and metal had significantly lower ones.
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Instagram Edits takes on TikTok with new Creator Tools AppInstagram Edits challenges TikTok’s CapCut with an app packed with advanced tools, trending audio, and premium features to support creators. Instagram Edits takes on TikTok with new Creator Tools App. Continue reading
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The unflattening of music[This post builds on two other recent MIDiA posts: Background music and What got you here]

At the half way point of the decade it is a good time to reflect on how the business of music is reshaping the culture of music – and where this is heading. 

Streaming – and the ecosystems it feeds / feeds from ≠ has done as much to music culture in ten years as the phonograph and record player each did in half centuries. Of course, streaming would not have been possible without those prior inventions, but it has reached far more people, with more music, more frequently, and with more listening time. 

Most importantly, by pulling consumption, creation, and monetisation closer together than ever before, streaming has transformed the tense but often distant relationship between business and culture into one that now resembles a single entity. People make, and are encouraged to make, music that feeds the machine. This has resulted in what is often referred to as the flattening of music, which is most visible in the rise of ‘functional music’ and of the song over the artist. It is a process that can feel both inevitable and unstoppable. 

At the start of the year I posted a remarkably evergreen quote from Jaques Attali’s 1985 book Noise:

“Fetishized as a commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of our entire society: deritualize a social form, repress an activity of the body, specialize its practice, sell it as a spectacle, generalize its consumption, then see to it that it is stockpiled until it loses its meaning.”

The fact that this was written long before the internet and music collided illustrates that streaming’s effect is not an isolated phenomenon  but part of a much longer continuum. The 1980s was the decade in which the CD supercharged the commercialisation of music and the Walkman kick-started today’s dominant ‘always on, everywhere’ paradigm. While streaming is massively accentuating trends, it is not creating them. Indeed, the whole idea of music as background filler is at least centuries old. For example,  800 years ago Eleanor of Acquitaine hired minstrels to soundtrack her daily court life. More recently, French composer Eric Satie wrote three pieces of music in 1917 that he called ‘furniture music’ specifically designed to be background music.

However, music has never been shunted so far into the background as it is now, including music that was intended for the foreground. It is driven by a vicious / virtual circle of influence of consumer behaviour and the algorithm. As Jeffrey Antony puts it in his 2024 piece ‘The Great Flattening’:

“These algorithms are designed to keep users engaged with the platform, ensuring that music remains a background experience rather than a foreground focus.”

 Spotify shifted its business model and user experience in pursuit of this paradigm, further fueling it with lower-cost production music (often termed as ‘fake artists’). Antony argues that this has moved music from being “deeply personal” to “commodified [and] disposable”. 

Meanwhile Daniel Ek mused that some music has a short shelf life and other music a long one. But music has always been both highly personal and commodified. Before streaming, radio was the main way most people heard music most of the time. Radio listening was often commodified background filler but the exact same songs could be deeply personal when listened to in a different way. 

The difference is that today, streaming is catering for both the deeply personal and commodified in the same platform while the behaviour / algorithm circle is nudging the needle ever further away from personal. As one writer puts it in The Mighty Pluck: “This is the blurred scenery of my life.” 

There are very clear and obvious commercial rationales at play (lowering rights costs, fragmenting rightsholder power, increasing platform power, etc.). Howevever,  it would be wrong to assume that this is all about the “fuelling the global circulation of capital”. It is also part of a much wider trend of digital platforms being terrified of losing users and their time in the saturated attention economy. In a digital economy defined by convenience, everyone wants to remove friction, which often means making decisions on users’ behalf. 

It results in a strategy of seeking not to offend rather than to delight. Nowhere is this better seen than Elon Musk’s suggestion that the most important metric of all is “Unregretted user minutes”. If one statement summarises the path towards the absolute reduction of culture, it is that.

Generative AI threatens to accelerate the trend even further. However, the seeming inevitability of all of this is only possible because of streaming’s fusing of business and culture. It is possible that algorithmically charged, functional, and generative music will become most (even all) of music in the future. But it is not yet. And it would only be able to get to that point because everyone else (labels, artists, publishers, songwriters) is, to some degree or another, playing by the new rules, terrified of missing out on audience and revenue / income. They play by these rules because the system is defined by being optimised for monetisation.

But what happens when monetisation stops working? The whole edifice comes tumbling down. It is incumbent on the system to manage the transition, so that by the time monetisation is completely broken, it is too late for a withdrawal of creative labour to break it, because the traditional creator’s role is no longer crucial or at least decisive. It might just be that the cracks in the monetisation machine are appearing early enough to change the trajectory.

With streaming growth slowing, larger rightsholders are doing everything they can to optimise including making it harder for longer tail creators and rightsholders to earn from their work. This adds to the already-growing difficulty many mid and long-tail creators have making streaming’s fractionalised royalties add up. Streaming services may not yet realise it, but they are breaking music’s 21st century social contract. Creative labour has thus far been given despite deteriorating conditions because value was returned. As value diminishes, more artists are beginning to question why they should give their labour any longer. 

We are already seeing more artists going non-DSP (e.g,. Ricky Tinexz, SEIDS, Mary Spender), triggering the start of the bifurcation of the music business, with an emerging generation of creators bypassing streaming entirely. Meaning that the foundations of tomorrow’s music culture are being laid elsewhere. It may only be a trickle for now, but already, one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2024, Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, was pointedly not released onto streaming. How long before the trickle of streaming exiles becomes a flood?

What makes the non-DSP world so important for the unflattening of music is not the absence of algorithm (because there are plenty of those there too) but: a) the diversity of models (bandcamp, TikTok, SoundCloud) and b) being different and distinct is a feature not a bug.

Music business and culture are flattening, no doubt. The tide can be turned but it will not happen on its own. It will take both commercial and creative bravery. It will require a new social contract for music and it will be a long, tough fight. Not least because consumers (the actual people doing the listening) are not exactly throwing their hands up in dismay at having music that soundtracks the mundanity of their daily lives.

Yet, streaming may also hold the key to reversing the trend. Today’s music creators have a far bigger and more diverse musical canon to call upon than in any previous generation. Yesterday’s artists’ influences stemmed from inherently limited sources (their parents’ and friends’ record collections, their local record store, etc.). Today’s can listen to virtually every song ever written. The history of music is a steady evolution, with each generation of genres imitating and innovating the previous one. Now, creators can pull from over a hundred years’ worth of popular music, thousands of genres and millions of artists to create their own, unique take on just what music is. 

Streaming may have made itself the (flattened) establishment – but the thing about the establishment is that culture almost always rebels against it.

Arturia launches Pigments 6, the sixth iteration of its powerful sound design softwareArturia has kicked off 2025 with a bang by launching the sixth iteration of its powerful sound design software Pigments.
Front and center in the lineup of new features is a new Vocoder, which enables producers to get truly creative with voice modulation. There’s also a new Modal engine, new filters and modulators, and an improved user interface.

READ MORE: Spotify paid out $10 billion to the music industry in 2024: “Where we are now is only the beginning”

The aforementioned Modal engine, which features a host of “physically-inspired” sounds – in Arturia’s words – like collisions or friction-based sounds. There’s a bunch of sounds to get started with, too, including string plucks and lush pad sounds.
There’s also been improvements to Pigments’ Granular engine, which enables users to scan through samples mid-playback for time-stretching atmospheres, randomise grain playback for each note, and continuously adjust grain size for “fluid, evolving textures”.

Pigments 6 also features new filters – an analog-focused Multimmode V2, Cluster filter and LoFi – and new modulators. As Arturia says, “elevate expression by assigning different modulation values per voice, adding deeper randomness, triggering audio-driven envelope followers, and sculpting curves with the revamped Function V2.
Pigments 6 is available now at a launch price of £82/$103. If you’re an existing Pigments user, you can download the update totally free.
For more information, head to Arturia.
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Hans Zimmer concert film coming to cinemas to offer “peek behind the curtain” at his workA Hans Zimmer concert film is coming to cinemas across The Americas, Europe, Asia, and United Arab Emirates this year.
The film, titled Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond In The Desert, includes conversations with stars such as Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Finneas, and more, as well as live and intimate performances. Legendary filmmakers Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve are also featured, and limited screenings will begin from 19 March.

READ MORE: “It let us play the music of an imaginary future”: Why Hans Zimmer worked with the Expressive E Osmose on Dune 2

Diamond In The Desert is directed by Paul Dugdale, who has made concert films for the likes of Swift and Coldplay, and is executive produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who worked alongside Zimmer on hit films such as Top Gun: Maverick.
“Decades of cinematic masterpieces are brought to life by his band and a world-class orchestra at Dubai’s iconic Coca-Cola Arena, the star-studded Al Wasl Plaza dome at Expo City Dubai and beyond,” reads a press release (via NME). “From the dunes of the Arabian Desert to the heights of Jumeirah Burj Al Arab, these performances deliver an intimate and unique experience of Zimmer’s most beloved and renowned movie soundtracks.”
Zimmer himself comments, “The Hans Zimmer Live tour has been one of the most exciting experiences of my career, and I’m thrilled to bring it to an audience in cinemas globally with Diamond in the Desert. Seeing these compositions transform from their big-screen origins to the live show then back to the big screen is a delightful full-circle moment. I hope audiences enjoy this peek behind the curtain as much as we enjoyed making it.”

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Tickets for Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond In The Desert go on sale on Wednesday 5 February 5 at 9 am ET/2 pm GMT. You can sign up for more information now. 
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The Crow Hill Company Tina Guo - Storm CelloBring Tina's approach to blockbuster recordings into your work. This meeting of minds in collaboration with Steve Mazzaro & The Crow Hill Company combines traditional electric cello multi-samples... Read More

Beetlecrab Tempera receives major update Beetlecrab introduce new granular processing live effects along with more improvements to their flagship synthesizer.

Elon Musk claims Tesla will launch a self-driving service in Austin in JuneTesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that his company will launch a paid ride-hailing robotaxi service in Austin, Texas this coming June, the latest in a long line of sky-high promises he has yet to meet about autonomy. Musk was unsurprisingly light on details. He said that there will be no people in the cars, […]
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Texas Lt. Governor announces ‘Bitcoin Reserve’ as priority bill for 2025Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick revealed that establishing a Bitcoin reserve in the state will be among 2025’s legislative priorities.

Taylorator Makes Mischief on the Airwaves[Stephen] recently wrote in to share his experiments with using the LimeSDR mini to conduct a bit of piracy on the airwaves, and though we can’t immediately think of a legitimate application for spamming the full FM broadcast band simultaneously, we can’t help but be fascinated by the technique. Called the Taylorator, as it was originally intended to carpet bomb the dial with the collected works of Taylor Swift on every channel, the code makes for some interesting reading if you’re interested in the transmission-side of software defined radio (SDR).
The write-up talks about the logistics of FM modulation, and how quickly the computational demands stack up when you’re trying to push out 100 different audio streams at once. It takes a desktop-class CPU to pull it off in real-time, and eats up nearly 4 GB of RAM.
You could use this project to play a different episode of the Hackaday Podcast on every FM channel at once, but we wouldn’t recommend it. As [Stephen] touches on at the end of the post, this is almost certainly illegal no matter where you happen to live. That said, if you keep the power low enough so as not to broadcast anything beyond your home lab, it’s unlikely anyone will ever find out.

Concord acquires publishing catalog of Ed Sheeran collaborator Johnny McDaidMcDaid has also written for the likes of P!nk, Lewis Capaldi, Keith Urban, Shawn Mendes, Zara Larsson, Alicia Keys, and Jung Kook, amongst many others
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OpenAI, valued at $157bn and facing multiple copyright infringement lawsuits, says China’s DeepSeek may have used its data to train rival AI model without permissionDeepSeek spent far less money on developing a chatbot than US AI companies, but it may have done so by stealing OpenAI's IP
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