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Spotify has announced it’s hiking subscriptions for customers in the U.S., the second such price increase in the space of a year. The music-streaming giant reports that premium pricing will increase in July from $10.99 to $11.99, representing a rise of nearly 10%. The Duo and Family plans will go up to $16.99 and $19.99,

Amazon is rolling out an AI-powered search feature to Fire TV that would enable Alexa to answer open-ended questions about TV shows and movies, and deliver more specific recommendations tailored to users’ preferences.  Announced at Amazon’s annual devices event last September, the feature is powered by a proprietary large language model (LLM). The AI understands

Spotify is facing continued backlash over its decision to discontinue support for Car Thing, its in-car streaming device, announced earlier in May. The device will no longer work starting on Dec. 9, 2024, the company said. On TikTok, Gen Z users are posting videos to express their discontent with Spotify’s move and its recommended actions

HBO’s new documentary, “MoviePass, MovieCrash,” tells a story that many of us know about: how MoviePass, the subscription-based movie ticketing startup, was a catastrophic failure. After a series of mishaps and deception, it filed for bankruptcy in 2020.  However, the movie also tells the underreported tale of two Black men who aimed to disrupt the

Alex Taub, a longtime founder with multiple exits under his belt, believes it’s time to disrupt the meme industry. “I have this big thesis that meme tech is going to be the next big category,” Taub told TechCrunch. “Like, there’s health tech, there’s proptech, there’s adtech, there’s fintech… I think meme tech is about to

Spotify has hiked the price for its premium subscription in France by an eye-watering €0.13 in response to a music-streaming levy imposed by the government at the start of the year. At €11.12 per month for an individual subscription plan, the new price is 1.2% higher than the previous amount — the same as the

Everything in society can feel geared toward optimization – whether that’s standardized testing or artificial intelligence algorithms. We’re taught to know what outcome you want to achieve, and find the path towards getting there.  Kenneth Stanley, a former OpenAI researcher and co-founder of a new social media platform called Maven, has been preaching for years

Spotify’s addition of its AI DJ feature, which introduces personalized song selections to users, was the company’s first step into an AI future. Now, Spotify is developing an alternative version of that DJ that will speak Spanish. References to the new AI DJ were spotted in the app’s code by tech veteran and reverse engineer

The United States Department of Justice and 30 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, for alleged monopolistic practices. Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010, creating a dominant entertainment machine that controls the majority of ticket sales and venue bookings in the country. But Taylor Swift

Autodesk — the 3D tools behemoth — has acquired Wonder Dynamics, a startup that lets creators quickly and easily make complex characters and visual effects using AI-powered image analysis. The two companies have worked closely together for years but are making it official today. Wonder Dynamics, founded by VFX artist Nikola Todorovic and actor Tye

It’s been three years since Spotify acquired live audio startup Betty Labs, and yet the music streaming service isn’t leveraging the technology to its fullest potential—at least not in our opinion.  Betty Labs-owned Locker Room launched in 2020 as a sports-focused social audio app where sports fans could engage in live conversations, create watch parties,

When putting a video portal in a public park in the middle of New York City, some inappropriate behavior will likely occur. The Portal, the vision of Lithuanian artist and entrepreneur Benediktas Gylys, was designed to bring people together and let them share common experiences. After it opened earlier this month, the vast majority of

OpenAI is removing one of the voices used by ChatGPT. Users found that it sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson, the company announced on Monday, and Johansson herself released a statement saying she hired legal council to inquire about the Sky voice and get exact details about how it was developed. Sky is now being paused

OpenAI is removing one of the voices used by ChatGPT after users found that it sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson, the company announced on Monday. The voice, called Sky, is now being paused after OpenAI used it when demoing its new GPT-4o model last week. “We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a

Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the top entertainment and sports talent agencies, is hoping to be at the forefront of AI protection services for celebrities in Hollywood. With many stars having their digital likeness used without permission, CAA has built a virtual media storage system for A-list talent — actors, athletes, comedians, directors, musicians,

YouTube TV has announced that its ‘multiview’ feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube TV rolled out the feature to iPhones and iPads. The feature, which first launched in March 2023, is aimed at sports viewers who want to

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission. The letter, which was obtained by TechCrunch, says Sony Music has “reason to believe” that the recipients of the letter have “may already have made

As anticipated, numerous AI-related announcements were made at this year’s Google I/O 2024 conference, including the unveiling of a new feature for Google TV.  Gemini, the company’s family of generative AI models, will enhance the smart TV operating system so it can generate descriptions for movies and TV shows. When a description is missing on

Back in February, Google paused its AI-powered chatbot Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after users complained of historical inaccuracies. Told to depict “a Roman legion,” for example, Gemini would show an anachronistic group of racially diverse soldiers while rendering “Zulu warriors” as stereotypically Black. Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized, and Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of

Netflix announced during its Upfronts presentation on Wednesday that it’s launching its own advertising technology platform only a year and a half after entering the ads business. This move pits it against other industry heavyweights with ad servers, like Google, Amazon and Comcast.  The announcement signifies a significant shake-up in the streaming giant’s advertising approach.

Google’s upgrading its image generation tech to keep apace with rivals.  At the company’s I/O developer conference in Mountain View on Tuesday, Google announced Imagen 3, the latest in the tech giant’s Imagen generative AI model family. Demis Hassabis, head of DeepMind, Google’s AI research division, said that Imagen 3 more accurately understands the text

Google’s gunning for OpenAI’s Sora with Veo, an AI model that can create 1080p video clips around a minute long given a text prompt.  Unveiled on Tuesday at Google’s I/O 2024 developer conference, Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and time lapses, and make edits and adjustments to already generated footage.

In the third episode of “Creative Dialogues,” an interview series produced by the filmmaking division of generative AI startup Runway, multimedia artist Claire Hentschker expresses a fear that AI will commoditize the artistic process to the point where art homogenizes, regressing to a sort of derivative sameness. “Are you getting this increasingly narrower average of

On Thursday, Reddit is rolling out a new policy aimed at balancing its desire to license its content to larger tech companies, like Google, and protecting users’ privacy. The newly announced “Public Content Policy” will now join Reddit’s existing privacy policy and content policy to guide how Reddit’s data is being accessed and used by

Apple can generally be relied on for clever, well-produced ads, but it missed the mark with its latest, which depicts a tower of creative tools and analog items literally crushed into the form of the iPad. Many, including myself, had a negative and visceral reaction to this, and we should talk about why. It’s not

Amazon has historically operated audiobook marketplace Audible as a separate entity, unconnected to the retailer’s broader goals and ambitions. Today, that’s changing a bit with the launch of a test that will allow Audible users to receive recommendations about what to listen to next based on their Prime Video viewing behavior. The company says this

A harsh truth: As bad as North American wildfires have grown over the past several years, things are only going to get worse. Climate change continues to accelerate the issue, putting people, property, nature and animals at risk. Drones have been a fixture in the fight for over a decade now, and the Fire Apparatus

Kajabi, the video and web hosting platform for content creators to sell online courses, announced Thursday the official launch of its no-code branded mobile app offering, letting users host their own customized native app through the App Store and Google Play. Kajabi already has a mobile app for hosting online courses, but this new product

Spotify has apparently found a new way to push its free users to a paid subscription: It’s putting lyrics behind a paywall. Following various reports citing frustrated posts from users on Reddit, the company is quietly confirming the change — but without a direct statement. Instead, the company told TechCrunch simply that Spotify’s features can

It seems we’re all in agreement: Kendrick Lamar defeated Drake in one of the most engrossing rap battles of the decade. To add insult to injury, Drake also threw himself into legal hot water when he deepfaked the late rapper Tupac. The tension between Lamar and Drake goes back decades, but this latest flare-up began