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An anonymous reader shares a column: I'm going to take the diplomatic hat off here and say with brutal honesty: basically everybody in the music business hates Spotify except for the people who work there. It's a platform that sucks artists for everything they have, it actively prevents community building, and, despite all of that, the platform still struggles to maintain a healthy profit margin. The streaming business model is fundamentally broken. And eventually, its demise will become more and more obvious to recognize. I'll break down exactly why the DSP era is coming to a grinding halt, why the major labels are quietly terrified, and why the artists who don't pivot now are going to go down with the ship. [...] Jimmy Iovine put it bluntly: "The streaming services have a bad situation, there's no margins, they're not making any money." This model only works for Apple, Amazon, and Google, because they don't need their music platforms to be wildly profitable. Amazon uses music as a loss-leader to keep you paying for Prime. Apple uses it to sell $1,000 iPhones. As for Spotify, or any standalone music streaming company, they're kind of screwed. And guess what -- when the platform's margins are structurally squeezed, guess who gets squeezed first? The artists. [...] What if Jimmy is right? If the DSPs are "minutes away from obsolete," what replaces them? Well, I'm not sure the DSPs are going to disappear overnight, but if you're an artist or a manager trying to sustain yourself in this evolving music economy, the answer is direct ownership. The artists who will survive the next five years are the ones who are quietly shifting their focus away from the "ATM Machine." They are building their own cultural hangars. They are capturing phone numbers on Laylo. They are driving fans to private Discord servers. They are focusing on ARPF (Average Revenue Per Fan) through high-margin merch, vinyl, and hard tickets, rather than begging for fractions of a penny from a playlist placement. We are witnessing the death of the "Mass Audience" and the birth of the "Micro-Community."

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Musafar Hotak, 25, was convicted after a trial at Southampton Crown Court of the rape and sexual assault of the woman in the early hours of July 12, 2022.

Mohammed Suffi, 23, was filmed in harrowing footage driving his SUV into clubbers during the hit-and-run outside The Tunnel Club in Birmingham .

The daughter of the former Duke and Duchess of York, 35, looked to pass incognito in dark glasses, a long dark green coat and heels as she carried a paper shopping bag.

Christopher Trybus, of Swindon, Wiltshire, is accused of the manslaughter of Tarryn Baird, who took her own life aged 34 in November 2017.

A recent Office of Inspector General report detailed 'unsatisfactory kennel facility conditions', accusing the military program of neglect and failing to walk and medically care for its dogs.

The $200 billion video game industry is caught between studios eager to cut ballooning development costs through AI and a player base that has grown openly hostile to the technology after a string of visible blunders. As Bloomberg News reports, Arc Raiders, a surprise hit from Stockholm-based Embark Studios that sold 12 million copies in three months, was briefly vilified online for its robotic-sounding auto-generated voices -- even as CEO Patrick Soderlund insists AI was only used for non-essential elements. EA's Battlefield 6 and Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 both drew gamer anger this winter over thematically mismatched or poorly generated graphics, and Valve's Steam has added labels to flag games made using AI. Some 47% of developers polled by research house Omdia said they expect generative AI to reduce game quality, and PC gamers -- now facing inflated hardware prices from AI-driven demand for graphics chips -- have turned reflexively antagonistic.

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The Foreign Office was criticised when the Sussexes revealed in their own press release that they had been hosted by the British Ambassador in Amman, Phillip Hall.

ChatGPT maker announces $110B in new investment amid flurry of self-serving deals

The headlines say OpenAI on Friday announced $110 billion in new investment from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, though terms and conditions apply.…

Who is knocking at the Dohdoor?

Digital intruders with possible links to North Korea have been infecting US education and healthcare sectors with a never-before-seen backdoor since at least December, according to security researchers.…

Halliwell, 53, was a semi-regular fixture on race weekends alongside her husband, often appearing in the paddock at prominent races such as the British Grand Prix, before he was sacked.

Latest ORCA test results out

exclusive  Current-day LLMs are prediction engines and, as such, they can only find the most likely solution to problems, which is not necessarily the correct one. Though popular models have mostly become better at math, even top performer Gemini 3 Flash would receive a C if assessed with a letter grade.…

A baffling triangular formation deep in the Nevada desert is igniting theories that it could be the handiwork of a forgotten ancient civilization.

The official cause of death has been released for Nathan Smith, the 27-year-old son of rapper Lil Jon.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Worldwide smartphone shipments are forecast to decline 12.9% year-on-year (YoY) in 2026 to 1.1 billion units, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. This decline will bring the smartphone market to its lowest annual shipment volume in more than a decade. The current forecast represents a sharp decline from our November forecast amid the intensifying memory shortage crisis.

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By-election winner Hannah Spencer co-owns homes worth over £1m, has offered tips to others on making the most of property deals and enjoyed jetting off on foreign holidays

The date for 2026 has been confirmed

Lab aims to link power, cooling, and workload management to ease strain on the US grid

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is hoping to turn its technical expertise to the problem of growing electricity demand from AI datacenters.…

Nasa announced on Friday radical changes to its delayed Artemis III mission to land humans back on the moon, as the US space agency grapples with technical glitches and criticism that it is trying to do too much too soon. From a report: The abrupt shift in strategy was laid out by the space agency's recently confirmed administrator, Jared Isaacman. Announcing the changes on Friday, he said that Nasa would introduce at least one new moon flight before attempting to put humans back on the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century, in 2028. The new, more incremental approach would give the Nasa team a chance to test flight and refine its technology. As part of the changes, the Artemis II mission to fly humans around the moon this year, without landing, would also be pushed back from its latest scheduled launch on 6 March to 1 April at the earliest. "Everybody agrees this is the only way forward," Isaacman told reporters at a news conference. "I know this is how Nasa changed the world, and this is how Nasa is going to do it again."

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Bill Clinton issued a blistering statement attacking Republicans for forcing Hillary to testify about his relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.