One Man’s Army of Streaming Bots Reveals a Whole Industry’s Problem

A man in Denmark was sentenced to 18 months in prison today for using fake accounts to trick music streaming services into paying him 2 million Danish kroner ($290,000) in royalties. The unusual case reveals a weak spot in the business model behind the world’s biggest music platforms. The 53-year-old consultant, who had pleaded not … Read more

Apple Pulls Popular Movie Piracy App Kimi From the App Store

Watching pirated movies on your iPhone just got a little harder. After climbing the charts of Apple’s App Store, the trendy Kimi app, with its collection of bootlegged movies, has just disappeared. Pretending to be a spot-the-difference vision-testing game, the widely downloaded app ranked above Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video in Apple’s charts this … Read more

Netflix reports best-ever holiday season results with 13M new subscribers – National

Netflix registered its third-consecutive quarter of accelerating subscriber growth in the final three months of 2023, closing out a comeback year that included a crackdown on viewers freeloading on the video-streaming service and a smattering of price hikes. The fourth-quarter results announced Tuesday provided further evidence that Netflix was able to come up with a … Read more

Kanye West’s ‘Stronger’ named best motivational song of all time | Music | Entertainment

The best motivational song of all time is Kanye West’s “Stronger” – with rock anthem “Eye of the Tiger” only securing fourth spot, research has found. An analysis of the 65 most popular motivational playlists, on Spotify and Apple Music, was carried out, to determine which track made the most appearances. And “Stronger”, which was … Read more

Crave subscribers will need to pay $2 more monthly to avoid ads – National

Descrease article font size Increase article font size Avoiding commercials on the Crave streaming service is about to get a little costlier. Bell Media has told Crave subscribers who use its “premium ad-free” package that they’ll now have to pay $22 per month — an increase of $2.01. The change affects only the most expensive … Read more

How much longer will we be able to buy digital music? – National

On June 1, 1999, a university student named Shawn Fanning sent a message to his friends telling them about a new program he’d written called Napster. It offered music fans a way to connect and trade digital music files quickly and efficiently using a new type of compressed file called an MP3. “Don’t share it … Read more