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Not your average shades! Maluma is seeing things differently thanks to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
The “Según Quién” singer, who stars in the campaign for the latest iteration of Meta‘s smart glasses, likes wearing them because they allow him to share his “unique point of view” with fans.
“They’re super simple to use and feel like the average pair of sunglasses, except now I am more present,” the 29-year-old singer explained in an email interview with Billboard before heading back home to Colombia for the holidays.
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“My favorite thing about the glasses is that I can share my unique point of view while living my life, enjoying moments with family and friends and even while on stage.”
Ray-Ban and Meta tapped Maluma, Erykah Badu, Coi Leray and Coco Gauff to launch the newest installment of smart sunglasses. The Meta Wayfarer and Meta Headliner smart glasses are available in seven different colors, including shiny rebel black with amber lenses, shiny black with clear lenses, matte black with clear/green lenses, shiny caramel with brown lenses, matte jeans with dusty blue lenses, matte black with graphite lenses and shiny black with green lenses.
“I wear glasses all the time, so I like to match the glasses with my outfit but also the vibes of the day,” he explained of his favorite style of glasses. “Sometimes I wear a classic Wayfarer and other moments I go bold and bright. I even wore the Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer during my Latin Grammys performance [last November].”
Offering a hands-free way to capture, share, and livestream, the second-generation Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses lets you take 12MP photos, 1040p videos, answer phone calls and engage with AI. You can snap photos, record video and livestream on Facebook and Instagram with the glasses, which offer up to four hours of battery life (they come in a chargeable case) and are available on Ray-Ban.com starting from $299.
Shop the smart glasses below.
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Meta Quest, the leading VR headset device on the market, has long been ahead of the curve when it comes to curating moments for music and entertainment fans in the sprawling Metaverse. The great minds at Meta Quest are rolling out a new Music Valley concert series, featuring the likes of Victoria Monét, Jorja Smith, and more.
Music Valley is an innovative VR concert series experience that lives in the Meta Horizon Worlds realm and features some of entertainment’s biggest names. The desert venue features a large main stage screen and a dance floor that will allow Meta Quest fans to let loose and even grab some objects while jamming in the Metaverse.
Things jumped off last month in the valley via iHeartRadio LIVE with The Kid LAROI and tonight, (December 4), the aforementioned Victoria Monét will grace the virtual stages at 8 PM ET. In January, Jorja Smith will lend her formidable talents to the Music Valley experience.
Along with those names, K-Pop stars BLACKPINK will be highlighted in BLACKPINK: VR Encore, which was filmed during the Born Pink World Tour finale show at the Gocheok Sky Dome in South Korea with The Diamond Bros serving as producers.
Red Rocks Live will also deliver a VR experience with acts like Louis The Child rocking the major venue of Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado with other acts set to grace the stage in this developing partnership with Dorsey Pictures.
For all those who can’t make the shows when they air, Meta Quest is kindly hosting the concerts for one month after their air date. That means it’s time to sign up for the Music Valley experience and take in all the sights and sounds that extend far beyond concerts with mini-games, DJ sets and more to do inside the valley.
Learn more about Music Valley, including air dates and times, by clicking here.
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Photo: Meta Quest
Meta has launched AudioCraft, a new suite of AI models that generate music and audio based on text prompts, the company announced on Wednesday (Aug. 2). The technology consists of three models: MusicGen (music), AudioGen (sound effects) and EnCodec (higher quality music). It acts as new competition for Google’s MusicLM, a text-to-music generator that launched […]
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Source: SOPA Images / Getty / Threads
Is it a wrap for Twitter? Instagram’s Threads swiftly surpassed the 100 million users milestone.
Spotted on The Verge via Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads profile, the platform explicitly created to rival Twitter looks like a massive success for Meta.
The Threads app surpassed 100 million users faster than OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, which accomplished the feat in two months. It only took Instragram’s Threads mere days to reach that goal in a matter of days following its early Wednesday launch last week.
Per The Verge:
Threads proved to be an early hit almost immediately. In the first two hours, it hit 2 million users and steadily climbed from there to 5 million, 10 million, 30 million, and then 70 million. The launch has been “way beyond our expectations,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday.
On Monday, Zuckerberg said in a Threads post confirming the milestone that the growth was “mostly organic:”
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, followed Zuckerberg, noting that it only took five days to reach the staggering number of users.
Now, whether that was achieved “organically” is another story. Before its launch, Threads was heavily pushed to the over 1 billion people using Instagram, allowing them to transfer their IG accounts quickly to the new platform. So we are sure that also significantly increased the number of people signing up to use Threads.
Users are also threading it up. According to The Verge, there have “been more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes shared on the app.”
Threads Accomplishing A Goal Adam Mosseri Claims It Doesn’t Want To Do
Despite these impressive numbers, Mosseri stated in a Threads post that his platform is not trying to replace Twitter and will not actively push politics or hard news. But you can’t stop users from talking about what they want to, and hard news is finding its way onto Threads.
Also, if its mission is not to replace Twitter, it seems to be failing at that mission. With some help from Elon Musk, Twitter’s traffic is reportedly “tanking,” according to CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince.
Twitter has been telling whatever advertisers it has left, probably Cheech and Chong, whose gummy ads are flooding Twitter users’ timelines, that it has “535 million monetizable monthly active users,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
Prince’s claims say otherwise.
Right now, it’s looking like Twitter is dying a slow death. Twitter better hope that the lawsuit bears fruit. But we are here for anything hurting Elon Musk’s pockets.
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Photo: SOPA Images / Getty / Threads
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Meta is poised to unveil a new app that appears to mimic Twitter — a direct challenge to the social media platform owned by Elon Musk.
A listing for the app, called Threads, appeared on Apple’s App Store, indicating it would debut as early as Thursday. It is billed as a “text-based conversation app” that is linked to Instagram, with the listing teasing a Twitter-like microblogging experience.
“Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow,” it said.
Instagram users will be able to keep their user names and follow the same accounts on the new app, according to screenshots displayed on the App Store listing. Meta declined to comment on the app.
Musk replied “yeah” to a tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey saying, “All your Threads are belong to us,” along with a screenshot from the App Store’s privacy section showing what personal information might be collected by the new Meta app.
Threads could be the latest headache for Musk, who acquired Twitter last year for $44 billion and has been making changes that have unnerved advertisers and turned off users, including new daily limits on the number of tweets people can view.
Meta has good timing because Twitter users are growing frustrated with Musk’s changes and looking for a viable alternative, said Matt Navarra, a social media consultant.
Threads presents the “opportunity to jump to a platform that can give them many of the things that they want Twitter to continue to be that it no longer is,” he said.
Allowing Instagram users to port their profile to Threads could give the new app more traction with potential users by providing a ready-made set of accounts for them to follow, said Navarra, former director of social media at tech news site The Next Web and digital communications adviser for the British government.
Twitter has rolled out a series of unpopular changes in recent days, including a requirement for users to be verified to use the online dashboard TweetDeck. The policy announced Monday takes effect in 30 days and appears to be aimed at raising extra revenue because users need to pay have their accounts verified under Musk’s changes.
TweetDeck is popular with companies and news organizations, allowing users to manage multiple Twitter accounts.
It comes after outcry over Musk’s announcement this weekend that Twitter has limited the number of tweets users can view each day — restrictions that the billionaire Tesla CEO described as an attempt to stop unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data.
Still, some users might be put off by Meta’s data privacy track record, Navarra said. And would-be Twitter challengers like Mastodon have found it a challenge to sign up users.
“It’s hard to tell whether the upset and discontent is strong enough to make a mass exodus or whether it will be somewhat of a slow erosion,” Navarra said.
Musk’s rivalry with Meta Platforms also could end up spilling over into real life. In an online exchange between Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the two tech billionaires seemingly agreed to a cage match face-off, though it’s unclear if they will actually make it to the ring.
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Source: META / Meta Quest 3
Meta is still in the VR business and has a new Meta Quest 3 headset on the way.
Quiet as kept, the Meta Quest 2 was the best VR headset on the market. Meta is promising the Meta Quest 3 will build off that promising better performance, new mixed-reality features, and a much more comfortable and sleeker design.
The Meta Quest 3 will start at $500 for the 128GB model. A 256GB model is in the works, and the price will be announced at a later date.
The new headset boasts a smaller design, and that doesn’t mean a sacrifice on the power department. The Meta Quest 3 is 40% slimmer than the previous model and sports three large camera sensors on the front of it, making the Meta Quest 3 stand out from any other.
The controllers, Touch Plus, also receive an upgrade and have a much more compact design while boasting advanced tracking and haptics that owners of Meta’s $1000 Meta Quest Pro enjoyed.
Speaking of the Meta Quest Pro, the Meta Quest 3 will also support Meta Reality, a feature previously exclusive to the Quest Pro. Meta Reality allows users to merge the real world with the virtual one, allowing you to use your dining room table as a battlefield or project a large map on the floor.
If you upgrade from an older Quest model, you can bring all your games and other software because it will all be fully compatible with the Meta Quest 3.
The Meta Quest 2 Is Getting A Price Cut
With the addition of the Meta Quest 3 to Meta’s growing family of VR headsets, the Meta Quest 2 is receiving a substantial price cut and will now only cost $300 for the 128GB model and $350 for the 256GB model.
Both models will also receive a power boost through an update that sees the Quest 2 and Quest Pro internals get a boost. Meta says users of both headsets can expect 26% better processing performance and 19% better graphics performance, plus Dynamic Resolution Scaling allowing for a more smooth and more consistent VR experience.
So basically, if you have been on the fence about VR, this seems like the perfect opportunity to dive in.
The Quest 3 arrives sometime in the fall, pre-orders have not begun, but you can sign up for notifications about the VR headset.
You can head here if you want to know what new games are coming to the Quest 3.
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Photo: META / Meta Quest 3
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Instagram’s director of music partnerships, Perry Bashkoff, was one of the about 6,000 Meta employees whose roles were eliminated by Meta leadership on Wednesday (May 24). “Yes, I was one of them,” Bashkoff confirmed on Thursday in a LinkedIn post. As Bashkoff noted, he was “part of the team that brought music to the Meta […]
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Source: SOPA Images / Getty / Instagram
With Twitter still on a path to self-destruction thanks to Elon Musk, Instagram is looking to offer people a substitute.
The Verge reports Instagram is working on its own text-based social media component that aims to be a direct competitor to Twitter, according to Social and Influencer Marketing teacher Lia Haberman. Via her ICYMI Substack newsletter, she shared a screenshot of a marketing slide detailing the new app.
According to the slide, the new app has no name and is just “Instagram’s new text-based app for conversations.” Haberman reports it is codenamed P92 and Barcelona.
Users can sign in using their current Instagram username and password, and their bio, IG handle, followers, and verification status will transfer over.
Per The Verge:
In the app, you’ll see a feed, and you can make text posts up to 500 characters long with attached links, photos, and videos.
The app looks pretty much like if you mixed Instagram and Twitter together, based on two screenshots included in the leaked marketing slide. And Meta will apparently have some good moderation controls from the start, “equipping you with settings to control who can reply to you and mention your account,” the slide says. Any accounts you’ve blocked on Instagram will apparently carry over.
Per the slide, the new Instagram App will feature some form of decentralization, noting, “Soon, our app will be compatible with certain other apps like Mastodon.”
Instagram Suffered A Serious Service Outage
No one asked for this new app, but okay. But it would also be nice if Meta made sure Instagram works appropriately. On Sunday, the popular photo-sharing app turned TikTok clone was down “for a couple of hours,” according to The Verge.
Timelines did not refresh, and users were receiving error messages when refreshing them. If you hit Instagram via the website, it only loads a blank page.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Instagram. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we’re sorry for any disruption this has caused,” Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold told The Verge in an email following the service outage.
Like any time Instagram is down, social media (Twitter) has plenty of jokes because nothing is serious on that app.
You can see the jokes in the gallery below.
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Photo: SOPA Images / Getty
2. Howling
The European Union slapped Meta with a record $1.3 billion privacy fine Monday and ordered it to stop transferring users personal information across the Atlantic by October, the latest salvo in a decadelong case sparked by U.S. cybersnooping fears.
The penalty of 1.2 billion euros is the biggest since the EU’s strict data privacy regime took effect five years ago, surpassing Amazon’s 746 million euro fine in 2021 for data protection violations.
Meta, which had previously warned that services for its users in Europe could be cut off, vowed to appeal and ask courts to immediately put the decision on hold.
The company said “there is no immediate disruption to Facebook in Europe.” The decision applies to user data like names, email and IP addresses, messages, viewing history, geolocation data and other information that Meta — and other tech giants like Google — use for targeted online ads.
“This decision is flawed, unjustified and sets a dangerous precedent for the countless other companies transferring data between the EU and U.S.,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, and chief legal officer Jennifer Newstead said in a statement.
It’s yet another twist in a legal battle that began in 2013 when Austrian lawyer and privacy activist Max Schrems filed a complaint about Facebook’s handling of his data following former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations of electronic surveillance by U.S. security agencies. That included the disclosure that Facebook gave the agencies access to the personal data of Europeans.
The saga has highlighted the clash between Washington and Brussels over the differences between Europe’s strict view on data privacy and the comparatively lax regime in the U.S., which lacks a federal privacy law. The EU has been a global leader in reining in the power of Big Tech with a series of regulations forcing them police their platforms more strictly and protect users’ personal information.
An agreement covering EU-U.S. data transfers known as the Privacy Shield was struck down in 2020 by the EU’s top court, which said it didn’t do enough to protect residents from the U.S. government’s electronic prying. Monday’s decision confirmed that another tool to govern data transfers — stock legal contracts — was also invalid.
Brussels and Washington signed a deal last year on a reworked Privacy Shield that Meta could use, but the pact is awaiting a decision from European officials on whether it adequately protects data privacy.
EU institutions have been reviewing the agreement, and the bloc’s lawmakers this month called for improvements, saying the safeguards aren’t strong enough.
The Ireland’s Data Protection Commission handed down the fine as Meta’s lead privacy regulator in the 27-nation bloc because the Silicon Valley tech giant’s European headquarters is based in Dublin.
The Irish watchdog said it gave Meta five months to stop sending European user data to the U.S. and six months to bring its data operations into compliance “by ceasing the unlawful processing, including storage, in the U.S.” of European users’ personal data transferred in violation of the bloc’s privacy rules.
If the new transatlantic privacy agreement takes effect before these deadlines, “our services can continue as they do today without any disruption or impact on users,” Meta said.
Schrems predicted that Meta has “no real chance” of getting the decision materially overturned. And a new privacy pact might not mean the end of Meta’s troubles, because there’s a good chance it could be tossed out by the EU’s top court, he said.
“Meta plans to rely on the new deal for transfers going forward, but this is likely not a permanent fix,” Schrems said in a statement. “Unless U.S. surveillance laws gets fixed, Meta will likely have to keep EU data in the EU.”
Meta warned in its latest earnings report that without a legal basis for data transfers, it will be forced to stop offering its products and services in Europe, “which would materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.”
The social media company might have to carry out a costly and complex revamp of its operations if it’s forced to stop shipping user data across the Atlantic. Meta has a fleet of 21 data centers, according to its website, but 17 of them are in the United States. Three others are in the European nations of Denmark, Ireland and Sweden. Another is in Singapore.
Other social media giants are facing pressure over their data practices. TikTok has tried to soothe Western fears about the Chinese-owned short video sharing app’s potential cybersecurity risks with a $1.5 billion project to store U.S. user data on Oracle servers.
LONDON — Facebook parent Meta and Italy’s largest collecting society are locked in a dispute over the use of songs on the platform from thousands of songwriters and composers, with music rights groups accusing the tech company of using strong-arm tactics to try to get its way.
Meta has started to remove all licensed works from the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE). The company has “been unable to renew” its partnership agreement with SIAE and will therefore “no longer make available SIAE licensed works in Meta’s music library,” a spokesperson for Meta confirms to Billboard. The number of SIAE licensed music works that are affected by Meta’s actions is around 5.7 million works, according to SIAE.
The withdrawal means that any content-containing songs managed by SIAE, except those obtained through sub-licensing, will be blocked on Facebook, including Facebook Reels and Facebook Stories. On Instagram, content using SIAE members’ repertoire will be muted, unless users choose to replace the banned audio with another piece of music, Meta says.
The move affects repertoire from all European countries and multiple markets outside the European Union, but does not include the United States, an SIAE spokesperson tells Billboard.
Based in Rome, SIAE is the world’s sixth-largest copyright collective management organization, according to the International Confederation of Authors and Composers Societies’ (CISAC), representing the rights of around 5.7 million Italian music works and around 95,000 members. The organization has agreements in place with 178 authors’ societies worldwide and administers public performance and other rights of 62 million Italian and international works, spanning music, cinema, literature and other areas.
Notable music artists it represents include composer Ennio Morricone, singer Zucchero and hard rockers Mäneskin. “It is important to notice,” a rep for SIAE said, “that in the midst of the removal process many other works from the international catalog and from international authors, thus not related in any way with SIAE, have been erroneously removed.”
Meta’s music-licensing agreement with the Italian society expired at the end of December. During negotiations for a new deal, Meta offered a lump-sum value without providing the necessary information for SIAE to evaluate whether it was fair compensation for rights holders, the SIAE spokesperson says.
The Italian organization also claims the tech company refused to share data about how its members’ repertoire was being used and monetized, citing internal policies. “When it comes to complex platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and their many services (posts, stories, reels), if we’re not given any clue about the amount of advertising, video and music that they host, it means we’re negotiating blindly,” Matteo Fedeli, the CEO of SIAE, tells Billboard.
Fedeli says Meta threatened to remove all music works managed by SIAE if the offer was not accepted. “Meta gave a take-it-or-leave-it final offer when our positions were still pretty far from each other,” he says. “That’s imposing, not negotiating.”
The refusal to share relevant information, says SIAE, places Meta in contravention of the European Copyright Directive approved by the European Union in 2019, which requires platforms that rely on user-generated content — such as YouTube, TikTok or Facebook — to obtain “fair remuneration” license deals with rights holders and provide them with transparent reporting on revenues generated from the use of their work.
Meta responds that it has successfully renewed music licenses with many of its largest partners throughout Europe — including the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France and Sweden — based on the same fee model and terms it offered SIAE.
“Protecting the copyrights of songwriters and artists is a top priority,” a spokesperson for Meta says in a statement. “We continue to have music deals in more than 150 countries and remain committed to reaching an agreement with SIAE that works for everyone.”
Meta’s fallout with SIAE comes after the company announced on March 14 it would trim 10,000 jobs and would not be filling 5,000 open positions as part of cost-saving measures. In November, the company announced 11,000 job cuts, representing about 13% of its overall workforce.
On Friday, music rights and publishing trade bodies slammed Meta for its decision to pull SIAE repertoire from its platforms.
“Meta has decided to use its position as a corporate mega power to hold artists at gunpoint and undervalue their hard work and creativity,” the Brussels-based Independent Music Publishers International Forum (IMPF) says in a statement. “Fair and honest negotiation is the only way forward. Meta needs to retract.”
John Phelan, director general of ICMP, an international music publishing trade association, criticizes Meta for “using unsurprising strong-arm tactics of demanding a ‘take it or leave it’ fee and when not happy, removing music to try and devalue the deal.”
The tech company, Phelan says in a statement, “must obey the law and take a full and fair license for the music it wants to use and profit from. If it does not, it is in breach of Italian and EU law.”
Fedeli says the music industry “understands that there is a problem with [the] value gap and that the excessive power of [tech] platforms allow them to pursue such unilateral actions.” He is, nevertheless, keen to resume negotiations.
“We want to reach an agreement in good faith that is satisfying for both parties,” he says. “We know that we’re not aiming for the moon. We’re asking for a perfectly reasonable figure.”
Additional Reporting By Federico Durante Of Billboard Italy