YouTube Red Becomes YouTube Music Premium

On May 22nd 2018, YouTube officially relaunched its music streaming service, which will be called YouTube Music.  In addition to music videos, YouTube Music will offer thousands of playlists, official versions of songs, albums, artists, radio, and more. The ad supported version will be free for those who use it. Those who subscribe to the new YouTube Music premium, which is ad free, will pay $9.99 a month and will offer background listening and the ability to download.

YouTube Red will become an $11.99 version of YouTube Music Premium, which will also include ad free viewing and YouTube original shows. The new service will offer a desktop music player as well as a mobile app. YouTube Music will be offered in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and South Korea first, with Canada and most European countries, including the UK and France being added at a later date.

Sony To Get 90% Of EMI

On May 21st 2018, Sony announced that it has made a deal to buy EMI Music Publishing from Mubadala Investment Company for $2.3 billion. The deal will give Sony controlling interest in EMI, with a 90% ownership of the company. Sony will add EMI's catalog of 2.1 million songs to it's own catalog 2.3 million, making it the largest music publishing company in the world. Sony's new CEO, Kenichiro Yoshida said, "We are thrilled to bring EMI Music Publishing into the Sony family and maintain our number one position in the music publishing industry." 

Nintendo To Bring Back NES Classsic

On May 13th 2018, Nintendo announced that it will be reintroducing the NES Classic on June 29th 2018.  The NES Classic first appeared in November of 2016. Though it was extremely popular it was discontinued in 2017 and was replaced by the SNES Classic. The gaming system will once again sell for $59.99 and offer 30 classic games such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Super Mario Bros. Nintendo also plans to again offer the SNES Classic which will sell of $80.

NASA Launches Insight On Mission To Mars

On May 5th 2018, NASA announced the successful launch of it newest robotic lander named Insight. The lift off, took place at Vandenberg Air Force base in southern California, at 4:05 am PDT. The lander will take six months to arrive at the Red Planet after a 301 million mile trek across the solar system. Once there, it is expected to land on Mars on November 26th 2018 at 3 pm EST. The lava plains of Elysium Planitia has been chosen as its lading site.

Insight's mission is to explore the interior of Mars. For that reason, the lander is not a rover, but will remain in a fixed stationary position, after it touches down. The plan is for Insight to probe to a depth of 16 ft, where it will measure the planets temperature and seismic activity. Scientists hope that the data that they receive will help them determine what type of rock Mars is made of. On board radio antennas will also be used to estimate the size of the planets core.

T-Mobile And Spirit To Merge

On April 29th 2018, Sprint and T-Mobile announced that they have agreed to a merger totaling $26.5 billion. If the deal is approved the third and fourth carrier would combine to become the nation's second largest wireless carrier, behind Verizon. The new company will be based in Bellevue, Washington, it will be called T-Mobile, and John Legere will remain its CEO. The two companies believe that by combining, they can become a force in the formative years of 5G.