From love songs to dance tunes to lullabies, music made in disparate cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way human minds create music. From a report: The study focused on musical recordings and ethnographic records from 60 societies around the world including such diverse cultures as the Highland Scots in Scotland, Nyangatom nomads in Ethiopia, Mentawai rain forest dwellers in Indonesia, the Saramaka descendants of African slaves in Suriname and Aranda hunter-gatherers in Australia. Music was broadly found to be associated with behaviors including infant care, dance, love, healing, weddings, funerals, warfare, processions and religious rituals. The researchers detected strong similarities in musical features across the various cultures, according to Samuel Mehr, a Harvard University research associate in psychology and the lead author of the study published in the journal Science. "The study gives credence to the idea that there is some sort of set of governing rules for how human minds produce music worldwide. And that's something we could not really test until we had a lot of data about music from many different cultures," Mehr said.

US authorities charged a Texas man this week for hacking into the cloud accounts of two music companies and the social media account of a high-profile music producer, from where he stole unreleased songs that he later published online for free on public internet forums. From a report: When the man realized he could be caught, he contacted one of the hacked companies and tried to pin the blame on another individual. According to court documents published on Monday by the Department of Justice, the suspect is a 27-year-old named Christian Erazo, from Austin, Texas. US authorities say that Erazo worked with three other co-conspirators on a series of hacks that took place between late 2016 and April 2017. The group's primary targets were two music management companies, one located in New York, and the second in Los Angeles. According to investigators, the four hackers obtained and used employee credentials to access the companies' cloud storage accounts, from where they downloaded more than 100 unreleased songs. Most of the data came from the New York-based music label, from where the Erazo and co-conspirators stole more than 50 GBs of music. Erazo's indictment claims the group accessed the company's cloud storage account more than 2,300 times across several months.

theodp writes: To help Prince Charles quickly learn the Welsh Language, viewers of The Crown learned this week, Labour prime minster Harold Wilson engaged Welsh nationalist Dr. Edward "Tedi" Millward as his reluctant tutor. To help U.S. children quickly learn to code, readers of Medium learned this week, Code.org and Amazon have engaged Lil Nas X and Katy Perry to be their Hour of Code tutors this December (guess the pair aced their interview with Jeff Bezos!). Last year's signature Hour of Code tutorial Dance Party , Code.org explains, has been given a facelift -- "New backgrounds and foregrounds!" "New songs!" "A brand new character!" -- to yield this year's signature Hour of Code tutorial, Dance Party (2019 Remix) . Separately, the AWS Public Sector Blog Team just announced it's teamed up with the MIT Media Lab on a Scratch-based Hour of Code activity to introduce AWS cloud computing technologies to kids 7 and up. AWS Educate also recently announced it's out to connect the K12 crowd to AWS cloud services, offering free capped AWS Educate Starter Accounts as well as look-Ma-no-limit credit-card backed regular AWS accounts to the 570,000+ students and 300,000+ volunteers participating in the FIRST Robotics Competition and FIRST Tech Challenge.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A simple glance at torrent websites shows that plenty of people are stealing from the brand new steaming services -- episodes of The Mandalorian and Dickinson all have hundreds or thousands of seeders and are among the most popular shows on torrent sites. I reached out specifically to Disney, Apple, and Netflix to ask what their policy was on going after pirated content, and haven't heard back, but it's obvious that these companies assume that at least some of their viewers aren't paying the full price for their services. Given that you can watch as many as six simultaneous streams with Apple TV+, and four with Disney+ and the top Netflix package, the more common form of piracy -- password sharing -- is built into the system. But for pirates who don't have any access to the legit services, what makes stealing content particularly appealing in this age is that there are few if any people who face consequences for the crime.

Since the discontinuation of the "six strikes" copyright policy in 2017, there's been lax enforcement of copyright laws. Rather than going after individuals for exorbitant fines for downloading a handful of songs like copyright holders did a decade ago, enforcement these days has focused on the providers of pirated content, with the much more efficient goal of taking down entire streaming sites rather than just a few of their visitors. Of course, as the continued resilience of The Pirate Bay shows, the current strategy isn't particularly effective at stopping piracy, either. But it does mean that those who only download already-stolen content are safer than they've ever been.

A new article at Motherboard remembers when the MIDI file format became the main way music was shared on the internet "for an incredibly short but memorable period of time..." [I]n the hunt for additional features, the two primary developers of web browsers during the era -- Microsoft and Netscape -- added functionality that made audio files accessible when loading websites, whether as background music or as embedded files with a dedicated player. Either way, it was one of the earliest examples of a plug-in that much of the public ran into -- even before Flash. In particular, Microsoft's Internet Explorer supported it as far back as version 1.0, while Netscape Navigator supported it with the use of a plug-in and added native support starting in version 3.0. There was a period, during the peak of the Geocities era, where loading a website with a MIDI file was a common occurrence.

When Geocities was shut down in 2019, the MIDI files found on various websites during that time were collected by The Archive Team. The Internet Archive includes more than 51,000 files in The Geocities MIDI Collection. The list of songs, which can be seen here, is very much a time capsule to a specific era. Have a favorite song from 1998? Search for it in here, sans spaces, and you'll probably find it...! They sound like a musical time capsule, and evoke memories of a specific time for many web surfers of the era. "Even in an age of high-quality MP3s, the chintzy sounds of MIDI files resonate on the Web," writer Douglas Wolk wrote for Spin in 2000, immediately adding the reason: "They play on just about anything smarter than a Tupperware bowl, and they're also very small...." The thing that often gets lost with these compositions of popular songs done in MIDI format is that they're often done by people, either for purposes of running a sound bank (which might come in handy, for example, with karaoke), or by amateurs trying to recreate the songs they enjoy or heard on the radio.... [I]ts moment in the sun reflected its utility during a period of time when the demand for multimedia content from the internet was growing -- but the ability for computers to offer it up in a full-fat format was limited. (Stupid modems....) MIDI is very much not dead -- far from it. Its great strength is the fact that a MIDI-supporting iPad can communicate with some of the earliest MIDI-supporting devices, such as the Commodore 64.
Using a browser plugin called Jazz-Plugin, their writer even re-discovered John Roache's Ragtime MIDI Library. "[I]t occurred to me that I should spend more time writing about one of the things that makes the Web so special -- labors of love. Unlike any medium before it, the Web gives people with unusual talents and interests a chance to share their passions with fellow enthusiasts -- and with folks like me who just happen to drop by."

A year ago, Google rolled out ".new" links that worked like shortcuts to instantly create new Google documents. For example, you could type "doc.new" (without the quotes) to create a new Google Doc or "sheet.new" to create a new spreadsheet. Today, Google announced it's bringing the .new shortcuts to the rest of the web. From a report: Now, any company or organization can register their own .new domain to generate a .new shortcut that works with their own web app. Several have already done so, including Microsoft, which now has "word.new" to start a new word document, or Spotify, which has "playlist.new" to start adding songs to a new playlist on its streaming app. The domains are designed to get users straight to the action. That is, instead of having to visit a service, sign in, then find the right menu or function, they could just start creating. However, some of today's new domains aren't quite as seamless as Google's own.

CNET reports on a new crowdsourced public awareness campaign: Mozilla is publishing anecdotes of YouTube viewing gone awry -- anonymous stories from people who say they innocently searched for one thing but eventually ended up in a dark rabbit hole of videos. It's a campaign aimed at pressuring Google's massive video site to make itself more accessible to independent researchers trying to study its algorithms. "The big problem is we have no idea what is happening on YouTube," said Guillaume Chaslot, who is a fellow at Mozilla, a nonprofit best known for its unit that makes and operates the Firefox web browser.

Chaslot is an ex-Google engineer who has investigated YouTube's recommendations from the outside after he left the company in 2013. (YouTube says he was fired for performance issues.) "We can see that there are problems, but we have no idea if the problem is from people being people or from algorithms," he said....

Mozilla is publishing 28 stories it's terming #YouTubeRegrets; they include, for example, an anecdote from someone who who said a search for German folk songs ended up returning neo-Nazi clips, and a testimonial from a mother who said her 10-year-old daughter searched for tap-dancing videos and ended up watching extreme contortionist clips that affected her body image.

iTunes is officially dead with the release of macOS Catalina today. Apple decided to break apart the app into separate Apple Music, Podcasts and TV apps. "Each is better at its individuals task than it was as a section within iTunes, which was teetering on collapse like the Jenga tower of various functions it supports," writes Dieter Bohn via The Verge.

"In the early days, iTunes was simply a way to get music onto Apple's marquee product, the iPod music player," reports Snopes. "Users connected the iPod to a computer, and songs automatically synced -- simplicity unheard of at the time." It was the first service to make songs available for 99 cents apiece, and $9.99 for most albums -- convincing many people to buy music legally than seek out sketchy sites for pirated downloads. "But over time, iTunes software expanded to include podcasts, e-books, audiobooks, movies and TV shows," recalls Snopes. "In the iPhone era, iTunes also made backups and synced voice memos. As the software got bloated to support additional functions, iTunes lost the ease and simplicity that gave it its charm. And with online cloud storage and wireless syncing, it no longer became necessary to connect iPhones to a computer -- and iTunes -- with a cable."

What did you like or dislike about iTunes? When you look back at the media player, what are you reminded of?

Amazon Music HD is a new tier of Amazon's music service that offers lossless versions of audio files for streaming or downloading at a price that aggressively undercuts Tidal, the main competition for this kind of audio. "Amazon will charge $14.99 a month for the HD tier, or $12.99 if you're an Amazon Prime customer," reports The Verge. "Tidal's Hi-Fi plan costs $19.99 monthly." From the report: Amazon says it has a catalog of over 50 million songs that it calls "High Definition," which is the term it's applying to songs with CD-quality bit depth of 16 bits and a 44.1kHz sample rate. It also has "millions" (read: less than 10 million, more than one million) of songs it's calling "Ultra HD," which translates to 24-bit with sample rates that range from 44.1kHz up to 192kHz. Amazon Music HD will deliver them all in the lossless FLAC file format, instead of the MQA format that Tidal uses.

Amazon's VP of Music, Steve Boom, tells me that Amazon chose the HD and UltraHD terminology because it found it was more comprehensible to a mass audience than the current terminology for audio quality. And "mass audience" is exactly what Amazon is going for; it doesn't want Amazon Music HD to be a niche player like Tidal and other lossless music platforms like HDtracks or Qobuz. Boom says that "It's a pretty big deal that one of the big three global streaming services is doing this -- we're the first one." In response to today's news, Rock legend Neil Young said (with no hyperbole whatsoever): "Earth will be changed forever when Amazon introduces high quality streaming to the masses. This will be the biggest thing to happen in music since the introduction of digital audio 40 years ago."

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've spent much time thinking about the political divide in the United States, you've hopefully noted how bloody weird it is. Somehow, just about every topic that people want to argue about splits into two camps. If you visualize the vast array of topics you could have an opinion about as a switchboard full of toggles, it seems improbable that so many people in each camp should have nearly identical switchboards, but they do. This can even extend to factual issues, like science -- one camp typically does not accept that climate change is real and human-caused. How in the world do we end up with these opinion sets? And why does something like climate change start an inter-camp argument, while other things like the physics behind airplane design enjoy universal acceptance?

One obvious way to explain these opinions is to look for underlying principles that connect them. Maybe it's ideologically consistent to oppose both tax increases and extensive government oversight of pesticide products. But can you really draw a straight line from small-government philosophy to immigration attitudes? Or military funding? A new study by a Cornell team led by Michael Macy approaches these questions with inspiration from an experiment involving, of all things, downloading indie music. That study set up separate "worlds" in which participants checked out new music with the aid of information about which songs other people in their experimental world were choosing. It showed that the songs that were "hits" weren't always the same -- there was a significant role for chance, as a song that got trending early in the experiment had a leg up.

Apple and Spotify are in talks about potentially enabling Siri to play songs, albums, and playlists from the leading subscription music service. The Verge: A new report from The Information confirms that Spotify would be taking advantage of new capabilities that Apple is introducing in iOS 13 and iPadOS 13, which allow other apps to be on equal footing with Apple Music when making music requests through the company's Siri voice assistant. If Spotify takes advantage of the new tools, you'll be able to play music without having to open the app on your iPhone or iPad. The integration could be a sign of progress between two companies that have butted heads to a more heated degree than ever before over the last year. In March, Spotify filed an antitrust complaint with the EU that accused Apple of disadvantaging third-party services that compete with its own apps. Among other gripes (such as Apple's subscription tax), Spotify pointed to hands-free Siri compatibility as one convenient feature that Apple was reserving for its own Apple Music service. Further reading: Apple Says Spotify Wants 'the Benefits of a Free App Without Being Free'; and Apple Cites Irrelevant Spotify Subscription Stats In New Antitrust Defense.

dryriver writes: The line "sharks with fricking lasers" was once popular on Slashdot. It sounds like a joke, but a never-made James Bond movie co-written back in the day by Sean Connery was actually going to feature robotic sharks carrying stolen NATO nukes in order to attack New York. Bond was going to stop the sharks inside the New York sewer system, waterski out of the sewers, paraglide up to the Statue of Liberty's head, then fight a Bond villain inside said head, with the villain's "blood trickling out of the Statue of Liberty's eye like tears" at the end of the fight. All this was going to happen without the consent of Cubby Broccoli, the official producer of the Bond movies. Why did the movie never get made? The producers of competing Bond movies were fighting in court over who has what rights to the franchise and characters. In the end, "Bond fights robot sharks with nukes" was scrapped, and "Never Say Never Again," a remake of "Thunderball," was made instead. This featured stolen nukes as well, but unfortunately no robot sharks or other "Austin Powers" style silliness.

We're reviving an old Slashdot tradition -- the review. Whenever there's something especially geeky -- or relevant to our present moment -- we'll share some thoughts. And I'd like to start with Jonathan Coulton's amazing 2017 album Solid State, and its trippy accompanying graphic novel adaptation by Matt Fraction. I even tracked down Jonathan Coulton on Friday for his thoughts on how it applies to our current moment in internet time...

"When I started work on Solid State, the only thing I could really think of that I wanted to say was something like, 'The internet sucks now'," Coulton said in 2017 in an epilogue to the graphic novel. "It's a little off-brand for me, so it was a scary place to start..."

So what does he think today? And what did we think of his album...?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Hong Kong's protesters are using AirDrop, a file-sharing feature that allows Apple devices to send photos and videos over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, to breach China's Great Firewall in order to spread information to mainland Chinese visitors in the city. Leaving AirDrop settings open allows anyone in the vicinity to send files to your device. A protest held yesterday (July 7) in Tsim Sha Tsui, one of Hong Kong's most popular tourist districts, had a clear aim: to tell people from mainland China about the city's opposition to a hated extradition bill, which has mobilized millions of people over the past several weeks to multiple protests and presented the most critical challenge to the local government in decades.

But news of the protest has been heavily censored in mainland China, with any mention of the mass movement wiped off the Chinese internet. Even songs alluding to the city have been scrubbed. As such, many Chinese tourists were visibly confused by the large march, which organizers say drew an estimated 230,000 people. Hong Kong's protesters have therefore turned to Apple's AirDrop feature to get their message across to their mainland Chinese compatriots. That the messages are written in simplified Chinese -- Hong Kongers use traditional Chinese -- confirm that the intended audience is Chinese tourists.

In a blog post on Monday, Spotify announced that it will prohibit individual musicians from directly uploading their songs to the streaming service. The new move requires a third party to be involved in the business of uploads. From a report: The company announced the change on Monday, saying it will close the beta program and stop accepting direct uploads by the end of July. "The most impactful way we can improve the experience of delivering music to Spotify for as many artists and labels as possible is to lean into the great work our distribution partners are already doing to serve the artist community," Spotify said in a statement on its blog. "Over the past year, we've vastly improved our work with distribution partners to ensure metadata quality, protect artists from infringement, provide their users with instant access to Spotify for Artists, and more."

"The best way for us to serve artists and labels is to focus our resources on developing tools in areas where Spotify can uniquely benefit them -- like Spotify for Artists (which more than 300,000 creators use to gain new insight into their audience) and our playlist submission tool (which more than 36,000 artists have used to get playlisted for the very first time since it launched a year ago). We have a lot more planned here in the coming months," the post continued.

During the social network's heyday, multiple Myspace employees abused an internal company tool to spy on users, in some cases including ex-partners, Motherboard reported on Monday. From the report: Named 'Overlord,' the tool allowed employees to see users' passwords and their messages, two former employees said. While the tool was originally designed to help moderate the platform and allow MySpace to comply with law enforcement requests, multiple sources said the tool was used for illegitimate purposes by employees who accessed Myspace user data without authorization to do so. "It was basically an entire backdoor to the Myspace platform," one of the former employees said of Overlord. (Motherboard granted five former Myspace employees anonymity to discuss internal Myspace incidents.) The abuse happened about a decade ago, closer to the height of the platform's popularity, according to multiple sources. In fall 2006, the platform signed up its 100 millionth user. Around this time, Myspace was the second most popular website in the U.S., and ranked higher than Google search. Further reading: MySpace Has Reportedly Lost All Photos, Videos and Songs Uploaded Over 12 Years Due To Data Corruption During a Server Migration Project (March, 2019).

"Genius.com says its traffic is dropping because, for the past several years, Google has been publishing lyrics on its own platform, with some of them lifted directly from the music site," reports the Wall Street Journal: Google denies doing anything nefarious. Still, Genius's complaints offer a window into the challenges small tech companies can face when the unit of Alphabet Inc. starts offering competing services on its platform... Genius said it notified Google as far back as 2017, and again in an April letter, that copied transcriptions appear on Google's website. The April letter, a copy of which was viewed by the Journal, warned that reuse of Genius's transcriptions breaks the Genius.com terms of service and violates antitrust law.

"Over the last two years, we've shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius," said Ben Gross, Genius's chief strategy officer, in an email message.... Genius said it found more than 100 examples of songs on Google that came from its site. Starting around 2016, Genius made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics' apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song. When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words "Red Handed."

Genius is a privately held company, and its investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Emagen Investment Group and the rapper Nas... Genius clients include the music streaming website Spotify Technology SA and Apple Inc.
The article also notes March study from web-analytics firm Jumpshot Inc. which found 62% of mobile searches on Google now don't result in the user clicking through to a non-Google web site.

Shazam, the Apple-owned app that helps users identify songs playing around them, can now recognize songs you're listening to through your headphones when using an Android phone or tablet. From a report: Acquired by Apple for $400 million last year, the company introduced a feature called 'Pop-Up Shazam' to its Android app recently, which when enabled, works with any other Android app to track and identify songs playing externally or internally on the phone. It's a feature that many users have requested for years. Prior to this, when a user would chance upon a music track in say a YouTube video, they only had two inconvenient ways to shazam the song. They could either unplug the earphones from the phone and let the audio play through the built-in speakers, or draw an earpiece close to the mic of the phone. The new feature enables Shazam to track the audio signal beaming off of other apps, thereby not completely relying on just output from the surrounding and a phone's speaker. The app is tapping the audio signal by using a persistent notification that floats around and could be dragged -- like the ones from Facebook Messenger -- and can be activated by a single tap.

Radiohead have released a vast collection of unreleased tracks made during the sessions for 1997 album OK Computer, after a MiniDisc archive owned by frontman Thom Yorke was hacked last week by an unnamed person, who reportedly held the recordings to ransom for $150,000. From a report: The band have now made the 18 MiniDisc recordings, most of them around an hour in length, available on Bandcamp for $23. Proceeds will go to climate activists Extinction Rebellion. The band's guitarist Jonny Greenwood confirmed the hack, and said: âoeInstead of complaining -- much -- or ignoring it, we're releasing all 18 hours on Bandcamp in aid of Extinction Rebellion. Just for the next 18 days. So for $23 you can find out if we should have paid that ransom. Never intended for public consumption (though some clips did reach the cassette in the OK Computer reissue) it's only tangentially interesting. And very, very long. Not a phone download." Thom Yorke wrote of the 1.8 gigabyte collection: "It's not v interesting. There's a lot of it 0... as it's out there it may as well be out there until we all get bored and move on."

From a report: Recently, a musician signed to a major indie label told me they were owed up to $40,000 in song royalties they would never be able to collect. It wasn't that they had missed out on payments for a single song -- it was that they had missed out on payments for 70 songs, going back at least six years. The problem, they said, was metadata. In the music world, metadata most commonly refers to the song credits you see on services like Spotify or Apple Music, but it also includes all the underlying information tied to a released song or album, including titles, songwriter and producer names, the publisher(s), the record label, and more. That information needs to be synchronized across all kinds of industry databases to make sure that when you play a song, the right people are identified and paid. And often, they aren't.

Metadata sounds like one of the smallest, most boring things in music. But as it turns out, it's one of the most important, complex, and broken, leaving many musicians unable to get paid for their work. "Every second that goes by and it's not fixed, I'm dripping pennies," said the musician. Entering the correct information about a song sounds like it should be easy enough, but metadata problems have plagued the music industry for decades. Not only are there no standards for how music metadata is collected or displayed, there's no need to verify the accuracy of a song's metadata before it gets released, and there's no one place where music metadata is stored. Instead, fractions of that data is kept in hundreds of different places across the world. As a result, the problem is way bigger than a name being misspelled when you click a song's credits on Spotify. Missing, bad, or inconsistent song metadata is a crisis that has left, by some estimations, billions on the table that never gets paid to the artists who earned that money.