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“What’s the worst part about being dead? You can’t listen to music”: Liquid Death and Spotify have come up with a solution, The Eternal Playlist Urn

Liquid Death, the achingly-cool purveyors of fizzy drinks, and Spotify have teamed up to create the Eternal Playlist Urn, so you can groove to your favourite tunes – from beyond the grave.

No, it’s not April 1 (yet). This is absolutely for real. It’s an urn, you know, for the ashes of your dead loved ones. But with a Bluetooth speaker attached.

The urn is 11 inches tall, 7 inches wide, and weighs 2.4 pounds. The one catch is that you will be dependent on your surviving chums to charge up the speaker and operate the playlist. At that point, the burnt remains of your body will be in the actual urn. Still, you can’t have everything…

“What’s the worst part about being dead?” asks the launch video. “You can’t listen to music. Now you can enjoy all your favourite jams – for eternity.”

“Upload remains and you’ll upgrade any post life experience,” they say, tongue firmly in their collective cheeks. “Research shows that if you keep the dead happy, then they’re less likely to haunt you. Music has been shown to reduce hauntings by up to 47%.”

Spotify has helpfully rolled out the Eternal Playlist Generator to build a list of songs for the urn. You could even construct a thematic playlist should you wish: There’s A Ghost In My House, Dead by the Pixies, Death Disco and more. Hours of fun await.

The Eternal Playlist Urn is priced at $495, it’s only available in a limited run via the Liquid Death website.

Google’s ProducerAI can create customized instruments and effects in your browser.

ProducerAI is a chatbot that generates songs, album art, music videos and even music-making apps.

Just days after unveiling its latest AI model for music generation, Lyria 3, Google has acquired AI music platform ProducerAI and folded the startup into Google Labs, its experimental playground for AI-powered products.

Founded by the makers of Riffusion – one of the first text-to-music AI apps – ProducerAI is a browser-based generative AI tool that is capable of producing songs based on text prompts. Following the acquisition, ProducerAI is now equipped with Lyria 3, a “high-fidelity, professional-grade” music generation model that Google claims has a deep understanding of musicality.

ProducerAI’s output is similar to that of rivals such as Suno and Udio – as in, it can confidently cough up a convincing imitation of a chosen genre that lacks soul, flair and humanity – but the interface is a little different. Users interact with the platform via a chatbot-style interface that utilizes Google Gemini, and can develop and refine their creations through a conversational, iterative process.

ProducerAI can also generate both album art and music videos using Google’s image and video generation models, Nano Banana and Veo.

Speaking to The Verge, ProducerAI’s Seth Forsgren said that his team is “just scratching the surface of what these models are going to be able to do once we harness everything that Google brings to the table.”

“You can talk to this producer like you would a Gemini model, ask questions, and learn about a new genre,” he added. “As soon as you want to, you can start actually creating, and you can craft things with these instruments and make a song and iterate on it.”

Tracks generated with ProducerAI will be embedded with SynthID, Google’s imperceptible watermark for identifying AI-generated content. While Google has not shared any specifics on how Lyria 3 was trained, the company says that it has “sought to develop this technology responsibly” and remained “mindful of copyright and partner agreements” during the model’s training process.

From our perspective, the most interesting thing about ProducerAI is the Spaces feature, which can be used to create musical mini-apps in the browser based on natural language prompts, allowing you to design customized instruments and effects without writing a single line of code.

Examples provided by Google include a cute mini keyboard you can play with your computer keyboard and a sophisticated modular audio patching environment, Node Atlas, complete with synthesis, sample playback, modulation and a comprehensive set of audio effects.

Though it’s unsurprisingly a little glitchy and unpredictable, the concept behind Spaces is a fascinating one, and it’s a lot of fun to play with – we managed to create a three-oscillator granular synth and a basic 909-style drum machine with probabilistic sequencing in the space of about ten minutes.

ProducerAI operates a credit-based system with several membership tiers, ranging from $8/month to $64/month – there’s also a free tier that gives you a limited number of credits.

S1gns Of L1fe Modular – latest video – takes a look at the Infinite Machinery line of Eurorack modules, exploring how they work in a musical context.

Infinite Machinery offers a variety of pre-built and DIY Eurorack modules, along with parts for synth DIYers.

Video Summary:

“In this video, I explore a selection of Infinite Machinery Eurorack modules in real musical context, focusing on stable FM, expressive filtering, and patch-efficient utilities that support creative flow. You’ll hear practical patch ideas and see how these modules translate into dependable, musical results you can apply to your own system.”