Tech

Independent electronic label Monstercat returns for its second-ever NFT drop this week, featuring work from comic artist José Delbo and Grammy-nominated producer RAC. The collections of NFTs, called Ikon and Odyssey, will be sold via marketplace Nifty Gateway. Non-fungible tokens, unique digital assets which are sold using blockchain technology, have become the music industry’s most

Variety has won the Webby Award for best entertainment website, the Webbys announced on Tuesday. The category — general websites and mobile sites, entertainment — considers sites that are developed for the distribution of entertainment content or focused on the entertainment industry, including, sports, games, news, gossip, humor, reviews or promoting a specific celebrity or group.

Bad Robot Games, the video games division of J.J. Abrams and Katie McGrath’s Bad Robot, said it closed a Series B funding round of more than $40 million. Bad Robot Games was formed in 2018 as a joint venture with Tencent, the Chinese internet and tech conglomerate, and Warner Bros. Games. To date, the company

Spotify announced Tuesday its intention to invest in and amplify Black voices by launching Frequency, an initiative aimed at celebrating established and emerging Black artists and fostering community and culture in the realms of fashion, tech and business as well as music. As part of the initial wave, Spotify announced — naturally — several new

Instagram has set a three-day program dubbed Creator Week — the social-media platform’s first professional development event series designed to help creators grow their followings and make more money. The first-ever Instagram Creator Week will run June 8-10, with a series of virtual streaming sessions. Those will be accessible by invitation only, with about 5,000

Hugo Barra, who has served as VP of Facebook Reality Labs for the past four years — overseeing the social giant’s Oculus team and its VR and augmented reality development projects — is exiting his post. Barra announced his departure in a Facebook post Monday, saying May 17 is his last day at the company.

Snap’s newest original series is comedy “Everything’s Fine,” a very personal (and very funny) exploration of what it’s like to have bipolar disorder. Series creator and writer Hannah Klein based “Everything’s Fine” on her experiences after she received a bipolar diagnosis a few years ago, and she said music plays a central role in the

One thing we did not expect to see on this Spring Monday morning was a high-quality audio duel between two of the world’s biggest music streaming services. At around 9 a.m. ET, Apple announced that its Apple Music is bringing “industry-leading” sound quality to its subscribers, with the addition of Spatial Audio with support for

The Podcast Academy on Sunday hosted its first Awards for Excellence in Audio — aka The Ambies — the industry group’s bid to establish an Oscars-level awards program for audio programming. The first Ambies featured awards in 23 categories, with Wondery’s “Dying for Sex,” documenting the sexual adventures of a woman diagnosed with Stage IV

Redbox, the DVD-rental kiosk and streaming company, is going back to the public markets. On Monday, Redbox announced that it reached a definitive agreement to combine with Seaport Global Acquisition Corp., a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in a deal giving the combined company an enterprise value of $693 million. Strategic investors backing

Earlier this month, LaKeith Stanfield became a moderator of a conversation on Clubhouse where dozens spewed anti-Semitic rhetoric and ideals. He has since come forward in a tell-all to the Daily Beast to explain his participation in the chat. “I definitely don’t align myself with Louis Farrakhan, I don’t stand by him,” Stanfield said. “Any

For Disney Plus, maybe getting the first 100 million subscribers was the easy part. Shares of Disney were down 2.6% in midday trading Friday, after the media company missed revenue estimates for the first three months of 2021 and reported a net gain of 8.7 million Disney Plus subs — some 6 million fewer than

In the 24 hours since Wednesday’s real-time implosion of the Joe Budden Podcast, during which the host of the popular twice-weekly show fired his longtime cohosts Rory Farrell and Jamil ‘Mal’ Clay (or Rory and Mal, as they’re known colloquially) in the wake of a pay and “accounting” dispute, PTSD has subsided and it got

Ellen Pompeo, star of long-running ABC hit “Grey’s Anatomy,” is set to host her first podcast — a weekly show in which she plans to get real on a range of topics with her guests. For “Tell Me with Ellen Pompeo,” the actor is teaming with Cadence13, the podcast studio that is part of radio

Rhett & Link, the long-running hosts of YouTube talk show “Good Mythical Morning,” are co-producing and starring in “Ronstadt,” their first scripted podcast project. In the nine-episode series, Rhett McLaughlin (above left) is the voice of Ronstadt, who is in charge of taking the “weird” calls that come in through the 911 call center in

Quibi is coming back from the dead next week… sort of. On May 20, Roku will debut the first batch of Roku Originals — a collection of 30 shows originally produced for Quibi, the short-lived mobile entertainment startup led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. Roku paid substantially less than $100 million for the assets

When the music industry’s NFT craze hit its fever pitch earlier this year, it seemed nearly everyone was rushing to mint the crypto collectibles in one form or another. The non-fungible tokens, known colloquially as their acronym “NFT,” have captured the industry’s fascination in 2021 for their promise of fan engagement and a new source

Podcaster Joe Budden has fired his co-hosts and friends, Rory Farrell and Jamil “Mal” Clay, according to social media posts and audio leaked online. The former rapper and “Love & Hip-Hop” star has made the dynamics of the show’s main talkers a focus of recent episodes, as noted by a recent Variety article expounding on

Spotify has landed another exclusive deal with a big-name podcaster: Dax Shepard’s popular “Armchair Expert” show will be available only on the streaming-audio giant starting this summer. Under the multiyear exclusive license agreement, all existing and new episodes of the “Armchair Expert” podcast, co-hosted by actor-filmmaker-comedian Shepard and producer Monica Padman, will be available exclusively

Funny Or Die has a new owner: Henry R. Muñoz III, a prominent business leader, architect, philanthropist and Democratic fundraiser, has acquired the 14-year-old comedy website and production company. Financial terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. Muñoz is now the sole owner and chairman of L.A.-based Funny Or Die, whose co-founders include Will Ferrell,

According to “Crazy Rich Asians” and “In the Heights” filmmaker Jon M. Chu, many of the depictions of Asian women he’s seen portrayed in Hollywood films are “not the Asian women that we know.” “That’s not my mother, not my grandmother, not my sister, not my best friend,” Chu said during a virtual panel presented

The Clone Club is coming back for another round: Tatiana Maslany will return as narrator of Season 2 of “Orphan Black: The Next Chapter,” the scripted podcast set after the events in the TV show from audio entertainment company Realm. In addition, Maslany, who won an acting Emmy for “Orphan Black,” will executive produce and

The latest gold rush in digital video? Short, shareable video clips — like those popularized by Vine half a decade ago, before Twitter shut down the Vine app. YouTube, the world’s biggest video platform, announced the YouTube Shorts Fund, a $100 million pool of money it’s promising to distribute to creators of the most-engaging clips

Rotten Tomatoes is continuing on its quest to grow into something substantially bigger than its Tomatometer movie and TV rating scores. On Tuesday, the website — owned by NBCUniversal’s Fandango — expands its entertainment footprint with the launch of The Rotten Tomatoes Channel, a new over-the-top streaming service that will initially debut on on The

Seth Rogen has finally caved in: He’s getting his own podcast. SiriusXM announced that Rogen, the Canadian comedian, actor, writer, producer, director, entrepreneur and philanthropist, will launch his first podcast with Stitcher, the podcast company the satellite radio company bought last year. Rogen’s podcast is expected to debut later in 2021. Stitcher described the weekly

Serialized fiction app Radish is being acquired by Kakao Entertainment, the entertainment arm of Korean internet giant Kakao, in a transaction valued at $440 million. Word of the deal comes as South Korea’s Naver on Monday announced the completion of its $600 million-plus takeover of Wattpad, a user-fiction story app. Radish’s board of directors and

After a slew of controversies surrounding the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s lack of diversity, NBC announced on Monday that it will not air the Golden Globes in 2022. “We continue to believe that the HFPA is committed to meaningful reform,” NBC said in a statement. “However, change of this magnitude takes time and work, and

Facebook is hoping to cut the spread of misinfromation on its platform by prompting users to read a news story before they share it on the massive social platform. Starting Monday, Facebook said, it is testing “a way to promote more informed sharing of news articles. If you go to share a news article link

After over a year of exclusivity on iOS, Clubhouse is expanding to Android users. During Sunday’s town hall, the audio-only social platform announced the rollout for their Android app, which is available to download for all Android users in the U.S. today. Other English-speaking markets, and soon the rest of the world, will also be

Telefilm Canada has launched Canada Now, a new portal devoted to highlighting Canadian content in the U.S. The site will add new titles each month to its portfolio, which ranges from recent films such as “My Salinger Year” and “Antigone” to Oscar nominees like “Barbarian Invasions” and “Monsieur Lazhar,” as well as some series. The