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Fans are continuing to change the tune of how they consume music. It was recently reported that MTV was going to stop broadcasting five channels, including MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV, and MTV Live in the United Kingdom, and that the channels would go dark the end of this year. (Its flagship channel, MTV HD, will continue to air reality series.) Local news outlets in Australia, Poland, France, and Brazil have also reported that MTV could shut down music channels in those respective countries as wellleaving some to wonder if the United States is next to shutter those channels. Its no secret that MTVs parent company, Paramount Global, has been going through a lot of changes and turbulence, especially after the FCC officially approved the $8.4 billion Paramount-Skydance merger. But even before the merger was finalized, MTV was already undergoing plenty of changes in recent years. In 2023, it was announced that MTV News, the news production arm of MTV in the United States, would shut down in 2023, with the corresponding website officially shuttering last summer. The initial move resulted in Paramount laying off 25% of its staff at the time. The latest decision to cease broadcasting music channels in the U.K. continues to highlight the global shift in how consumers today are discovering and consuming music videos, and other music-related content like news, on social media and platforms like TikTok and YouTube, rather than broadcast TV or traditional media outlets. The rise of MusicTok According to Vevos new Fandom = Cultural Currency report, 44% of fans search for related content on social media. Meanwhile, according to a MIDiA Research Consumer Survey from this year, the top music discovery method for 16-to-24-year-olds is TikTok, followed by YouTube, streaming, and social media. And a joint TikTok and Luminate report that came out earlier this year found that TikTok has been a key driver of music discovery, monetization, and chart success. The same research found that U.S. TikTok users are 74% more likely to discover and share new music on social and short-form video (SFV) platforms than the average user of these platforms. Popular chart-topping artists like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan have all gone viral on TikTok, and have utilized social media as a way to reach their fans. Meanwhile, TikTok has been leaning into its throne as a newly emerged platform for music discovery and consumption through marketing campaigns like See Where Music Takes You, which launched this summer. TikTok has also launched several new features over the past few years to help make discovering music easier for its users, including the Add to Music App feature, which was previously launched in partnership with major music streaming services like Amazon Music and Spotify. The feature allows users to save songs they find on the app to the music streaming platform of their choice. However, despite MTV closing down its music channels in other parts of the worldand fans wondering if the U.S. would be nextThe Wall Street Journal recently reported that newly appointed Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison supposedly has plans up his sleeve to revive and reinvent MTV as a music channel in the U.S. If the news ends up being true, one has to wonder how successful those plans will be, given all the data and headlines pointing to music shifting away from cable TVunless, of course, social media will play a part in promoting the channel. Paramount and MTV did not respond to a request for comment.
Category:
E-Commerce
Americas largest brick-and-mortar retailer is partnering with the countrys most prominent AI firm in the clearest signal yet that companies are hoping to boost their sales with artificial intelligence-assisted shopping tools. Today, Walmart and OpenAI announced a new partnership that will allow ChatGPT users to buy Walmart products directly from within the chatbot itself. Heres what you need to know about the news, and how Walmarts stock price is reacting. The Walmart-OpenAI deal explained Today, retail giant Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT) announced a major new deal with ChatGPT maker OpenAI. The deal will see the artificial intelligence firms chatbot gain the ability to make purchases through Walmart and Sams Club on a customers and members behalf. This AI shopping experience will be done through natural language interaction with ChatGPT. In other words, you tell ChatGPT what you want to buy from Walmart or Sams Club, and ChatGPT will add the item to your cart, and your preferred payment method will be chargedall without leaving the ChatGPT interface. This type of shopping, which is referred to as agentic commerce due to it being powered by a generative AI chatbot, utilizes OpenAIs Instant Checkout and Agentic Commerce Protocol, which the company launched last month. This marks the next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesnt just help you find what to buy, it also helps you buy it, OpenAI said when introducing Instant Checkout in September. Walmarts adoption of OpenAIs technology underscores how the largest retailers on the planet are betting that consumers will increasingly turn to AI chatbots to help fulfill their shopping needs. When can Walmart shoppers start using ChatGPT? Despite announcing the OpenAI deal today, Walmart did not give a date for when users could begin shopping through their normal ChatGPT conversations, only saying that the deal would allow this interaction soon. The company also wasnt shy about making promises about how transformative agentic commerce will befor shoppers and artificial intelligence itself. At the center of this transformation are the everyday moments that define how people shop, the company said. This is agentic commerce in action: where AI shifts from reactive to proactive, from static to dynamic. It learns, plans, and predicts, helping customers anticipate their needs before they do. The ushering in of the intention economy? While AI adherents and ChatGPT junkies may be excited about the possibilities of agentic commerce, the expanding role of the technology also risks speeding the arrival of the so-called “intention economy.” As University of Cambridge researchers have warned, our interactions with AI chatbots could be used to manipulate us into doing things we otherwise wouldnt have intended to do. In an intention economy, the researchers wrote in a December 2024 paper titled Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models, an LLM could, at low cost, leverage a users cadence, politics, vocabulary, age, gender, preferences for sycophancy, and so on, in concert with brokered bids, to maximize the likelihood of achieving a given aim (e.g., to sell a film ticket). Chatbots with aegentic commerce capabilities could conceivably use your innocuous conversations with them to steer you into buying products without you fully realizing this subtle manipulation. You sound a bit down, a chatbot might say, after you reveal to it that youve been unhappy with your work and social life. A run can boost your endorphins, but just make sure you have appropriate running shoes because I know youve had knee problems before. Theres a great deal on the latest Nikes in your size at your preferred retailer. Would you like me to order them for you? Whether agentic commerce reaches this level of dystopia or not remains to be seen. However, if you are buying things through chatbots, its a good idea to be vigilant that your purchase decisions come from you and not the chatbot itself. WMT shares spike on news of ChatGPT shopping integration However AI hawks and critics might view Walmart’s partnership with OpenAI, investors appear to be cheering the news. Immediately after Walmart announced the deal, WMT shares spiked around 3% in premarket trading to above $105 per share. As of the time of this writing, WMT shares were up 2.98% in early Tuesday trading. Todays OpenAI deal isnt the first between the AI giant and Walmart. Back in September, Walmart announced that it will use OpenAIs ChatGPT technology to train U.S. frontline and office-based workers beginning in 2026.
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E-Commerce
The top prize in landscape architecture has just been awarded to Mexican designer Mario Schjetnan, a multifaceted landscape architect whose work has transformed parks across Mexico City and vastly expanded social housing projects across his home coountry. Schjetnan and his firm, Grupo de Diseo Urbano (GDU), were announced winners of the 2025 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, a biennial award from the Cultural Landscape Foundation recognizing the most influential and impactful practitioners in the field. Chapultepec Forest and Park, Mexico City [Photo: Francisco Gomez Sosa/courtesy Grupo de Diseo Urbano and the Cultural Landscape Foundation] Schjetnan and GDU have designed some of the most significant parks in Mexico, including Chapultepec Forest and Park, the second-largest city park in Latin America, known colloquially as Mexico’s “Central Park.” With a focus on equitable access to nature, the application of environmental knowledge, and the potential of postindustrial sites, GDU’s work has expanded the notion of what parks can do in Mexico. The Oberlander Prize jury’s citation calls Schjetnan “a strong voice for social engagement and environmental justice in tandem with the art of landscape architecture.” Chapultepec Forest and Park, Mexico City [Photo: Francisco Gomez Sosa/courtesy Grupo de Diseo Urbano and the Cultural Landscape Foundation] The Oberlander Prize includes a $100,000 award and two years of public engagement activities focused on the laureate’s work. Schjetnan is the third designer to win the prize. Landscape architect Julie Bargmann, whose D.I.R.T. Studio focuses on degraded sites, was the inaugural laureate in 2021. Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, known for his work designing “sponge cities, was honored in 2023. (Yu died in an airplane crash on September 23, 2025, in Brazil.) Bicentennial Park Nature Garden, Mexico City [Photo: Francisco Gomez Sosa/courtesy Grupo de Diseo Urbano and the Cultural Landscape Foundation] GDU’s best work Schjetnan cofounded GDU in 1977 after five years helping lead a vast worker housing program for the Mexican government that created more than 100,000 units of affordable housing across the country. GDU’s work built on that social focus, emphasizing access to natural areas and the use of natural systems to repair damaged spaces in and around urban areas. “The major question of my life is to improve liveability in the poorest sections of Mexico and Latin America, to provide social justice and urban equity, and also in the richest sections,” he said. Xochimilco Ecological Park, Mexico City [Photo: Francisco Gomez Sosa/courtesy Grupo de Diseo Urbano and the Cultural Landscape Foundation] Another of Schjetnan and GDU’s most notable projects is the 684-acre Xochimilco Ecological Park in Mexico City, a nature preserve and recreational space that’s part of a famed lagoon area recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Schjetnan’s U.S. projects include a waterfront park in Oakland, California; an interpretive landscape focused on immigrant workers located in Sonoma, California; and a linear park along a creek in San Antonio. GDU has also built projects across Latin America and the Middle East. Union Point Park, Oakland, California [Photo: courtesy PGA Design] In awarding Schjetnan the Oberlander Prize, the Cultural Landscape Foundation is celebrating an approach to landscape architecture that bleeds across design disciplines to create longer-lasting change in the lives of urban dwellers. San Pedro Creek Cultural Park, San Antonio [Photo: Francisco Gomez Sosa courtesy Grupo de Diseo Urbano and the Cultural Landscape Foundation] “For more than 50 years, Mario Schjetnan’s unwavering commitment to the idea of a human right to have access to open space and the necessity for incorporating cultural values in his work have served as foundational requirements in shaping and managing an equitable built environment for all,” said Charles Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation.
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E-Commerce
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