Enlarge / CD Baby no longer sells or distributes CDs but will help an artist figure out how much to charge for their discs . (credit: CD Baby)

CD Baby, an online indie music pioneer and the go-to place for indie music artists looking to get their music into storefronts, has told its customers that it will no longer distribute physical goods, like CDs, after June 22, 2023.

As seen on Twitter , on music blogs , and in its Help section , the Portland, Oregon-based distributor of independent music will continue to help artists get their music onto the digital stores of Spotify, Amazon, and Apple. But as of June 22, CD Baby will no longer warehouse, ship, or distribute CDs, vinyl, cassette tapes, or DVDs to Amazon or music wholesaler Alliance. Once artists with inventory in CD Baby's warehouse receive notice, they'll have 60 days to decide whether to get their inventory shipped back to them or have it recycled.

Like other services that date back to the late-1990s dot-com boom, CD Baby has gradually shifted away from its namesake offering. Launched from Woodstock, New York, in 1998 by Derek Sivers, it was one of the first web-based CD stores that focused on selling independent artists' work. By 2009, according to the company, physical sales through its store accounted for only 27 percent of the revenue it paid out to artists.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel via Getty )

Spotify has removed tens of thousands of songs from artificial intelligence music start-up Boomy, ramping up policing of its platform amid complaints of fraud and clutter across streaming services.

In recent months the music industry has been confronting the rise of AI-generated songs and, more broadly, the growing number of tracks inundating streaming platforms daily.

Spotify, the largest audio streaming business, recently took down about 7 percent of the tracks that had been uploaded by Boomy, the equivalent of “tens of thousands” of songs, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Enlarge / Graduate student W. Walker Smith converted the visible light given off by the elements into audio, creating unique, complex sounds for each one. His personal favorites are helium and zinc. (credit: W. Walker Smith and Alain Barker)

We're all familiar with the elements of the periodic table, but have you ever wondered what hydrogen or zinc, for example, might sound like? W. Walker Smith, now a graduate student at Indiana University, combined his twin passions of chemistry and music to create what he calls a new audio-visual instrument to communicate the concepts of chemical spectroscopy.

Smith presented his data sonification project—which essentially transforms the visible spectra of the elements of the periodic table into sound—at a meeting of the American Chemical Society being held this week in Indianapolis, Indiana. Smith even featured audio clips of some of the elements, along with "compositions" featuring larger molecules, during a performance of his "The Sound of Molecules" show.

As an undergraduate, "I [earned] a dual degree in music composition and chemistry, so I was always looking for a way to turn my chemistry research into music," Smith said during a media briefing . "Eventually, I stumbled across the visible spectra of the elements and I was overwhelmed by how beautiful and different they all look. I thought it would be really cool to turn those visible spectra, those beautiful images, into sound."

Mood Indigo" (1930) is a jazz composition and song, with music by Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard with lyrics by Irving Mills. Ellington's biographer, Terry Teachout, described it as "an imperishable classic, one of a handful of songs that come to mind whenever Ellington's name is mentioned anywhere in the world".

Just created a Jazz music 🎶 Community here in mov.im. Enjoy! #jazz #music

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Two interesting projects we've not covered here before are UltraStar Deluxe and the newer UltraStar Play, both open source games aimed at karaoke fans. You've likely somewhere heard of SingStar, an exclusive PlayStation series. Sadly, it was shut and so it's mostly lost. Thankfully though, as usual, open source to the rescue!

UltraStar Deluxe has been going for a while now, with an aim to create a similar experience. It's been going strong but there hasn't been a release of it since 2020 and going by the GitHub page, not much development activity for the last year either.

Another more recent project appearing is UltraStar Play , which we're told is "the youngest of UltraStar games, currently in development and available for desktop (including Linux) and mobile (Android already available, iOS planned)" and that in response to SingStar shutting "UltraStar Play fills this gap by allowing everyone to create their own sing-along version of songs. And it removes the need to buy USB-microphones via the Companion App such that you can use a regular smartphone as mic (see the Companion App).".

It's not pretty but it does the job.

Note: while UltraStar Play is open source, the project itself relies on the proprietary Unity game engine.

It's not finished but it's perfectly usable and should be fun enough to get a party going. With the UltraStar Play Companion , you only need a phone to use as your microphone so it's quite cleverly thought-out.