Pioneer celebrates 30 years of the CDJ with limited edition zinePioneer DJ is celebrating 30 years of its CDJ with a special zine. Titled deckades, the limited edition zine features 42 exclusive pages of photos, interviews and commentary.
The CDJ-500 landed back in 1994 as a new, modern tool for DJs and has thoroughly evolved since. Though the zine is available to read for free digitally, there will also be a limited print run of just 1000 copies – these are available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

READ MORE: This DJ has a price list for overplayed song requests, and Mr Brightside will cost you a grand

The publication also hosts interviews with DJs Fatboy Slim, Fabio, Anna Tur, Kikelomo and TSHA, and includes an overview of all 23 models of the CDJ “alongside plenty of nostalgic imagery”.
“In the high-speed world of digital technology, 1994 sort of feels like the ancient past. When Pioneer DJ launched the CDJ-500, its revolutionary first CD deck, the average clubgoer might have consulted a paper map to find the venue, listened to an FM radio to get them in the mood, and arrived to find a DJ playing vinyl records to an audience that couldn’t have even conceived of a smartphone,” states Pioneer.
“deckades tells the story of how the CDJ went from a strange new alternative to vinyl to becoming the quintessential tool of modern DJing. The limited-edition zine, which we’re now making available digitally, shows how the CDJ dovetailed with the major advancements in music technology – from CDs and MP3s, to USB and touchscreens, and the more recent developments of AI and VR.”

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DJ gear has come on leaps and bounds since the birth of the CDJ. At MusicTech, we created a guide of the best standalone DJ controllers for 2024 so you can choose the right one for you.
Find out more about deckades or have a read over at the Pioneer DJ blog.
The post Pioneer celebrates 30 years of the CDJ with limited edition zine appeared first on MusicTech.

Rough Trade apologises and shuts down vinyl selling platform after criticism for “insulting” pricesRough Trade has taken down its vinyl selling platform FlipVinyl following backlash over its “insulting” prices. The company has also issued an apology, and says it is reassessing how to move forward.
Powered by Rough Trade, the scheme was launched on 2 August and allowed people to sell their records “in a flash” through the FlipVinyl company. Rough Trade described FlipVinyl as the “fastest-growing second-hand vinyl buyers in Germany who have revolutionised the way to sell vinyl online”.

READ MORE: How the vinyl industry weathered pandemic disruptions to emerge stronger than ever

Through FlipVinyl, users could search their records and get a price instantly before packaging them up and sending them off to get paid, but many criticised the very low payments they would potentially receive, even for rare or sought after albums.
One user wrote on X, “One of the rarest and most sought after Beatles albums will not even net you £50. This site is a joke.” Another said, “Take my £3.57! Might be able to buy a Tesco’s meal deal with that”, along with a screenshot which showed Tool’s Aenima LP listed at such price. Replies have since been turned off.

SELLING YOUR VINYL MADE EASY…
Swap your pre-loved records for cash with FlipVinyl, powered by Rough Trade.
Look up your records Get a price instantly Package and send Get paid
Find out more and try it for yourself >>https://t.co/2gIViWPCSO pic.twitter.com/qT1p79Q0YL
— Rough Trade (@RoughTrade) August 2, 2024

Please note! We appreciate this service won't be suitable for everyone's needs i.e. those seeking to maximise collectible items. However for anyone looking to trade casually for a quick turn-around i.e. to make space, then this could well be a great solution. https://t.co/KPI1uoJL2x
— Rough Trade (@RoughTrade) August 2, 2024

One of the rarest and most sought after Beatles albums will not even net you £50. This site is a joke. pic.twitter.com/2Ec7IpEeJl
— Parlogram (@Parlogram) August 2, 2024

Take my £3.57 ! Might be able to buy a Tescos meal deal with that. pic.twitter.com/iNlMmb1MsH
— Real Ghostbusters Fridge Magnet (@Endangered_Duck) August 2, 2024

 
 
 
Rough Trade closed the platform and shared an official statement on 3 August from its managing director, Lawrence Montgomery, after the backlash. The letter takes “full responsibility”, and apologises for the “mistake”: “It’s clear based on feedback from a number of customers that we made wrong assumptions and that people viewed this service as inappropriate and saw us as profiteering.
“This was not our intention,” it continues. “However we understand and appreciate these criticisms and take full responsibility. As a result, we are going to suspend the service to give us time to reassess. We’re very sorry for this mistake.”

A statement on the launch of FlipVinyl for the UK market. pic.twitter.com/iifjSNdLrZ
— Rough Trade (@RoughTrade) August 3, 2024

Last year, it was revealed that vinyl sales in the UK had reached their highest figures since 1990. Vinyl LP sales have been consecutively rising for 16 years, and following a 2.9 percent improvement in unit sales in 2022, the market in 2023 had increased more than four times as fast with an 11.7 percent rise to 5.9 million units.
The post Rough Trade apologises and shuts down vinyl selling platform after criticism for “insulting” prices appeared first on MusicTech.

Suno claims using copyrighted songs to train its AI model constitutes “fair use”AI music generation startup Suno says using copyrighted music to train its AI model constitutes “fair use”.
CEO and founder Mikey Shulman makes the claim in response to a lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against Suno and fellow AI startup Udio. The suit alleges that the companies train their models on copyrighted music.

READ MORE: Will RIAA’s lawsuit against Udio and Suno really be the win we’re hoping for?

In a blog post published on 1 August, Shulman argues that AI “learning” from copyrighted material “is not infringing”.
“We train our models on medium- and high-quality music we can find on the open internet,” he writes, later adding: “Much of the open internet indeed contains copyrighted materials, and some of it is owned by major record labels.
“But, just like the kid writing their own rock songs after listening to the genre – or a teacher or a journalist reviewing existing materials to draw new insights – learning is not infringing. It never has been, and it is not now.”
While it’s heavily open to interpretation, the US “fair use” doctrine permits the use of portions of copyrighted work for such purposes as criticism, commentary and education.
Udio also pushed back against the lawsuit on August 1.
“The premise of their case is that musical styles – the characteristic sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music – are somehow proprietary,” it has claimed. “Decades of judicial precedent establishes that no company controls a genre or style of music.”
The RIAA has responded to both companies and criticised their statements.
“After months of evading and misleading, defendants have finally admitted their massive unlicensed copying of artists’ recordings,” says a spokesperson. “It’s a major concession of facts they spent months trying to hide and acknowledged only when forced by a lawsuit. Their industrial scale infringement does not qualify as ‘fair use’. There’s nothing fair about stealing an artist’s life’s work, extracting its core value, and repackaging it to compete directly with the originals.”
The RIAA filed its lawsuit against Suno and Udio on June 24, with plaintiffs including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records Inc.
The record labels have alleged copyright infringement of recorded music at “an almost unimaginable scale”, and are seeking up to $150,000 in damages for each infringed work.
The lawsuit is also seeking to stop the two AI companies from training on the labels’ copyrighted songs.
Learn more about Suno and Udio.
The post Suno claims using copyrighted songs to train its AI model constitutes “fair use” appeared first on MusicTech.

Daniel Ek earned more from Spotify in the past 12 months than any artist has ever earned on the platformSpotify CEO and founder Daniel Ek earned more money from the platform in the past 12 months than any other artist ever has, reports royalties accountant Hunter Giles — and Ek’s closest executives aren’t far behind him, either. Taylor Swift, Drake, Billie Eilish, Ed Sheeran, and literally any other megastar you can think of, haven’t been able to top the $345 million dollars Ek has roughly made since last year.

READ MORE: “Enough’s enough”: deadmau5 threatens to pull music from Spotify following Daniel Ek “cost of creating content” comments

In his IC Newsletter, Giles breaks down the cashout values of Spotify executives’ shares, and equates those earnings to the number of streams each exec would need to gain to accrue the sum. Giles adds that he made the comparison using the “generous” value of $0.003 per stream and “assumed 100 per cent control over the IP in the comps ([which is] never the case).”
Daniel Ek takes the top spot, cashing out a total of $345 million in shares since July 2023, which is equal to gaining 115 billion streams, hypothetically making him the number-one top-streamed artist of all time on the platform. As a comparison, Statista reports that Taylor Swift is the most-streamed real artist on Spotify, with 76 billion all-time streams as of April 2024.
Second place to Ek is Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of Spotify, whose shares are valued at $166.8 million — equal to 55.6 billion streams. This would hypothetically make him the ninth most-streamed artist of all time. Alex Norström, co-president at Spotify, is third in the ranking with a share value of $26.4 million, equal to 8.8 billion streams and placing him at 185 in the most-streamed artists of all-time.
Giles’ comparison was inspired by an MBW article reporting on Lorentzon’s recent cash-out of $85.8M in shares and the recent news that songwriters are set to face $150 million in royalty cuts from Spotify in 2024.
However, Giles says his analysis is not intended to vilify or shame the executives at Spotify. “I personally don’t think that Ek and the Gang are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as people,” he says, “and the point of this isn’t to shame them…The bad actor here imho [in my humble opinion] is the same as always: misaligned incentives that fail to appropriately share the wealth amongst stakeholders, AKA late-capitalism. These people are just doing a good job of hitting the misaligned marks, and I don’t feel it’s true or useful to think of them as evil geniuses out to steal money from artists.”
Daniel Ek hasn’t taken home a regular salary since 2017, according to Spotify’s filings, and Fortune reckons he was “probably one of the worst-paid major tech CEOs last year” but did receive $ 1.4 million in “other compensation.”
In other recent news, Ek confirmed in July that a new “deluxe” tier of Spotify is set to arrive soon, complete with high-resolution audio quality.
Sign up to the MusicTech newsletter to keep up to date with music industry developments.
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Cobra Fuzz plug-in from Safari Pedals Safari Pedals' latest software effect packs a versatile range of sounds into a simple and intuitive GUI.

OpenAI has a ‘highly accurate’ tool to detect AI content, but no release plansThe company expressed worries that its detection system could somehow “stigmatize” the use of AI among non-English speakers.

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Your ESP32 As A USB Bluetooth DongleUsing Bluetooth on a desktop computer is now such a seamless process; it’s something built-in and just works. Behind that ubiquity is a protocol layer called HCI, or Host Controller Interface, a set of commands allowing a host computer to talk to a Bluetooth interface.  That interface doesn’t have to be special, and [Dakhnod] is here to show us that it can be done with an ESP32 microcontroller through its USB interface.
The linked repository doesn’t tell us which of the ESP32 variants it works with, but since not all of them have a USB peripheral we’re guessing one of the newer variety. It works with Linux computers, and we’re told it should work with Windows too if a HCI driver is present. We might ask ourselves why such a project is necessary given the ubiquity of Bluetooth interfaces, but for us it’s provided the impetus to read up on how it all works.
We can’t find anyone else in our archive who’s made a Bluetooth dongle in this way, but we’ve certainly seen sniffing of HCI commands to reverse engineer a speaker’s communications.

Soundspear Updates Formula and Makes 50+ Audio Effects FREE
Soundspear has updated Formula and made more than 50 audio effects available for free for the audio effects integrated development tool. Formula is a free and open-source plugin for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and it is available in VST3, AU, and standalone formats. Previously Soundspear offered the Formula Cloud paid subscription service, which included access to [...]
View post: Soundspear Updates Formula and Makes 50+ Audio Effects FREE

All The Air Ducting Parts You Could Ever NeedIf you have ever planned an air duct or dust extraction system for your shop, you’ll know just how difficult it can be to accommodate all but the simplest of arrangements. Off the shelf systems are intended for use in home heating or other domestic systems, and offer little flexibility of choice. Of course you could 3D print an adapter or two, but [Fabian] has taken it to the next level with a comprehensive library of 3D-printable pipe system adapters and accessories. We’re not sure we’ve seen such a complete collection.
The pipes are mostly at 125 mm diameter, with the full array of elbows and joints, alongside adapters for fans and smaller pipes, and different splitter options. It becomes particularly interesting in the accessories department though, because he’s also made a set of smart addons, packing ESP32s for sensors, and even valves.
It sometimes shocks us to go into hackerspaces and see nothing in the way of extraction around tools that really need it. Airborne smoke and particulates are a proven hazard, and thus we like this project a lot. If you don’t have adequate ventilation or extraction on your bench, consider printing yourself a solution. Take a look at how one hackerspace did it.

Casio introduce CT-S1-76 keyboard The CT-S1-76 delivers a 76-key version of the popular CT-S1, and uses Casio's AiX Sound Source technology to deliver faithful reproductions of a range of different instruments. 

Forget about Ethereum ETFs — Here's what you can do insteadSpot Ether ETFs were supposed to set the gold standard for ETH investing. Unfortunately, they still aren't allowed to offer staking.

Getting It Done: Last week in D.I.Y. & Indie MusicLast week, our tips and advice for independent, do-it-yourselfers covered how to promote music with Instagram Reels, how often to post on social media, and more.
The post Getting It Done: Last week in D.I.Y. & Indie Music appeared first on Hypebot.

REWIND: New Music Industry’s Last Week in ReviewCatch up on what everyone in the music industry was talking about last week, with MediMusic transforming healthcare; a report revealing songwriter stats, and more…
The post REWIND: New Music Industry’s Last Week in Review appeared first on Hypebot.

Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway sells half its Apple stockWarren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway cut its Apple holding by around half, to $84.2 billion, according to an SEC filing. While Apple remains the firm’s largest stock holding by far, Buffett had already reduced its stake by 13 percent earlier this year, hinting that he didn’t mind selling “a little Apple” for tax reasons. Berkshire Hathaway […]
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