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Warner Music Signs Record Deal With an Algorithm (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Last week, a press release went out to tech and music reporters claiming that little-known startup Endel had become the "first-ever algorithm to sign [a] major label deal" with Warner Music. The news was covered widely, with commentators tossing around phrases like "the end is nigh" while hand-wringing over the idea of coders coming for musicians' label contracts. But the press release wasn't exactly right, and questions about the future of music are even bigger than anyone thought. Endel is an app that generates reactive, personalized "soundscapes" to promote things like focus or relaxation. It takes in data like your location, time, and the weather to create these soundscapes, and the result is not quite "musical" in the traditional sense. It's ambient, layering in things like washed-out white noise and long string notes. It's the type of stuff that's exploded on streaming platforms in recent years under newly invented genre names like "sleep."
Although Endel signed a deal with Warner, the deal is crucially not for "an algorithm," and Warner is not in control of Endel's product. The label approached Endel with a distribution deal and Endel used its algorithm to create 600 short tracks on 20 albums that were then put on streaming services, returning a 50 / 50 royalty split to Endel. Unlike a typical major label record deal, Endel didn't get any advance money paid upfront, and it retained ownership of the master recordings. Even if Endel had signed over the masters, the company could easily just make more: Dmitry Evgrafov, Endel's composer and head of sound design, says all 600 tracks were made "with a click of a button." There was minimal human involvement outside of chopping up the audio and mastering it for streaming. Endel even hired a third-party company to write the track titles. Five Endel albums have already been released, and 15 more are coming this year — all of which will be generated by code. In the future, Endel will be able to make infinite ambient tracks.
Although Endel signed a deal with Warner, the deal is crucially not for "an algorithm," and Warner is not in control of Endel's product. The label approached Endel with a distribution deal and Endel used its algorithm to create 600 short tracks on 20 albums that were then put on streaming services, returning a 50 / 50 royalty split to Endel. Unlike a typical major label record deal, Endel didn't get any advance money paid upfront, and it retained ownership of the master recordings. Even if Endel had signed over the masters, the company could easily just make more: Dmitry Evgrafov, Endel's composer and head of sound design, says all 600 tracks were made "with a click of a button." There was minimal human involvement outside of chopping up the audio and mastering it for streaming. Endel even hired a third-party company to write the track titles. Five Endel albums have already been released, and 15 more are coming this year — all of which will be generated by code. In the future, Endel will be able to make infinite ambient tracks.
If two algorithms come up with similar tracks can one sue the other for similarities? If math is the influence can an algorithm claim rights to sound and other distinct elements?
How do you program play it sadly with a glimmer of hope. Or happy with a sense of lost.
You don't, and society will be conditioned to accept this "new normal".
Generations from now, old music will be rediscovered and only then perhaps there's be another renaissance in discovering what it means to embrace the human element...again.
Life is not for the lazy.
It is unfair to compare current popular music, with long standing classics.
Why? Because there is a ton of old music that was pure crap too. So now we are comparing the last decade of popular music, against the last hundred years for modern music, and music spanning 500+ years, for the classics.
That is 500 years and we have a library of a thousand songs, and some of these classic songs we collected were not even popular back in the day.
The Pop radio stations play the top songs of the past 5 years, the Oldies station plays the top songs of the past 50 years, It is easy to feel like the new stuff doesn't stand up to the stuff in the past, but there have been generations of crap, that we have forgotten.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
" It takes in data like your location, time, and the weather to create these soundscapes, and the result is not quite "musical" in the traditional sense"
Douglas Adams has prior art circa 1987:
https://dirkgently.fandom.com/wiki/Richard_MacDuff_(Adams)
After leaving Cambridge, he was poor for three years. During that time he had a number of different jobs, one of which was a road sweeper; at night on his own time, he worked on his computer.[1]
Richard then became a programmer at Gordon Way's WayForward Technologies. Gordon assigned him to write an accounting program for the Apple Macintosh. This became Anthem, which on top of its accouning functions could turn the spreadsheet numbers into music pieces.[1]
He wrote an article titled "Music and Fractal Landscapes", which was published in Fathom.[1]