If there were any doubts before, streaming is king now. Revenue from streaming music accounted for the majority of US major record labels’ sales for the first time ever last year, a music industry trade group said Thursday. Streaming vaulted over the one-time leader digital downloads, which declined faster than any previous year. The data …

Google’s Waze navigation helper wants to be your donut concierge too. The navigation app said it’s working with fast-food chain Dunkin’ Donuts to allow preorders that you can pick up along your drive. The feature launched Tuesday. Since being acquired by Alphabet’s Google in 2013, the crowdsourced navigation app has added features like advertising that nudge drivers to stop by …

Facebook is letting everybody stream their lives in 360 degrees. The operator of the world’s biggest social network said Wednesday that it was widening the tool to all users globally, after it launched it on National Geographic’s Facebook page in December. Now playing: Watch this: Stream live 360-degree video on Facebook 1:30 Live-streaming in 360 degrees, which lets viewers swivel …

Digital news and media publisher BuzzFeed is eyeing going public next year, according to report by Axios. The news comes after Snap, the parent of disappearing photo app Snapchat, whet Wall Street’s appetite for another millennial tech darling to produce an IPO spectacle. A month ago, Snap’s shares priced higher than expected in its initial public offering and popped 44 …

Spotify’s take on “Carpool Karaoke” gets two hip-hop artists stuck in traffic and makes them write beats that get stuck in your head. With a new video series called “Traffic Jams” kicking off Tuesday, Spotify will run weekly episodes that pair a rapper with a producer, putting them in the back seat of a car to create a new song …

Record stores mean a lot to Zane Lowe. Best known for his 12 years as one of the BBC’s top Radio 1 DJs, Lowe uncovered the earliest recordings of hip-hop by devotedly riffling through record store bins, and he found the way to Nirvana by awkwardly humming the guitar riff to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to his local record store …

Who would have thought that augmented reality‘s best pitch would be puking rainbows and candy-colored camera glasses? Augmented reality — and its more advanced cousin mixed reality — overlay digital information onto the visible world. Typically, this is where I’m supposed to reference Pokemon Go, last year’s mobile gaming phenomenon that popularized AR through the digital monsters that popped up …

Spotify has hit 50 million paying subscribers, adding 10 million new members in about five months, the music-streaming company tweeted Thursday. Put another way, Spotify spent less than half a year adding about half an Apple Music. The growth underscores the consumer shift from buying music outright to paying a fee for all-you-can-access tunes. As more people have come on …

Snapchat turned heads when it redefined itself as Snap and released candy-colored camera glasses. Next, will it be turning eyes upward to watch for unmanned aircraft? The company has worked on making a drone, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing three unnamed people briefed on the project. Snap didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment. The report comes …

Good news for the tech giants whose fortunes rise or fall on phone sales: Shipments of smartphones are expected to rebound this year after slow growth in 2016, market researcher IDC said Tuesday. Worldwide smartphone shipments should grow 4.2 percent in 2017 and another 4.4 percent in 2018. That’s an uptick from the 2.5 percent growth rate last year, though …