Beatles' 'Now and Then' Makes History As First AI-Assisted Song To Earn Grammy Nomination (billboard.com) 29
"Now and Then" by the Beatles has been nominated for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance at the 2025 Grammy Awards -- marking the first time a song created with the assistance of AI has earned a Grammy nomination. From a report: When "Now and Then" first came out in late 2023, the disclosure that it was finalized utilizing AI caused an uproar. At the time, many fans assumed that the remaining Fab Four members -- Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr -- must have used generative AI to deepfake the late John Lennon. That was not actually the case. Instead, the Beatles used a form of AI known as "stem separation" to help them clean up a 60-year-old, low-fidelity demo recorded by Lennon during his lifetime and to make it useable in a finished master recording.
With stem separation, the Beatles could isolate Lennon's vocal and get rid of excess noise. Proponents of this form of technology say it has major benefits for remastering and cleaning up older catalogs. Recently, AudioShake, a leading company in this space, struck a partnership with Disney Music Group to help the media giant clean up its older catalog to "unlock new listening and fan engagement experiences" like lyric videos, film/TV licensing opportunities, re-mastering and more.
With stem separation, the Beatles could isolate Lennon's vocal and get rid of excess noise. Proponents of this form of technology say it has major benefits for remastering and cleaning up older catalogs. Recently, AudioShake, a leading company in this space, struck a partnership with Disney Music Group to help the media giant clean up its older catalog to "unlock new listening and fan engagement experiences" like lyric videos, film/TV licensing opportunities, re-mastering and more.
Not AI Assist (Score:5, Informative)
They use software to pull out vocal track from demo and do remix later.
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Grammy awards viewership (Score:2)
The Grammy awards viewership has declined by 60 percent from 2014 to 2024, coincidentally following the millennial age group's demographics.
There is an incentive to pick a mix of songs from old and new artists to maximize the Grammy ratings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The rights-holders for the Beatles and post-Beatles projects are scraping the bottom of the recording barrel to extract as much revenue as possible before their fan base is too old or expired.
Still waiting for an actual blues song artist
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They use software to pull out vocal track from demo and do remix later.
And you'd be wrong. The software used to pull the vocal track was in fact the application of an AI model trained specifically to the task of extracting Lenon's voice from a noisy background.
Hint: Not all AI is "ChatGPT: please sing me a song"
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I watched the mini documentary and in the screenshot you see the software is called the "Fab Filter".
Stem separation is a nothingburger (Score:5, Insightful)
As a musician I *deeply* dislike the sort of AI used in things like UDIO and the like. Generative slop is built on stolen art and tries to replace talent with prompts
Stem separation is not that. Its the musical equivelent of things like upscalers or whatever. Its putting nobody out of work, or acting as a substitute for talent. I have no idea how its trained, but whatever comes out is based on the musician using its own work so theres no art theft in the final result.
This isn't a problem except to people who are uncritical about clickbait.
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Generative slop is built on stolen art and tries to replace talent with prompts
If pop music wasn't already incredibly derivative and formulaic AI song generators wouldn't work at all. Really it's just that they pulled a Prometheus with these tools. Now anyone who fancies themselves a songwriter can actually hear their creation without having to pay someone to "compose" (which these days means using a loop based tool - seriously, watch how Taylor Swift has tracks produced for her) a track for it, and if you're not a particularly skilled vocalist, then paying someone else to sing it.
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I dont enjoy modern pop at all. But I can assure you if it looks easy, its only cos the people who do it are good at it.
Theres a lot of training and well practiced intuition that goes into sample based music. Its not as easy as you seem to think it is.
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Theres a lot of training and well practiced intuition that goes into sample based music. Its not as easy as you seem to think it is.
It's not easy making money. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of music theory and a decent size sample library can throw shit at the wall until enough of it sticks. Again though, I'm talking about producing something that's good enough for modern pop music, which you've just admitted you have little interest in.
It's a bit like saying ChatGPT isn't useful because it can't write anywhere near on the level of Shakespeare, but that's ignoring the fact that most writing isn't on Shakespeare's level to be
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You could probably just listen to the experience of someone who does the job instead of trying to tell them what their experience should be.
The surest possible way to end up hating your hobbies is to make them into a job. Any musician that hates the idea that machines have made song creation accessible to more people has clearly forgotten that not everyone who makes music even expects to or cares about getting paid for it.
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Get over it. You can't own styles or chords. If you write the lyrics you put enough originality in it to be interesting at least to you. And usually gen music is just listened once by the prompter. More like exploration or imagination than works for publishing. The idea of "stealing music" is nonsensical... music is meant to be sung, it's a social activity to a large degree.
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I have no idea how its trained, but whatever comes out is based on the musician using its own work so theres no art theft in the final result.
Very easy to train I imagine. Just put in a bunch of songs as input data and their stems as output data.
No idea if this is how they actually do it, but it's how I would approach the problem.
No double standard there (Score:1)
Regular person makes AI assisted song: Ineligible for copyright protection, no record label will sell it, and the internet will collectively groan "Oh no, not another person who thinks they're an artist because they wrote a prompt."
Famous musicians make AI assisted song: So brave!
See, the reason you or I can't use this stuff to make music anyone else has a chance of actually hearing isn't because it's not good enough, it's because we don't have the preexisting wealth, fame, and music industry connections.
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Good art conveys intelligence in some way. See the post above [slashdot.org] from a musician.
TL/DR: using AI to separate and clean up a performance of a human is just fine, because the human is still a contributor. But using generative AI to create something with trivial effort is sus.
Now, If a famous (or not famous) musician used generative AI to create something, I'd need to judge it based on how much of their own talent the project required. I'm not impressed with a work that relies completely on AI just for mimicry.
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Good art conveys intelligence in some way.
I've personally witnessed Taylor Swift pack a stadium so people could hear her sing "Look what you made me do". You know, that song where the entire chorus is just, you guessed it, "Look what you made me do", ad nauseum. If ChatGPT spit out something like that, I'd ask it to try again.
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I've personally witnessed non-musicians assume that musicians will consider music on the same merits they do.
Understand some basics of music theory? Written lyrics? Guess what, that meets the definition, so what we're really talking about here is: what's the difference between Suno/UDIO, some dude who said he's a musician on Slashdot (probably somewhat lacking in the fame department, I'm assuming), and Taylor Swift?
Taylor Swift has made a lot of money from her music. We could probably go into a lot of reasons for that. She comes from a wealthy family, she genuinely is a good vocalist and most her songs are cat
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I stand by my statement, Swifties notwithstanding. ;-P
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And to make things even worse.
It appears for her whole billion $ plus tour, she's been miming/lip synching the whole concert...so, all that money just to basically watch her dance around and that's it.
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It appears for [Taylor Swift's] whole billion $ plus tour, she's been miming/lip synching the whole concert...so, all that money just to basically watch her dance around and that's it.
I don't give concerts, I put on a show. -- Liberace
And at what point in history did this Liberace thing happen? Franz Liszt? Vivaldi? Earlier?
Not saying Liberace, Liszt, or Vivaldi didn't have the chops to shred like hell. Swift is talented, but I'm not sure she measures up to those others.
My take is not where an idea comes from, or even how it is rendered, but rather how it is used by an artist to express something.
Re: No double standard there (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s not really the same AI, in fact itâ(TM)s just more and more computers being smart.
Generative AI is its own thing, it isnâ(TM)t the same as AI capable of isolating sounds that humans canâ(TM)t.
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AI didn’t create anything in this instance. They used it to isolate and clean up the vocal tracks from a poor quality cassette. I’m happy they were able to pull it off and give us one final Beatles song. The George Harrison guitar tracks were recorded in the 90s but the technology wasn’t available at the time to isolate Lennon’s vocals.
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You're right, no double standard there. The AI assisted songs ineligible for copyright protection are generative. There was nothing generative here. An AI model was used for noise reduction. That's Lennon's original voice in the recording.
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Well we have had this discussion in the visual art world every since Du Champ, gave us 'Fountain' or maybe before with Rothko did some of those colored box abstracts.
Part of why those works were accepted I think isn't just that those men were already somewhat famous, but that they had demonstrated master level ability in works that were more traditional already. When you have alredy proven you can paint something like 'Nude Descending a Staircase', 'hack' and 'pretender' are not really criticisms anyone can
That's obviously incorrect (Score:2)
At the time, many fans assumed that the remaining Fab Four members -- Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr
EXCEPT that everyone knows that Paul is dead.
Just look at the cover of Abbey Road.
Or the lyrics of I Am The Walrus.
Or listen to his last few albums.
Paul is dead!