No 49. - Robots and dinosaurs edition 🤖 🦕
How AI will help legacy artists extend their brands long after their recording careers are over.
“Heart on My Sleeve,” last year’s viral Drake and the Weeknd collab that wasn’t, was the music industry’s first big public reckoning with artificial intelligence’s potential for disruption. Created by someone named ghostwriter977, who trained an AI model on tracks from both artists, it raised many intellectual property questions around ownership when a new song like “Heart on My Sleeve” is created by training an algorithm on old — and copyrighted — music from the artist they’re trying to emulate.
“Heart on My Sleeve” wasn’t the first time generative AI was used to create “new” music from established artists. Back in the spring of 2021 for example, the Lost Tapes of the 27 Club project used GenAI to create a “new” Nirvana, Amy Winehouse and Doors tracks to highlight mental health issues in the music industry. But it was (to the best of my knowledge) the first time that such a creation threatened to crash the actual charts.
How this shakes out is anybody’s guess. The music industry had the law on its side back in 1999, but that didn’t stop Napster and its ilk (s/o LimeWire, BearShare, Kazaa, Soulseek) from wreaking havoc that took the industry decades to come back from, a recovery that’s left most artists with the smallest of financial footholds.
But it underlined AI’s unique power to perpetuate the copious market advantages already enjoyed by legacy artists. “Heart on My Sleeve” is pretty mid, but the combination of the Drake and Weeknd brands, not to mention the two Toronto artists shared history, was enough to convince fans to give the track a spin or two.
I’ve wrote a bit about the tyranny of old music back in KKMC No. 25, where I noted that “the music biz has always been a winner-take-all proposition where the top tier of artists reap a disproportionate share of the profits and all the intangible elements that come with it. That structure favours legacy acts whose reputations — rather than musical or cultural relevance — ensures that they’re the first names casual fans look to when trying to decide what records to buy, music to stream, or concerts to attend.” That dynamic has always made it an uphill battle for newer artists.
New technologies tend to promise users the gift of more time, but it never works out that way. Streaming levelled the playing field on paper, but in reality people have a finite amount of time and when given the choice most people will stick with a known commodity. And AI is only going to make it worse, giving legacy acts new ways to extend their catalogs long after their recording or performance careers are over.
Ask most musicians what AI’s impact on music will be and you’ll likely get an answer that amounts to “it’s a tool” and liken it to the introduction of drum machines. That’s true! Baking AI into music and production gear isn’t going to replace actual musicians — someone still has to make the creative decisions and manipulate the hardware and software. Even with AI models like Jukebox, from OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, someone needs to have the idea to prompt it with.
A number of artists have already incorporated AI into their work. Perhaps most prominently — and successfully IMO — is Holly Herndon who trained a model, Spawn as she called it, on her own voice to create her 2019 album PROTO.
Not to be outdone, experimental music godhead Brian Eno created a generative AI version of his 2017 ambient composition, Reflection, which continues to play and change endlessly via an app based GenAI model.
Cool stuff! And they’re definitely not alone.
In the wake of sound-a-like tracks like “Heart on My Sleeve,” Grimes’ Claire Boucher was quick to give her blessing and offered to split the royalties with anyone making fake AI Grimes tunes. It looked like, and to a degree probably was, an altruistic embrace of new technology. But it also serves to advance the Grimes brand: the more AI-sound-alike Grimes songs there are out there, the more it enhances Grimes’ standing as an artist worth emulating.
And that’s the rub. AI models, trained on existing data (in this case, songs) are very good at making new versions of existing things. So while GenAI tools aren’t likely to produce groundbreaking new music in the immediate future (I think), they are already helping anyone with an established sound and/or brand maintain their legacy.
The end of 2023 saw the two biggest names in the game enter the chat. The Beatles much ballyhooed “final song” did feature performances from each of the original fab four, but an AI tool was used to isolate John Lennon’s voice from a demo recording that had previously been deemed too rough or muddled to be used for the Anthology series that produced previous “new” Beatles tunes “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.”
Meanwhile their crosstown rivals, The Rolling Stones, leaned on the tech for their comeback single, “Angry.” Again, the song itself doesn’t use AI, but the video, which features classic Stones performances projected onto billboards, does. Throw in Sydney Sweeney as you’ve got the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band — whose members are now older than the genre itself — looking fresh and vital for the Gen Z set.
However mindful of their respective legacies they may be, the Beatles and the Stones aren’t without taste. But its not hard to imagine more mercenary artists using GenAI to recapture the sound of their glory years, or using it to prolong the career of artists who have died. The steady drip of posthumous releases from Hendrix to Lil Peep already shows that no riff nor verse shall go unreleased. How long will it be before we get an official AI Tupac album?
Then there is Kiss, who recently played their supposedly final show at Madison Square Gardens. Ever the savvy marketers (or tasteless self-promoters) the band took the opportunity (and captive audience) to announce that they were essentially replacing themselves with 3D digital avatars created using AI-eneabled motion capture tech. “KISS could have a concert in three cities in the same night across three different continents,” says Per Sundin, CEO of Pophouse Entertainment, one of the companies behind the effort.
While I think (hope?) that anyone with an interest in new music will ignore something this gimmicky, it illustrates the advantages that a legacy act can wield to get a piece of their fans’ finite time and money. Says Paul Stanley in a video promoting the band’s “new era: “We can live on eternally.” Reading between the lines, what he means is that with AI artists can now do all their brand management without ever having to leave the house or even strum a note. If you’re a young artist or a fan of music that isn’t just more of the same, that’s a bit sad and frightening.
Kool Kids Self Promotion Club
Been busy on the freelance writing front. First up, the new album from Montreal mathy emo-rockers Gulfer. On Third Wind, “all of the members are playing to their strengths, and its hooks and melodies benefit from more languorous rhythms. A decade plus into their career, Gulfer aren’t content to rest on their laurels.”
Next up is GRIP, the gorgeous new album from serpentwithfeet, which I called “more than just a showcase for the return of Black queer spaces. It’s a celebration of the relationships — passionate, platonic, lasting, fleeting, loving, lustful — that these spaces foster.”
Leed’s quartet Yard Act had to prove they were more than just a post-punk act with a sense of humour on their second album, Where’s My Utopia? Instead, frontman James Smith used the record as an opportunity to unload his overload of discontent, while keeping his wry wit intact.
Finally, I tool a deep dive on CanRock classic Clayton Park by Thrush Hermit. The record turned 25 last month and I spoke to both Joel Plaskett and Rob Benvie about the album and its legacy.
Kool Kids Recommendation Club
We live in an era where Gen Z have embraced shoegaze, a fact that is currently exploding the brains of middle-aged male gear-heads everywhere. So it should come as no surprise that there is a tidal wave of new bands playing in that sandbox. Phoenix, AZ quartet Glixen are an immediate standout, their heavy riffs and ethereal vocals snapping into focus in a genre known for being a bit seamless. My personal favourite of theirs is “Splendor,” from their recently released She Only Said EP. They’re currently on tour with Glitterer and play Toronto on March 5 at the Velvet Underground.
There’s a long history of Europeans taking American music, putting their own twist on it, and selling it back to America. Erika de Casier, a Copenhagen-based singer signed to 4AD records, takes 90s r&b, mixes in a dash of UK garage, an interpolation of British pop singer Des’ree’s mid-90s jam “You Gotta Be,” and a dash of Vanessa Carlton keys and comes up with “Lucky,” the lead singer from her third album Still. The record is a great example of Aaliyah-adjacent Y2K nostalgia, hushed vocals over flashy beats and twinkling piano. I really debated between this song and “Ice,” a she-said, they-said duet with Miami hip-hop duo They Hate Change, which if you dig “Lucky” you should also really check out.
Many readers are probably already familiar with The Last Dinner Party’s potty-mouthed song “Nothing Matters.” Their debut single, it’s massive success ensure that the London, UK band would include it on their debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy which came out last month. The grand drama of their baroque indie rock pairs well with singer Abigail Morris’ let-it-all-hang-out lyrics. The song recounts a revenge affair where the protagonist imagines her lover as her partner and herself to be their other woman because, as she says, “nothing matters.” The nihilistic take on heartbreak is a welcome change after more than a decade of crying on the dance floor bangers.
A.G. Cook is shuttering his long-running PC Music record label, but that doesn’t see the producer slowing down one bit. “BritPop,” the title track from a new album due in May, is his first new solo song since his behemoth 49-track record, 7G, and its companion record, Apple, back in 2020. The song features a chopped up vocal sample from frequent collaborator Charli XCX. There’s no indication that the track or album have anything to do with the 90s UK rock genre; if anything, this could be Cook suggesting that he (and Charli, who just announced her own new album, Brat) are in fact the new sound of BritPop. They would not be wrong…
In the early 2000s, Jimmy Eat World perfected a kind of slow motion, emotionally wrenching, cinematic epic that can function as both a terrific album closer and sync really well with teen dramadies. I have no idea if Hamilton singer-songwriter Ellis is a fan, but “obliterate me,” the first single from her upcoming album No Place That Feels Like, captures that feeling perfectly and I want more of it now. Unfortunately No Place that Feels Like isn’t out until April 26 :(
I feared that the NPR-ification of Waxahatchee would smooth over everything that was great about Katie Crutchfield’s songwriting. But “Right Back to It,” featuring Wednesday guitarist MJ Lenderman, is a stellar return for the singer-songwriter following the career altering Saint Cloud. The track is about the ebb and flow of a relationship, the way that your love for someone can waiver, but always find its way back to what drew you to them in the first place. It bodes well for Tigers Blood, out March 22
Two decades into his career, and Rollie Pemberton, aka Cadence Weapon, is busier and better than ever. Following his Polaris Music Prize winning album Parallel World, Pemberton published his memoir, Bedroom Rapper, and now he’s back with the first single from upcoming record Rollercoaster. As with most Cadence Weapon releases, it features an eclectic mix of producers whose work doesn’t necessarily lend itself to an MC rapping overtop. On “Press Eject,” produced by Toronto-based DJ GrandTheft, Pemberton threatens to opt-out of modern life, analog cassette style.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Hit up koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms and submissions.