This month: more changes to Plex for music, hi-fi M&A, Synology’s restrictions on non-proprietary storage, and mainstream media validation for ripping lossless.

This month’s roundup includes news on Plex, articles on musical history and MusicBrainz’s continual progress.

This month we’re concentrating on law and a rather negative look at some music hardware and software - broken, cancelled and commodified!

In this month’s round-up: old music vs new music; a bold stand on streaming royalties; music setups and data sovereignty.

It’s a New Year, and digital audio and music seems to be carrying on in the same vein as the past year. There are concerns about AI and old catalogue music dominating newer music. More commonly, opinion pieces, if not usage figures, reflect a growing reaction to streaming services’ misaligned incentives in promoting attention rather than deep listening.

But there remain positive stories for the music-attentive intentional-listener.

This month we’ve seen articles about streaming services and the various ways they engage and embed themselves into our everyday lives, some end-of-year musical analysis stuff and a great resource for free music.