They’re trying to cure cancer, and I’m trying to get machines to write three-minute songs. | | | | Reggae section.
(Richard Newstead/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “They’re trying to cure cancer, and I’m trying to get machines to write three-minute songs.”
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| | rantnrave:// It's a slow Tuesday afternoon and I'm reading this thought-provoking ROB ARCAND piece in SPIN about the various ways artists are using artificial intelligence and the aesthetic and ethical questions the technology raises. Questions about authorship, originality, humanity, the future of humankind (I might be exaggerating that question; also, I might not), and the other things corporations like GOOGLE are doing with the same artificial intelligence when musicians maybe aren't looking. Logistical and philosophical questions: Is AI better suited right now to be a composer or a performer? Should AI music imitate human music, should it be something else altogether, should it be a hybrid? Will an AI program trained on the BEATLES eventually sound like the Beatles, or more like JOHN CAGE? Which is the better outcome? But a more pressing question is nagging me as I listen to the embedded YOUTUBEs from HOLLY HERNDON, DADABOTS, YONA and others, each presenting different ideas of what artificial intelligence can do if you just give it a little studio time. This question: Why does KATY PERRY's new single, "NEVER REALLY OVER," which has nothing to do with any of them besides a vaguely shared interest in electropop, automatically play after every single one of them? Why has it auto-played six times before I've finished the story? Why does LIL NAS X and BILLY RAY CYRUS's "OLD TOWN ROAD" auto-play after every Katy Perry auto-play? Why do I have to keep scrolling up and stopping this madness? (And I'm saying this as a pop fan who doesn't mind Katy Perry singles at all.) Who thinks this is a good user experience for someone reading a story about the AI music vanguard? Spin? AIR.TV, which is providing the intrusive embeds? Katy Perry? Her label? What kind of digital payola hell is this? And is *this* the AI question we should be debating instead? Should we be worried not about AI as composer or performer but as ubiquitous DJ, deciding what everyone in the world will hear next no matter what they choose to listen to first? LA PHILHARMONIC performances segueing into Katy Perry? DEAFHEAVEN into Katy Perry? International news updates into Katy Perry? Katy Perry into Katy Perry in an unstoppable feedback loop that, 13 or 14 plays in, starts sounding mysteriously like John Cage, or maybe the Beatles? Please help... RESIDENT ADVISOR simultaneously dropped its own longread about AI by CHERIE HU, who also leads with Holly Herndon, and there are no AIR.TV embeds. When the video stops, it actually stops. Peaceful... Alleged crime of the day: On INSTAGRAM a week ago, a Baltimore rapper named CHAD FOCUS told his 187,000 followers you can buy a #1 hit for $300,000 if you know where to spend it. On Tuesday the rapper, who had a mega billboard in TIMES SQUARE, a minor hit dance chart hit in BILLBOARD and a T-PAIN remix among other achievements, was indicted for allegedly paying for all of it with $4.1 million of his employer's money. I have one question for the witness: Where are the 13 #1 hits that money should have bought?... MINECRAFT BERGHAIN... LGBTQ musical heroes... A nice Tuesday in New York: Public grants for female musicians announced during the day, BIKINI KILL and JOAN JETT share a stage at night... Every SPICE GIRLS song, ranked. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Talkhouse |
| Adam Schatz (Landlady) on how a persistent YouTube ad led him to a three-hour lesson about joy in music. | | |
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 | Gizmodo |
| It's official. Apple announced yesterday that it would begin killing off iTunes, one of the company's most important software products ever. And, to be honest, there isn't much love lost, since iTunes has become widely reviled by most users in recent years. But that wasn't always the case. | | |
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 | SPIN |
| Can an A.I. and human, working together as peers, create something genuinely new? | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| Taylor, Katy, and Miley Cyrus are all struggling to reach the same heights they did just a few years ago. Has the pop world passed them by? | | |
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 | Billboard |
| Streaming algorithms appear to be one factor in the reduction. | | |
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 | NPR |
| Country singer Ty Herndon came out as gay in 2014 and this year, he's re-releasing his 1995 hit "What Mattered Most" with updated lyrics to fit his true identity. | | |
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 | Complex |
| In an effort to shed more light on American-Muslim culture, we're presenting Islam and Hip-Hop: Muslims in America--the latest installment of our docuseries, Complex News Presents. Speedy Mormon sat down with several members of the religion to discuss everything from representation in the media to institutionalized discrimination to the common thread between Islam and hip-hop. | | |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| 'My challenge would be: excuse me, what did Columbia actually do in this? He was doing millions of streams per day before they picked him up.' | | |
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 | Elemental |
| The science behind listening to music to concentrate. | | |
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 | Switched On Pop |
| On the KRCW series Lost Notes, Jessica Hopper plumbs pop music history for the most important stories never told. She brings us a bevy of lost gems, from Fanny, an all-female quartet of rockers that was one of David Bowie’s favorite bands, to the Freeze a late-70s punk outfit now coming to terms with the offensive lyrics of their youth. | | |
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| | | doesn't mean it's really over |
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 | NPR Music |
| A writer thinks he's found disco's progenitor, but none of the experts agree with him, or each other - and the end result is beside the point. | | |
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 | 5 Magazine |
| The mp3, ProTools, Ableton and digital music itself can be traced to a crazy engineer who taught his computer to sing and helped Stanley Kubrick scare the crap out of the world. | | |
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 | MusicAlly |
| He’s been Lady Gaga’s manager and Spotify’s global head of creator services, but Troy Carter is now co-founder and CEO of Q&A. | | |
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| Billboard |
| The new rules, which reverse those put in place by Obama, could have wide-ranging impact on U.S-Cuba music travel operators and their Cuban colleagues. | | |
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 | VICE |
| Through the marriage of arts and ecology, the Arizona microfest cultivates a uniquely intimate experience that blends all the best elements of festival culture and none of the worst. | | |
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| Gizmodo |
| Take a look at the music streaming services of the moment and you'd be forgiven for not seeing any major differences: They all offer access to around 50 million tracks on demand, they all give you recommended mixes of music, they all let you sync tunes to your phone for offline listening, and so on. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| With a new doc about the famed tenor, the filmmaker explains what he learned about the opera star’s life. | | |
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 | Medium |
| Rock criticism has had a false scarcity problem since its inception. [This paper was written for the MoPOP Pop Conference 2018: "What Difference Does It Make?: Music and Gender"] | | |
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 | Afropunk |
| On the occasion of George Clinton's retirement from the stage, AFROPUNK salutes the Parliament-Funkadelic leader, a non-confirming Black original. | | |
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 | The Bitter Southerner |
| If Southern cities can be measured by the caliber of performers they attract, then Greenville, South Carolina, is big enough for Paul McCartney. Kristi York Wooten remembers waiting half a century for her home city - and a Beatle - to arrive. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | Featuring Spawn, her own AI collaborator. From "Proto," out now on 4AD. |
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