CD sales are booming as physical media continues its resurgence
According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), CD sales exploded in the first half of 2026. A new report from the organization says 17.5 million CDs were sold in the first six months of the year, up from just 12 million during the same period in 2025. That's a jump of 45.7 percent, and 58.6 percent in dollars, which reached $171.1 million. What makes this all the more shocking is that CD sales actually shrank 22 percent from 2024 to 2025.
The RIAA isn't the only one to notice the boom in CD sales. In July, research firm Luminate released a report saying that 16.3 million units were sold in the first half of 2026. It sug …
Fantasy Footballers’ Andy Holloway is a dedicated zero-inbox kinda guy
Andy Holloway cohosts the Fantasy Footballers podcast with his friends Jason Moore and Mike Wright. The show is one of the premier fantasy sports podcasts, netting over 2 million monthly listeners and numerous awards, including Best Sports Podcast from iHeartRadio and People's Choice at the Podcast Awards four years in a row.
Holloway's goal has always been about bringing fantasy football to a wider audience, not just hardcore nerds. With the NFL season starting next week and fantasy drafts in full swing, now seemed like a great time to see how Holloway stays focused during what is probably the busiest part of the year for a serious fantasy …
Content creators drop the ball
During Naomi Osaka's match against Anastasia Zakharova at this year's US Open earlier this week, a gaggle of ring light-wielding influencers who were packed in a luxury suite became enough of a distraction that the umpire paused the match and repeatedly asked them to quiet down. Elsewhere in the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, other creators could be seen asking US Open staffers to take full-flash photos of them while Osaka and Zakharova were playing.
Last month, United States Tennis Association (USTA) media operations director Jeanmarie Daly said that the US Open was "almost doubling" the number of content creators it was app …
The weird and wonderful headphones of CanJam 2026
I've been reviewing headphones for a long time, and I've listened to everything from the barely serviceable to multi-thousand-dollar open-back headphones. But recently I've been uninspired by the state of mainstream options. Most are perfectly good - great, even - but they lack a distinct character. Something to remind me why I fell in love with headphones to begin with, landing me in this crazy career. I needed some revitalization. I needed to see something cool. I needed to be around other people with an emotional connection to headphones. I needed to go to CanJam.
CanJam is a small audio show produced by Head-Fi.org, the largest audio-fo …
OpenAI admits to German wiki ‘incident’
OpenAI says it needs to overhaul how and when it reports instances of AI models attacking real-world targets. The acknowledgement comes as the company manages the fallout from reports that a swarm of its out-of-control agents hijacked a German wiki site.
Regarding the "'wiki incident,' where our agents wrote to several internet sites," OpenAI wrote in a post on X on Saturday morning, "it's past time for us to define standards for when and how we share misalignment incidents, not just misalignment properties of our models."
OpenAI said it has typically treated cases of AI agents acting in unintended ways as a "research question," but that r …
Robotaxis enter their villain era
It's Bullitt meets Christine meets Waymo.
A new short film imagines a San Francisco car chase where the other driver isn't human - and the car may be trying to kill you. That a robotaxi can now be cast as the villain with almost no explanation says something about the present moment. Autonomous cars have gone from sci-fi curiosities to fixtures in some American cities, where they've become stand-ins for anxieties about AI job displacement, Big Tech surveillance, and machines making decisions once left to humans.
Road Rage, the planned short film awaiting $40,000 on Kickstarter to fund production, leans into all of it. The film pits Joa, a …
Audacity 4 is a complete revamp of the ‘world’s most popular’ audio editor
Audacity 4 has been in the works for some time, and had its own mini controversy last year when an unfortunate redesigned logo started making the rounds. The final version of the new icon isn't nearly as bad as the early rendition that was circulating last October. But more importantly, all the promised improvements to the self-proclaimed "world's most popular audio editing and recording app" are here, turning Audacity from a free and capable but extremely clunky audio editor into a powerful modern tool.
The biggest change is the move to a non-destructive editing workflow. That means you can trim a clip down, then recover the audio simply …
The White House is making arcade games racist
The PR masterminds at the White House just released a series of vaguely policy-themed "arcade" games, some of which are racist - and modeled on real games whose copyright holders may not be too happy to be associated with the MAGA agenda.
The Tetris Company has already responded to "Build the Wall," which is obviously modeled on the famous puzzle game. In the Trump administration's game, the player has to stack interlocking shapes to stop a "zombie border siege" along the southern border. Aliens - the administration's preferred term for noncitizens, and the subject of previous grotesque attempts at humor - run across the screen, trying to …
GoPro says it’s still committed ‘to your collective stoke’
GoPro CEO Nick Woodman said in a letter to customers that making cameras is still his company's "core DNA," after a proposed $285 million acquisition by Starman was announced earlier this week. He claims the merger puts GoPro in a better position to continue developing its content creation tech, after saying in the deal announcement that it would work with Starman to address "important areas of national security related to cameras, optics and AI infrastructure."
YouTuber Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach, who prior to the acquisition became GoPro's largest individual shareholder, is not mentioned at all.
To our GoPro community, fans and custom …
Roland is getting into generative AI music with Melody Flip
It's not quite the "push button; get song" of Suno, but Roland's new Melody Flip tool marks the company's foray into generative AI music. Available as a plug-in for your digital audio workstation (DAW), Melody Flip offers around 250 "Palettes," which are essentially themed collections of musical ideas sorted by genre. You can start from scratch and ask it to generate any combination of melody, chord progression, bassline, or drums. Or you can feed it a reference track and have it build off the melodic ideas from that.
Unlike Suno or Udio, Melody Flip doesn't spit out fully polished songs with vocals and full arrangements. Instead, it offers …