Music

According to Shazam, that’s equal to 12 songs named for each person on Earth.

Nintendo added F-Zero X to the growing library of video game tracks on the Nintendo Music app. One of my favorites, “White Land,” is below in YouTube form (I’m also partial to “Port Town“). Just please avoid speeding while listening in your car.

Despite the glitches in its Tyson-Paul livestream that pulled in more than 60 million viewers, Netflix is pushing forward to another major live event with two exclusive NFL broadcasts on Christmas Day.

And now the streamer has announced that Beyoncé will perform at halftime of the second game, as the Houston Texans host the Baltimore Ravens starting at 4:30PM ET on December 25th.

If video game soundtracks are what you use to get through the workday, then FromSoftware has a gift for you. The soundtrack for Shadow of the Erdtree is now streaming in all the regular (and not so regular) places including Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, something called Deezer, and more.

Zuck worked with T-Pain on a new version of “Get Low,” but the song initially wasn’t playing for me and some Verge colleagues on his Instagram carousel.

Now, the song works for me on iOS, but not on desktop. Meta spokesperson Sienna La Rocca confirms that this isn’t a copyright issue, however.

Update: The song is working on iOS but not on desktop.

The latest version of the app now includes support for CarPlay and Siri, alongside “stability and performance enhancements” according to Apple.

It’s more surprising that this wasn’t already available. MacRumors notes that CarPlay support also briefly appeared in January before mysteriously vanishing just hours later. I’m glad they brought it Bach.

While interviewing Switched on Pop’s Charlie Harding on this episode of The Vergecast, David Pierce speculates that voice memo demos will become a distinct genre because people just want “lots of different experiences of this same kind of thing.”

And why not? As a songwriter, I’ve always been impressed with how good smartphone voice memos can sound, and who doesn’t have a strong opinion about at least one early demo from their favorite band?

At the Jack Dorsey-owned Block, employees were given “stern warnings” not to speak of Jay-Z, according to Fortune. Employees reportedly weren’t told why they couldn’t mention the rapper, who is also on Block’s board.

Block, purchased a majority stake in Jay-Z’s music streaming app Tidal in 2021. Tidal laid off more staff last month, but that may not be the end of this year’s cuts, Fortune reports.

Phil Elverum fuzzy guitars and crashing cymbals don’t really conjure “remix material” in my mind, but I love that he dropped his new record Night Palace along with a folder of all the stems, in case you were ever so inclined. Since his days under the moniker The Microphones, Elverum has embodied the DIY spirit, so I guess now you can do it yourself, too.

If you’re someone who loves to play Christmas music a full month before the actual holiday, great news: the music industry is trying to make Halloween music A Thing.

My friend group’s Music League theme for this week was Halloween-ish songs (among the submissions: The Specials, David Bowie, Death from Above 1979). What’s on your playlist?

There was a flurry of headlines earlier this week claiming vinyl sales were down 33 percent this year, which would have been the first decline in 17 years. Don’t fret, though: it turns out sales were actually up 6.2 percent — Luminate, the firm which handles most of the music industry’s metrics, changed its methodology at the beginning of the year.

In Luminate’s mid-year report, the company stated: “While the new modeled methodology more accurately represents the independent retail market, we do not have comparable historical data to provide an accurate year-over-year trend. Therefore, independent retail physical sales are not included in our H1 2024 vs. H1 2023 U.S. physical sales reporting.”

The Discogs blog has a full dive, including an explanation of the metrics change. Counting things: a never-ending challenge.

A new feature lets artists create playlists with the songs they’ve played at recent shows. It sounds like it’ll make it a lot easier to get familiar with all the songs an artist is going to play before you see them on tour.

Green Day’s Dookie is 30 years old — I’ll give my fellow millennials a moment to gather themselves — and to celebrate the band is releasing demastered tracks available on everything from a toothbrush to a Game Boy cartridge. Unfortunately they’re tough to buy (each track is only available via a drawing) but you can at least listen to them all right here.

Some turned out great, but others highlight just how messy this technology is, according to Pitchfork. From Shaad D’Souza’s review:

AI is simply another tool that will sometimes be used badly and sometimes be used well, and on Honey I think it’s used well—to complicate and expand the abilities of an artist well into his career, whose creative impulses can no longer be entirely satiated through the means previously available to him. There is one exception: The rap verse on “Campfire” is also Snaith, and it edges toward racial ambiguity in a way that feels queasy. At best, it’s a misguided experiment; at worst, outright minstrelsy.

Thanks to enthusiasts at minidisc.wiki, you can still add songs to a MiniDisc from a modern computer using its web app. Which means we live in a world where a Pixel 9 Pro can talk to a MiniDisc player from 2002.

For another 8 hours or so, it’s still time for the monthly event where Bandcamp foregoes its revenue split with artists. It’s also now a sponsored event if that matters to you, but the music probably still sounds the same.

So said Daniel Plasche, co-director of a Berlin venue, while talking to The New York Times about the club’s decision to follow other nightclubs by putting stickers on customers’ smartphone camera lenses.

“There is something unifying, ritualistic about the dance floor,” he added, but the atmosphere was ruined when people use their phones to take images that “they will never look at again, anyways.”