Auto Added by WPeMatico
Apple Podcasts is adding native video support and dynamic ad tools, letting creators deliver audio and video in one feed as competition intensifies.
The post Apple Podcasts Gets Major Video Overhaul to Take on YouTube, Spotify appeared first on TechRepublic.
Sour times? It's certainly a change from the $9.99 service that launched in the US back in 2011.
The post Spotify’s Third Price Hike in 30 Months Hits $13 appeared first on TechRepublic.
From an enraging indictment of Spotify to Del Amitri frontman Justin Currie’s account of Parkinson’s and a compelling biography of Tupac Shakur, here are five titles that strike a chord
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
Liz Pelly (Hodder & Stoughton)
Enraging, thoroughly depressing, but entirely necessary, Mood Music offers a timely, forensically researched demolition of Spotify. In Pelly’s account, the music streaming giant views music as a kind of nondescript sonic wallpaper, artists as an unnecessary encumbrance to the business of making more money and its target market not as music fans, but mindless drones who don’t really care what they’re listening to, ripe for manipulation by its algorithm. Sharp business practices and evidence of its deleterious effect on the quality and variety of new music abound: the worst thing is that Pelly can’t really come up with a viable alternative in a world where convenience trumps all.
Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters With Rock Royalty
Kate Mossman (Bonnier)
There’s no doubt that Men of a Certain Age is a hard sell, a semi-autobiographical book in which the New Statesman’s arts editor traces her obsession with often wildly unfashionable, ageing male artists – Queen’s Roger Taylor, Bruce Hornsby, Steve Perry of Journey, Jon Bon Jovi among them – through a series of interviews variously absurd, insightful, hair-raising and weirdly touching. But it’s elevated to unmissable status by Mossman’s writing, which is so sparkling, witty and shrewd that your personal feelings about her subjects are rendered irrelevant amid the cocktail of self-awareness, affection and sharp analysis she brings to every encounter. In a world of music books retelling tired legends, Men of a Certain Age offers that rare thing: an entirely original take on rock history.
As demand for audio content grows, companies are looking for faster – and cheaper – ways to make it
When we think about what makes an audiobook memorable, it’s always the most human moments: a catch in the throat when tears are near, or words spoken through a real smile.
A Melbourne actor and audiobook narrator, Annabelle Tudor, says it’s the instinct we have as storytellers that makes narration such a primal, and precious, skill. “The voice betrays how we’re feeling really easily,” she says.