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DistroKid is all grown up, with the launch of its first-ever branded mobile app.
Initially available for iPhone, DistroKid’s app puts the independent digital music distributor’s tools at the fingertips of artists, all the time.
From today (May 4), clients can upload new releases, receive instant payment alerts, access stats from Apple and Spotify, and edit metadata, all from their devices, according to a presser.
“The number one request we’ve gotten from DistroKid members is a dedicated mobile app,” comments Matthew Ogle, VP of product at DistroKid. “With music consumption, promotion, and increasingly even music creation happening predominately on mobile, we are meeting artists where they’re at, on their phones.”
British R&B singer Xadi participated in the beta-rollout, and, in a statement, vouches that the app “felt so familiar and easy to use.”
It’s unclear when the app will be available for Android.
The DistroKid iPhone app is the latest innovation from DistroKid, which claims to distribute 30-40% of all new music in the world and, in 2021, was valued at $1 billion.
Earlier in 2023, the business pressed the button on Mixea, an AI-powered intelligent mastering tool that helps artists prep their tunes for radio.
Last year, DistroKid officially got busy in the music video space with the launch of DistroVid, which enables artists to upload an unlimited number of music videos to leading digital service providers for one flat price.
And in 2021, the rollout of Upstream, a service that would allow independent artists using the platform to share data with record labels in hopes of grabbing attention, and getting signed.
Now in its 10th year, DistroKid pays artists 100% of their earnings, and claims to have processed more than 25 million songs.
Britain’s competition watchdog said Thursday that it’s opening a review of the artificial intelligence market, focusing on the technology underpinning chatbots like ChatGPT.
The Competition Markets Authority said it will look into the opportunities and risks of AI as well as the competition rules and consumer protections that may be needed.
AI’s ability to mimic human behavior has dazzled users but also drawn attention from regulators and experts around the world concerned about its dangers as its use mushrooms — affecting jobs, copyright, education, privacy and many other parts of life.
The CEOs of Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI will meet Thursday with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris for talks on how to ease the risks of their technology. And European Union negotiators are putting the finishing touches on sweeping new AI rules.
The U.K. watchdog said the goal of the review is to help guide the development of AI to ensure open and competitive markets that don’t end up being unfairly dominated by a few big players.
Artificial intelligence “has the potential to transform the way businesses compete as well as drive substantial economic growth,” CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell said. “It’s crucial that the potential benefits of this transformative technology are readily accessible to U.K. businesses and consumers while people remain protected from issues like false or misleading information.”
The authority will examine competition and barriers to entry in the development of foundation models. Also known as large language models, they’re a sub-category of general purpose AI that includes systems like ChatGPT.
The algorithms these models use are trained on vast pools of online information like blog posts and digital books to generate text and images that resemble human work, but they still face limitations including a tendency to fabricate information.
As the tech hype shifts from crypto to AI, the Web3 space is left trying to figure out sustainable use cases for NFTs and blockchain technology. Progress is being made through shared streaming royalties, Web3 fan clubs that unlock exclusive content, and a new wave of independent artists finding their first supporters and early fans by releasing their music on-chain.
However, Web3 still attracts cash grabs and, sometimes, outright scams. This mix of good and bad was reflected in April as many independent artists stood shoulder to shoulder with Snoop Dogg in terms of sales — but the month was marred by a rushed Soulja Boy NFT that was delisted from major platforms.
Overall, April was the worst month for NFT volume (in ETH terms) on the popular sales platform OpenSea since July 2021 and that weakness was reflected in the music NFT market. Volume across the 10 biggest projects netted 278.4 ETH, down from 381 ETH in March. In dollar terms, it’s $509,714, compared to March’s $697,393. Based on analysis of sales data from 19 different NFT platforms, independent releases combined with secondary sales volume on OpenSea, here are the 10 biggest-selling music NFTs and collections in March 2023.
1/ Soulja Boy – 3D Game NFT (Delisted by OpenSea)Monthly trading volume: 114 ETH ($208,734)Primary sales (March): N/ASecondary sales: 114 ETH ($208,734)Drop date: April 6
After Soulja Boy was charged in March for promoting cryptocurrencies without disclosure by the SEC, the rapper dropped a series of NFTs, with one collection removed by OpenSea for copyright infringement.
Soulja Boy launched a collection of 500 3D NFTs which promised to unlock exclusive extras in his upcoming video game. The NFTs sold out within hours, generating 68 ETH ($124,508), but the collection was later taken down by leading NFT platform OpenSea because the artwork featured the Ferrari logo — a copyright infringement. The NFTs still exist on the Ethereum blockchain but cannot be traded or sold by holders. A second collection followed (without the Ferrari logo) generating 10 ETH ($18,310) volume, and a third collection of pixel art generated 36 ETH ($65,916).
The NFT community hit back at Soulja Boy, not only for the fumbled NFT projects but for pocketing as much as $730,000 over recent years for promoting crypto and NFTs — many of which turned out to be scams.
2/ Snoop Dogg – Various collectionsMonthly trading volume: 39.896 ETH ($73,049)Primary sales (March): 5.775 ETHSecondary sales: 34.121 ETHDrop date: various
A rare Snoop Dogg NFT — the “golden egg” from his XYZ track — sold for 20 ETH in April, the highest price paid for a single music NFT on Web3 music platform Sound.xyz. The “golden egg” is a unique 1/1 collectible associated with the song within the bigger collection of 10,000. Golden eggs are often valued highly by music collectors on the platform. Snoop Dogg also dropped another song, Let Me Hit That, on Sound.xyz last month, netting a further 5.74 ETH ($10,509), while his “Bacc on Death Row” NFT collection generated 14 ETH ($25,634) in trading volume on OpenSea.
View the collection on Sound.xyz.
3/ DeafbeefMonthly trading volume: $61,314Primary sales (March): $46,000Secondary sales: $15,314Drop date: March 2021
Deafbeef is a music project valued like fine art by many in the Web3 space. It’s a collection of generative music, created by an algorithm, and coded into existence on a 10-year old computer by musician Deafbeef. Minted straight to the Ethereum blockchain at the moment of creation, it represents an experimental art form only possible through Web3 and it’s considered one of the most important early NFT experiments. These rare items are often referred to as “grails” and thought of like art pieces. A single edition changed hands for $46,000 last month, while Deafbeef also sold a new piece at auction for $15,314.
View the collection on OpenSea.
4/ KINGSHIP – “Keycards”Monthly trading volume: 23 ETH ($42,113)Primary sales (March): N/ASecondary sales: 23 ETHDrop date: May 2022
The Bored Ape Supergroup has become a permanent fixture of the monthly roundup with another month of strong trading volume on OpenSea through April. KINGSHIP recently launched a way for holders to generate rewards called ‘Crowns’ by participating in the community, which they can use to buy exclusive items and NFTs via a new auction system.
View the collection on OpenSea.
5/ PLS&TY – “New Color”Monthly trading volume: $37,229Primary sales (March): $37,229Secondary sales: N/ADrop date: April 27
PLS&TY is a prolific EDM producer with hundreds of millions of streams across his music on YouTube and Spotify. He’s also an early adopter in the NFT space. The producer’s latest collection on GALA Music — a Web3 music platform that Snoop Dogg called his home for Death Row Records featuring several NFTs drops from artists on the label — generated $37,229 with a collection of 300 audiovisual NFTs.
View the collection on OpenSea.
6/ X Li – “think i’m in love with you”Monthly trading volume: 20.121 ETH ($36,841)Primary sales (March): 20.121 ETHSecondary sales: N/ADrop date: April 26
Independent LA singer X Li exploded onto the Web3 music scene in April with a heartbreak ballad — a departure from the typical EDM and hip- hop sounds that dominate the space. The track quickly rocketed to the top three3 most collected songs on Sound.xyz with over 4,000 mints. X Li has previously worked with Sony Music Entertainment China but is now embracing Web3 and building a music community called Liberal Mafias.
View the collection on Sound.xyz.
7/ Violetta Zironni – “Another Life”Monthly trading volume: 11 ETH ($20,141)Primary sales (March): N/ASecondary sales: 11 ETHDrop date: Feb. 20
Italian singer-songwriter Violetta Zironi launched an NFT collection, Another Life — an EP encompassing five tracks and 5,500 unique profile picture illustrations. Holders get access to virtual shows, live concerts and the ability to use the songs for their own projects. The project launched in February but continued to generate strong secondary sales through April.
View the collection on OpenSea.
8/ LNRZ – “Satellites”Monthly trading volume: 6.3 ETH ($11,535)Primary sales (March): 6.3 ETHSecondary sales: N/ADrop date: April 21
LNRZ is a music collective founded by Reo Cragun, a pioneering artist in the Web3 music space and vocalist on Flume’s EP “Quits.” The collective is known for releasing music NFTs every week through curated drops with select artists, but in April they released their first original body of work. Satellites is a six-track album featuring five emerging musicians that came together at a songcamp in Las Vegas. The LNRZ community voted on the price, supply and rarity structure of the NFT drop, which sold out 1,250 editions in 24 hours.
View the collection on Sound.xyz.
9/ Culture Code, Araya & RUNN – “After All”Monthly trading volume: ~$9,697Primary sales (March): ~$9,697Secondary sales: N/ADrop date: April 10
After All is a dreamy electronic track that racked up 800,000 streams since its release in February. DJ and producer duo Culture Code sold a percentage of streaming royalties in the track via music rights platform Royal. The pair sold approximately 100 gold tokens offering 0.1228% ownership each, and three diamond tokens at $899 each offering 1.6204%.
View the collection on Royal.
10/ Illenium – “Illenium Fire, Ice & Ash” digital deluxe albumsMonthly trading volume: $8,908Primary sales (March): $8,908Secondary sales: N/ADrop date: April 27
DJ and producer Illenium entered the top 10 in March with a Web3 access pass that granted access to a fan club powered by tech company Medallion. He returned in April with the release of a digital deluxe album, available in three limited editions, only to the fan club. Fans that own the first two editions can unlock the ultra-exclusive third edition, or two fans can team up to unlock the third.
Only available to fan club members.
Methodology: The chart was compiled using data from primary music NFT sales across 19 different NFT platforms, independent releases and combined with secondary volume data from OpenSea. Data was captured between April 1 – April 30, 2023. Conversion rates from crypto to US dollars were calculated on April 30.
Disclaimer: The author owns NFTs from LNRZ and Snoop Dogg, however, the above list is based purely on sales data.
Right now, our artificial intelligence future sure seems to look a lot like… Wes Anderson movies! Over the past week, various AI programs have used the director’s quirky style to frame TikTok posts, rethink the looks of movies and even, more recently, make a trailer for a fictitious reboot of Star Wars. The future may be creepy, but at least it looks color-saturated and carefully composed.
The fake, fan-made Star Wars trailer, appropriately subtitled “The Galactic Menagerie,” is great fun, and its viral success shows both the strengths and current limitations of AI technology. Anderson’s distinctive visual style is an important part of his art, and the ostensible mission to “steal the Emperor’s artifact” sounds straight out of Star Wars. But the original Star Wars captured the imaginations of so many fans because it suggested a future that had some sand in its gears – the interstellar battle station had a trash compactor, and the spaceport cantina had a live band (and, one assumes, a public performance license).
Right now, at least, AI can’t seem to get past the surface.
“Heart on My Sleeve,” the so-called “Fake Drake” track apparently made with an artificial intelligence-generated version of Drake’s vocals, also sounds perfectly polished precisely in-tune and on-tempo. So do most modern pop songs, which tend to be pitch-corrected and sonically tweaked. (Most modern pop isn’t recorded live in a studio so much as assembled on a computer, so why shouldn’t it sound that way?) It’s hard to tell exactly why this style became so popular – the ease of smoothing over mistakes, the temptation of technical perfection, the sheer availability of samples and beats – but it’s what the mass streaming audience seems to want.
It’s also the kind of music that AI can most easily imitate. AI can already create pitch-perfect vocals, right-on-the-beat drumming, the kind of airless perfection of the Wes Anderson Star Wars trailer. It’s harder to learn a particular creator’s style – the phrasing and delivery that set singers apart as much as their voices do. So far, many of the songs online that have AI-generated voices seem to have put it on top of the old singer’s words, although most pop music is less about technical excellence than style of delivery. And quirks of timing and emphasis are even harder to imitate.
Most big new pop stars are short on quirks, but they might do well to develop them. Whatever laws and agreements eventually regulate AI – and it pains me to point out that the key word there is eventually – artists will still end up competing with algorithms. And since algorithms don’t need to eat or sleep, creators are going to have to do something that they can’t. One of those things, at least for now, is embracing a certain amount of imperfection. Computers will catch up, of course – if they can avoid mistakes, they can certainly learn to make a few – but that could take some time.
Until relatively recently, most great artists had quirks: Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham played a bit behind the beat, Snoop Dogg started drawling out verses at a time when most rappers fired them off, and Willie Nelson has a sense of phrasing that owes more to jazz than rock. (Nelson’s timing is going to be hard for algorithms to imitate until they start smoking weed.) In most cases, these quirks are strengths – Bonham’s drumming made Zeppelin swing. But many producers came to see these kinds of imperfections as relics of an age when correcting them was difficult and the sound of pop changed so much that they now stick out like sore thumbs.
I don’t mean to romanticize the past. And newer artists have quirks, too – they just tend to smooth them over with studio software. But this kind of artificial perfection is easier to imitate. So, I wonder if the rise of AI – not the parodies we’re seeing so far, but the flood of computer-created pop that’s coming – will push musicians to embrace a rougher, messier aesthetic.
Most artists wouldn’t admit to this, of course – acknowledging commercial pressure is usually considered uncool. But big-picture shifts in the market have always shaped the sound of pop music. Consider how many artists created 35-to-45-minute albums in the ’60s and ’70s, and then 60-to-75-minute albums in the ’90s. Were they almost twice as inspired, or did the amount of music that fit on a CD – and the additional mechanical royalties they could make if they had songwriting credit – drive them to create more? These days, presumably also for economic reasons, songs are getting shorter and albums are getting longer.
It will be interesting to see if they also get a bit rougher, too. In Star Wars, at least, the future isn’t all about a sparkling surface.
For the Record is a regular column from deputy editorial director Robert Levine analyzing news and trends in the music industry. Find more here.
Sounding alarms about artificial intelligence has become a popular pastime in the ChatGPT era, taken up by high-profile figures as varied as industrialist Elon Musk, leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky and the 99-year-old retired statesman Henry Kissinger.
But it’s the concerns of insiders in the AI research community that are attracting particular attention. A pioneering researcher and the so-called “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton quit his role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.
Over his decades-long career, Hinton’s pioneering work on deep learning and neural networks helped lay the foundation for much of the AI technology we see today.
There has been a spasm of AI introductions in recent months. San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, rolled out its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-4, in March. Other tech giants have invested in competing tools — including Google’s “Bard.”
Some of the dangers of AI chatbots are “quite scary,” Hinton told the BBC. “Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”
In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Hinton also pointed to “bad actors” that may use AI in ways that could have detrimental impacts on society — such as manipulating elections or instigating violence.
Hinton, 75, says he retired from Google so that he could speak openly about the potential risks as someone who no longer works for the tech giant.
“I want to talk about AI safety issues without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he told MIT Technology Review. “As long as I’m paid by Google, I can’t do that.”
Since announcing his departure, Hinton has maintained that Google has “acted very responsibly” regarding AI. He told MIT Technology Review that there’s also “a lot of good things about Google” that he would want to talk about — but those comments would be “much more credible if I’m not at Google anymore.”
Google confirmed that Hinton had retired from his role after 10 years overseeing the Google Research team in Toronto.
Hinton declined further comment Tuesday but said he would talk more about it at a conference Wednesday.
At the heart of the debate on the state of AI is whether the primary dangers are in the future or present. On one side are hypothetical scenarios of existential risk caused by computers that supersede human intelligence. On the other are concerns about automated technology that’s already getting widely deployed by businesses and governments and can cause real-world harms.
“For good or for not, what the chatbot moment has done is made AI a national conversation and an international conversation that doesn’t only include AI experts and developers,” said Alondra Nelson, who until February led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and its push to craft guidelines around the responsible use of AI tools.
“AI is no longer abstract, and we have this kind of opening, I think, to have a new conversation about what we want a democratic future and a non-exploitative future with technology to look like,” Nelson said in an interview last month.
A number of AI researchers have long expressed concerns about racial, gender and other forms of bias in AI systems, including text-based large language models that are trained on huge troves of human writing and can amplify discrimination that exists in society.
“We need to take a step back and really think about whose needs are being put front and center in the discussion about risks,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute. “The harms that are being enacted by AI systems today are really not evenly distributed. It’s very much exacerbating existing patterns of inequality.”
Hinton was one of three AI pioneers who in 2019 won the Turing Award, an honor that has become known as tech industry’s version of the Nobel Prize. The other two winners, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, have also expressed concerns about the future of AI.
Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, signed a petition in late March calling for tech companies to agree to a 6-month pause on developing powerful AI systems, while LeCun, a top AI scientist at Facebook parent Meta, has taken a more optimistic approach.
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Source: SOPA Images / Getty / Bluesky
Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he has been doing a fantastic job making it an awful experience, leaving users screaming for a new place to debate $200 debates. Well, their prayers might have finally been answered.
Many of you have noticed on your Twitter timelines people talking about Bluesky, pondering where they can secure an invite leaving you wondering what the hell they are talking about.
Well, Bluesky could be the app that officially puts Twitter in the social media hospice, joining the likes of MySpace, Tumblr, and other social media platforms hanging on for dear life.
Bluesky is backed by Twitter’s former owner, Jack Dorsey, and it has the buzz Twitter first had. Per the New York Times, Bluesky could be Twitter 2.0 and is already boasting users like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chrissy Teigen, to name a few, with thousands begging for invites to get in on the action.
Those who have the privilege of using Bluesky say that the app comes the closest to giving users the feeling Twitter used to give before Elon Musk messed it all up.
Bluesky has all of the core features that made Twitter popping, like the ability to post short text, photo updates, reply, and share each other’s posts.
How Does Bluesky Differ From Twitter?
Bluesky’s chief executive, Jay Graber, spoke on what makes his app different from Elon Musk’s Twitter in a blog post, noting it will be a “decentralized system” that will eventually allow users to create their own apps and build their own communities within Bluesky.
According to Ms. Graber, this design is because an “individual could create rules for the entire Bluesky community,” the New York Times reports.
Also, Bluesky is “open protocol,” which is unusual regarding social apps. This means that Bluesky could allow for cross-posting between different social media platforms. This is something that Twitter used to do before becoming “walled off.” For example, there was a time when Instagram links populated Twitter timelines, showing the post. Now, if you share an IG post on their Twitter account, it just shows a link.
Sounds lit, so how do you sign up? Right now, if you want to use Bluesky, you can only do so if you receive an invite from someone already using the app while it’s in its testing phase.
Bluesky is available for download on iOS and will come to Android devices soon. You can sign up to be on the waiting list by heading here.
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Photo: SOPA Images / Getty
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Pharrell Pack, a new collection of digital, physical wearables and redeemables, was curated by Skateboard P himself. Merging the worlds of tech and fashion, a natural space for Pharrell Williams, the Pharrell Pack offers buyers a variety of stylish and fun options.
The Pharrell Pack is a collaboration with Doodles, which offers a selection of physical wearables, toys, and other items alongside digital countering items. With Pharrell’s eye for fashion and style, several brands connected to the Virginia Beach, Va. native such as BBC, Ice Cream, adidas, and Humanrace. Doodles recently launched a test version of its The Stoodio, a digital home that was born from the web3 world.
Via The Stoodio, buyers can redeem their Pharrell Pack and put new fashion flourishes on their Doodles 2 avatar with the custom digital wearables. The Pharrell Pack includes three digital wearables, 1 redeemable, and one beta pass. 48 of the 300 packs will have a grail redeemable and matching grail wearable. 252 packs will feature non-green sambas as redeemable along with exclusive wearables.
If that isn’t enough, 12 Doodlees will get a redeemable for a limited-edition Pharrell 50th birthday edition green Sambas. These Sambas will not be for sale anywhere else.
To learn more about the Pharell Pack and how to snag your own, please click here.
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Photo: Doodles/Pharrell Williams
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Source: YOSHIKAZU TSUNO / Getty / PlayStation
It looks like PlayStation isn’t out of the handheld business after all.
Insider Gaming exclusively reports PlayStation is actively working on a new handheld console called the “Q Lite.” The video game website says it will not center around cloud gaming but will be an extension of the PS5 utilizing the console’s remote play function that the company has been hyping up as of late.
[embedded content]
Per Insider Gaming:
Codenamed the Q Lite, the next PlayStation handheld is the next piece of Sony hardware that aims to be yet another piece of hardware that requires the PlayStation 5. Insider Gaming understands that the Q Lite is not a cloud-streaming device but instead uses Remote Play with the PlayStation 5.
According to the report, the Q Lite will feature adaptive streaming up to 1080p and 60FPS and require constant internet connectivity.
As for its look, Insider Gaming says it will look like a PS5 DualSense controller with “a massive 8-inch LCD touchscreen in the center.” It will also have adaptive triggers and support haptic feedback, plus all of the bells and whistles you come to expect for a portable gaming device.
The Q Lite Could Be A Part of The Second Phase of The PS5
The news of the Q Lite follows reports of Sony working on a PlayStation 5 Pro and PS5 console with a detachable disc drive, and it will arrive before both consoles.
All three devices could be a part of the “second phase of the PS5,” according to Jeff Grubb’s reporting. PlayStation is also said to be working on wireless earbuds called “Project Nomad,” a wireless headset called “Project Voyager,” and The Q Lite could all be coming very soon.
Sony officially discontinued its last portable device, the PS Vita, in 2019, leaving the impression the company is done with handheld consoles.
That appears not to be the case. Are you excited about Q Lite? Let us know in the comment section below.
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Photo: YOSHIKAZU TSUNO / Getty
For the last week, the most talked-about song in the music business has been “Heart on My Sleeve,” the track said to have been created by using artificial intelligence to imitate vocals from Drake and The Weeknd and uploaded to TikTok by the user Ghostwriter977. And while most reactions were impressed, there was a big difference between those of fans (“This isn’t bad, which is pretty cool!”) and executives (“This isn’t bad, which is really scary!”). As with much online technology, however, what’s truly remarkable, and frightening, isn’t the quality – it’s the potential quantity.
This particular track didn’t do much damage. Streaming services pulled it down after receiving a request from Universal Music Group, for which both Drake and The Weeknd record. YouTube says the track was removed because of a copyright claim, and “Heart on My Sleeve” contains at least one obvious infringement in the form of a Metro Boomin producer tag. But it’s not as clear as creators and rightsholders might like that imitating Drake’s voice qualifies as copyright infringement.
In a statement released around the time the track was taken down, Universal said that “the training of generative AI using our artists’ music” violated copyright. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Whether that’s true in the U.S. depends on whether training AI with music qualifies as fair use – which will not be clear until courts rule on the matter. Whether it’s true in other countries depends on local statutory exceptions for text and data mining that vary in every country. Either way, though, purposefully imitating Drake’s voice would almost certainly violate his right to what an American lawyer might call his right of publicity but a fan would more likely call his artistic identity. There are precedents for this: A court held that Frito-Lay violated the rights of Tom Waits by imitating his voice for a commercial, and Bette Midler won a similar lawsuit against Ford. Both of those cases involved an implied endorsement – the suggestion of approval where none existed.
The violation of an AI imitation is far more fundamental, though. The essence of Drake’s art – the essence of his Drakeness, if you will – is his voice. (That voice isn’t great by any technical definition, any more than Tom Waits’ is, but it’s a fundamental part of his creativity, even his very identity.) Imitating that is fair enough when it comes to parody – this video of takes on Bob Dylan‘s vocal style seems like it should be fair game because it’s commenting on Dylan instead of ripping him off – but creating a counterfeit Drake might be even more of a moral violation than a commercial one. Bad imitators may be tacky, but people tend to regard very accurate ones as spooky. “Heart on My Sleeve” isn’t Drake Lite so much as an early attempt at Drakenstein – interesting to look at, but fundamentally alarming in the way it imitates humanity. (Myths and stories return to this theme all the time, and it’s hard to think of many with happy endings.) Universal executives know that – they have talked internally about the coming challenges of AI for years – which is why the company’s comment asked stakeholders “which side of history” they want to be on.
This track is just the sign of a coming storm. The history of technology is filled with debates about when new forms of media and technology will surpass old ones in terms of quality when it often matters much more about how cheap and easy they are. No one thinks movies look better on a phone screen than in a theatre, but the device is right there in your hand. Travel agents might be better at booking flights than Expedia, but – well, the fact that there aren’t that many of them anymore makes my point. Here, the issue isn’t whether AI can make a Drake track better than Drake – which is actually impossible by definition, because a Drake track without Drake isn’t really a Drake track at all – but rather how much more productive AI can be than human artists, and what happens once it starts operating at scale.
Imagine the most prolific artist you can think of – say, an insomniac YoungBoy Never Broke Again crossed with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Then imagine that this hypothetical artist never needs to eat or sleep or do anything else that interferes with work. Then imagine that he – or, really, it – never varies from a proven commercial formula. Now clone that artist thousands of times. Because that’s the real threat of AI to the music business – not the quality that could arrive someday but the quantity that’s coming sooner than we can imagine.
It has been said that 100,000 tracks get uploaded to streaming services every day. What happens once algorithms can make pop music at scale? Will that turn into a million tracks a day? Or 100 million? Could music recorded by humans become an exception instead of a rule? In the immediate future, most of this music wouldn’t be very interesting – but the sheer scale and inevitable variety could cut into the revenue collected by creators and rightsholders. The music business doesn’t need an umbrella – it needs a flood barrier.
In the long run, that barrier should be legal – some combination of copyright, personality rights and unfair competition law. That will take time to build, though. For now, streaming services need to continue to work with creators and rightsholders to make clear the difference between artists and their artificial imitators.
Fans who want to hear Drake shouldn’t have to guess which songs are really his.
For the Record is a regular column from deputy editorial director Robert Levine analyzing news and trends in the music industry. Find more here.
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Source: Christopher Furlong / Getty / Twitter
Many thought the so-called “Chief Twit” was bluffing when he said he would snatch away people’s blue checkmarks if they didn’t subscribe to Twitter Blue. Well, he did it, and, of course, it was an absolute sh*t show.
While people were puff, puff, passing on 4/20, Phony Stark, aka Elon Musk, did start taking away legacy blue checkmarks. One by one, celebrities and other notable figures began to point out that their blue checkmarks were gone vowing to never subscribe to Twitter Blue and pointing out to their followers, “they have been verified.”
But, some also noticed that other celebrities still had their blue checkmarks well after the social media platform took away legacy checkmarks. TMZ reports that Soulja Boy, Khloe Kardashian, Taylor Swift, O.J. Simpson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ryan Reynolds, The Weeknd, Sia, Nick Carter, LL Cool J, and John Cena still have their blue checks potentially meaning they are paying the $8 subscription price.
When you click the blue checks next to their names, the description reads, “This account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.”
Remember that a blue checkmark is not the only perk of a Twitter Blue subscription. You can also post longer videos, drop longer tweets and edit them after you hit send.
Elon Musk Is Paying For Certain Celebs Twitter Blue Subscriptions
But there is also some funny business going on as well. Some celebs, like author Stephen King who still has his blue checkmark, immediately alerted his followers that he is not paying for Twitter Blue despite having his still.
LeBron James, who is notoriously cheap, told his followers that he was not paying to keep his blue checkmark also still has his.
“LeCap,” basically calling Bron Bron a liar, began trending, but it turns out there was a reason he and Stephen King were exemptions to the new stupid rule.
Elon Musk was personally paying for their subscriptions out of his pocket. Musk admitted as much via his account, adding that he also paid for William Shatner’s blue checkmark.
What a mess.
You can see more reactions to the blue checkmark ridiculousness in the gallery below.
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Photo: Christopher Furlong / Getty
2. That counts