Warner Music Signs Record Deal With an Algorithm (theverge.com) 52
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.
Old news (Score:1)
https://sp.wmg.jp/mikusymphony... [sp.wmg.jp]
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https://www.youtube.com/channe... [youtube.com]
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OK, I just skimmed through the top 10 tracks on that page. They are all 99% the exact same thing. A gentle hum that gets louder, some white noise comes into the background, a few more similar notes are played, and then it fades out at 2:30 +/- 10 seconds. This is stupid
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I could see using this so that if anyone uploaded a video that has any white noise in it whatsoever, it would get copyright striked
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Well I for one welcome our new soundscape-composing algorithmic overlords.
Seriously, I think it sounds very nice. The tracks do have a strong similarity, and I don't think it helps that they're all in the same key. But they are intended to be ambient music, with ambiguous ephemeral chord-progressions. They kind of remind me of Brian Eno, with some touches of Sigur Ros.
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Being that the Music industry controls the distribution of music, most music performed by musicians with an exclusive contract with a record label, means they will not be a legal outlet of their music on a service that the record label doesn't approve. Because the companies goal is to make money, they are not going to be giving free music away. Music will either be.
1. Live performance: paid by ticket holders, or a patron (a person or group)
2: Broadcast/Streamed: paid by advertising or service fees
3. Fare
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You forgot to shout "You kids get off my lawn" !
Apropos of nothing: (Score:2)
Law without mercy is not justice.
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Al Gore Rhythms will revolutionize the Interwebs!!
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It'll never happen. Al Gore Rythm only has one song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Older news (Score:4, Interesting)
" 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]
No such luck (Score:1)
Finally I can be a rockstar!
On a more serious note, only simple and repetitive music can be replaced by algorithms within any reasonable timeframe. In programming terms, if (map {/Oh baby baby/} @song > 50), chances are you can automate it, because it didn't take any brainpower to generate in the first place. Good luck getting an algorithm to create Mozart's Reqiuem or even Paggliaci. High quality music will remain purely in the domain of human ingenuity for the foreseeable future.
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It seems that you haven't studied much of music theory.
The key component to most music (including your "High Quality" Music) is the following formula. Set a Pattern, deviate from the pattern, go back to the pattern (often with elements of your deviation). Western Music hasn't changed much in the past 500 years.
What the human is stilled needed is arrangement and performance.
While a computer can read the notes and play them accurately, they don't have the degree of emotion put into the music. How do you pro
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All the theory in the world won't help you to create good and/or interesting music.
The algorithm you described is exactly the method to create bland and uninspired works. It takes genius to break those rules to make true art.
If anything your description shows that most music produced by the industry is overrated shit.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No such luck (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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This. What you described is known as survivorship bias. [wikipedia.org]
Re: No such luck (Score:1)
I don't. I'll just make an AI to make some dubstep tracks.
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You don't seem to understand what pattern means. It can be something trivially easy, or it can be something far more complex. A deviation from the pattern can be simple, or it can be a torrent of differences. Explaining music as "Taxi driver in Calcutta is the same as Lacrimosa because they both have patterns and deviations" is far from insightful.
Explaining all western music as "set pattern, deviate from pattern" is true in the sense that it's accurate for an unknown pattern and deviation, but it is so far
Music from an algorithm ?!? (Score:3)
music is mathematics put to sound (Score:2)
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And still can't make music.
the lawsuits will be better than the music (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
It wasn't supposed to. (Score:1)
Anything programmatically generated was supposed to be uncopyrightable, except if it could be shown that the majority of the work was by human creativity/labor, not the result of the algorithm itself. In this Brave New World however, anything can be copyrighted or patented, as long as it is by a corporation or wealthy individual and not by a pleb.
Maybe it is time to generate an open source algorithmic generator with values a human has to input, then crowdsource the 'clearcutting of the intellectual commons'
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I was thinking along similar lines, but didn't want to give anyone more bad ideas.
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one more bit from some post comment reading. The from the copyright act has an explicit statement that offers some guidance here:
Creativity
Finally, copyright requires some minimal amount of creativity. All that is required is for the work to possess some creative spark, no matter how crude, humble, or obvious it might be. Creativity is the big question here. The Next Rembrandt was not painted by a human, but by a computer, and computers aren’t creative, at least until we have sentient artificial inte
Think I agree with one of the commenters.... (Score:2)
On the original site, a comment points out how this is probably a bad deal for the creator/owner of the music, considering there's no advance paid out. With that royalty split arrangement, he stands to make a lot less profit than he would have by just cranking out music "with the click of a button" ease and putting it on streaming sites himself. Why get signed to a label at all?
This is more a publicity stunt than a lucrative deal for the artist OR for Warner Music, really (since this stuff isn't getting dow
And what's iold is new (Score:2)
This seems like the reimagining of Echoes from the 80s-90s [echoes.org]
I bet it sounds like it too, except maybe for the Enya tracks back then. And they did turn me on to space music, electronica, and trance. Pretty sure my MiniDisc player was loafing through these tracks...
Oh, yeah, that's where I've heard this before. Trance.
So? (Score:2)
Considering that all music kinda sounds the same by now anyway, why not let mainstream music be created by algorithm and let musicians concentrate on making music?
Algorithms cannot sign anything (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Captain Pedantic here. I know what they meant but an algorithm cannot sign a deal of any sort. Only people can sign deals. The owner of the algorithm can sign a deal but the algorithm cannot legally, physically, or logically sign any contract except under human supervision. Warner signed a deal with the developers/owners of said algorithm, not the algorithm itself.
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But "some guy's music" won't get us clicks. Don't you know anything about shitty, sensationalized bait? Think McFly, think!
Rent seeking profiteering (Score:1)
1. Generates 100,000,000 tracks of "music"
2. Put them inside some music repository that nobody f*cking going to listen
3. Use algorithm and find EVERY other new song/music that contains part of the tempo that turn popular
4. Sued the artist for profit.
Slashdot Phones it in Again (Score:2)
Heaven forbid you read the thing before you post it. "Warner Music Signs Record Deal With an Algorithm" --> "the deal is crucially not for "an algorithm,"
Actually, seems like the future (Score:2)
I think signing a record deal with an algorithm is actually a good idea, and potentially the future.
Imagine if you will, that someday you could purchase access to competing algorithms that generate music. Such a thing could be downloaded locally, or streamed from the cloud, and you could tailor what music it made for you - like asking it to generate a song like something Zero7 would make, or to generate an ambient ever changing stream of music, that tried to keep your heart rate in a certain range and woul
'Dance music' at best (yuck) (Score:2)
Why has this taken so long? (Score:2)