When was the last time your friends made you a playlist?Cath Virginia / The VergePhoto from Getty Images Writing about the decline of Pitchfork made me sad about the music industry — and also about the state of music discovery. Besides the fact that TikTok doesn’t prioritize music as anything other than background noise, it means that artists have to win the viral lottery in order to make a hit. And that’s entirely out of their control. But about two weeks ago, a friend of mine introduced me to Music League, a game where everyone in the league submits a song to a playlist, and a group of us st ..read more

Image: Bluesky Bluesky is apparently ready for a bigger challenge. It says it’s allowing heads of state to sign up now, a little over two months after it opened for general signups. In May last year, the site asked its users not to give invitation codes to “recent/prominent heads of state,” stating that it was its policy not to accommodate them. When Bluesky instituted its heads-of-state policy, the site was still in its showing-everyone’s-ass phase, and its moderation approach wasn’t in place, yet. So instead of the varying degrees of controlled chaos that social networks are, Bluesky was fil ..read more

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is going off on piracy again. During CinemaCon in Las Vegas, MPA CEO Charles Rivkin announced that the organization plans on working with Congress to pass rules blocking websites with pirated content. The MPA is a trade association representing Hollywood studios, including Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Disney (it’s also behind the ratings board that gives you an R if you say curse words too often). It has long lobbied for anti-piracy laws, but it seems the battle is heating up again. In his speech on Tuesday, Ri ..read more

Miku Expo 2024 in Portland, Oregon.Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge If you made it through that headline and you’re confused, don’t worry — I was, too, at first. Hatsune Miku is an internet fandom thing. She’s not a real person, and she didn’t get her start in some obscure anime — she’s a Vocaloid, which is a synthetic voice that can be fed melodies and song lyrics to output as vocal performances, and she puts on concerts. Here’s a succinct summary from my colleague Jess Weatherbed: Okay, a quick crash course is that Miku is the mascot and most recognizable character for Vocaloid voice synth ..read more

Jessika Fernandez uses Peloton about two hours a day — maybe even four if she’s training for a marathon. In her house, you’ll find not one but two Peloton machines. There’s the bike that the company is known for, and in her garage, there’s the company’s smaller treadmill. A rack of running medals hangs on the wall right near it. On our video call, she shows up in a Peloton shirt, a little shy, but her enthusiasm practically buzzes through the screen. Many owners of Peloton bikes wind up using them as very expensive drying racks; Fernandez is not one of those people. Her love for the beleaguer ..read more

Donghua Jinlong’s factory.Image: Donghua Jinlong Chemical Co. TikTok isn’t just useful for videos on robotic tape storage, Radiohead songs on step motors, and regretful congressmen. It’s also a place where businesses can go viral by marketing their industrial products. Because of that, I now know that a company called Donghua Jinlong Chemical makes food-grade glycine which, as the company reminds us in its TikTok marketing video, is “suitable as a flavor enhancer, sweetener, and nutritional supplement.” Not only that, but it’s “also used in pickles, sweet sauces, soy sauce, vinegar, and juices ..read more

Yikes!Photo by Paul Ellis / AFP via Getty Images How a bad Photoshop job turned into an existential crisis for the British monarchy ..read more

Photo by Paul Ellis / AFP via Getty Images Kate Middleton’s botched photo editing job seen around the world is more than just catnip for tabloids and TikTok conspiracy theorists. It’s also the most instructive illustration of the AI-flecked new reality we live in, a maelstrom formed when distrust and established processes converge and create chaos. It’s hard to know what Middleton, aka the Princess of Wales and future Queen of England, was thinking when she allegedly edited her own photo so sloppily that it’s become front-page news in a bunch of countries. Shortly after the image was shared pu ..read more

Photo illustration: The Verge Today, I’m talking to Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker, a regular contributor to The Verge, and author of the new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. Kyle has been writing for years now about how the culture of big social media platforms bleeds into real life, first affecting how things look, and now shaping how and what culture is created and the mechanisms by which that culture spreads all around the world. Kyle wrote a fantastic feature for The Verge back in 2016 called “Welcome to AirSpace,” which was an early exploration of this ..read more

Image: The Verge The self-styled ‘front page of the internet’ has unplugged third-party apps, spurned defiant mods, and struck AI partnerships in a bid to go public ..read more