Trying to win over musicians, Spotify is launching an Artists website, a free analytics service for artists, and an initiative to help them sell merchandise from their Spotify profiles. “The various announcements are a response to trenchant criticism from some musicians in 2013,” The Guardian reports. David Byrne, for one, said Spotify streaming business was "unsustainable as a means of supporting creative work of any kind.”

Adding a silver lining to David Carr’s report on New York magazine and its decision to cut its publishing schedule in half, he notes Web traffic at the publisher grew 19% in less than a year, per comScore. “But to keep up that rate of growth in a competitive set … the magazine had to reduce costs to find the money to fund the part of the business that is growing,” Carr writes. “The cut in frequency will yield about $3.5 million in savings, which will then be invested in faster-growing digital efforts.” 

The Wall Street Journal asks one Gawker editor the question everyone in media and marketing is dying to know: How do you inspire consumers to share your Web content? The answer? Simply create a deep connection with your audience's “evolving, irreducibly human, primal sensibilities,” WSJ writes, interpreting the wisdom Gawker’s viral guru Neetzan Zimmerman. “I guess you could call it intuition,” Zimmerman says. 

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley has the inside scoop on Microsoft’s latest operating-system improvements, which should encompass Xbox One, Windows and Windows Phone The changes should “advance them in a way to share even more common elements,” Foley reports. “From what I've heard, [the initiative includes a] wave of operating systems across Windows-based phones, devices and gaming consoles.” 

Pursuing its dream of “making computers deeply understand people's natural language and intentions,” Yahoo just bought a natural language processing technology company named SkyPhrase. “Now, SkyPhrase and its team will likely be focused more on helping improve Yahoo products,” TechCrunch reports. “Some examples of what specifically it's already been able to do include building queries that provide custom notifications whenever a certain action is triggered.”