"A lack of political diversity among staff and C-suite mandates has created a niche format that appeals mainly to far liberal-leaning listeners and only presents one side of important national and international stories. So says Uri Berliner, a senior business editor, and a 25-year NPR veteran." - Inside Radio
The official response, from chief news executive Edith Chapin: "We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do. … (Yet) none of our work is above scrutiny or critique." Colleagues are reportedly furious that Berliner quoted private conversations. - NPR
TikTok began life as Musical.ly, an app to film oneself lip-syncing to songs. Interacting with pop music was a core function of TikTok. Fans and artists shared music they loved, grafting it onto videos showing their lives and ideas. It was a lifeline to friends and culture during the pandemic. - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
New scientific investigations into the embodied experience of viewing art point us toward more concrete answers, but also more questions. - Hyperallergic
Maybe you don’t know that YouTube is also the most popular way to hear music and one of the country’s largest cable TV providers. YouTube is the healthiest economy on the internet. And it has been rocket fuel for artificial intelligence. - Washington Post
Ever more powerful systems developed by OpenAI, Google and others require larger oceans of information to learn from. That demand is straining the available pool of quality public data online at the same time that some data owners are blocking access to AI companies. - The Wall Street Journal
According to the recordings, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative AI, told executives that the company had used almost every book, poem and essay written in English available on the internet to train models, so was looking for new sources of training material. - The Guardian
If the MPA’s plan sounds familiar, it’s because it has tried this before. It helped hatch the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012, which would’ve restricted access to websites containing pirated content. - The Verge
“TikTok is how you get the word out about a new song — and now you’re muting someone’s entire catalog? The labels say TikTok is so important and push their artists to , and now they can’t?” - Variety
"With breaking making its first Olympic appearance at the Paris Games later this year, pole dancers feel it could soon be their turn to be in the limelight, although it could come at the cost of losing the spirit of the discipline." - Reuters
In an attempt to tackle fraudulent activity on the platform, the digital music service now also requires a minimum number of unique listeners for royalties to be generated. In addition, the length of play-time required for so-called “functional content” (such as white noise) to generate royalty payments has increased. - Eurozine
"How does the Taj Mahal’s history — one that has come to visually represent the period of the Mughal Empire, an Islamic empire — sit within the narrative of a contemporary India during a period when the Hindu nationalist movement is seeking to minimize, or perhaps erase, its Islamic past?" - JSTOR Daily
Although distributors and streaming services frequently use language that places the blame on the artist for fraudulent activity detected on their accounts, it has become clear that artists are often caught in the middle of a crossfire between streaming services, distributors and fraudsters attempting to game the system for their own financial gain. - Variety
"The film’s themes struck a chord in a country where dissent had been criminalized and fear of arbitrary arrest was pervasive. … Still, the backlash was swift. Putin’s propagandists … denounced (Michael Lockshin) as a traitor to his adopted country. They called for the film’s banning and the director’s prosecution." - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
Since these digital services first promised to boil down a title, usually a nonfiction work, a decade ago, the marketplace has become crowded. So much so that authors and publishers are concerned about the damage to sales, as well as to the habit of concentrated reading. - The Guardian
