Music

Green Day’s Dookie is 30 years old — I’ll give my fellow millennials a moment to gather themselves — and to celebrate the band is releasing demastered tracks available on everything from a toothbrush to a Game Boy cartridge. Unfortunately they’re tough to buy (each track is only available via a drawing) but you can at least listen to them all right here.

Some turned out great, but others highlight just how messy this technology is, according to Pitchfork. From Shaad D’Souza’s review:

AI is simply another tool that will sometimes be used badly and sometimes be used well, and on Honey I think it’s used well—to complicate and expand the abilities of an artist well into his career, whose creative impulses can no longer be entirely satiated through the means previously available to him. There is one exception: The rap verse on “Campfire” is also Snaith, and it edges toward racial ambiguity in a way that feels queasy. At best, it’s a misguided experiment; at worst, outright minstrelsy.

Thanks to enthusiasts at minidisc.wiki, you can still add songs to a MiniDisc from a modern computer using its web app. Which means we live in a world where a Pixel 9 Pro can talk to a MiniDisc player from 2002.

For another 8 hours or so, it’s still time for the monthly event where Bandcamp foregoes its revenue split with artists. It’s also now a sponsored event if that matters to you, but the music probably still sounds the same.

So said Daniel Plasche, co-director of a Berlin venue, while talking to The New York Times about the club’s decision to follow other nightclubs by putting stickers on customers’ smartphone camera lenses.

“There is something unifying, ritualistic about the dance floor,” he added, but the atmosphere was ruined when people use their phones to take images that “they will never look at again, anyways.”

Magnopus helped make recent Metallica and Karol G Fortnite concerts.

The service will be shut down on November 28th according to a post on the streaming site, with subscription renewals being automatically canceled.

TikTok Music launched in 2023 as a rival to services like Spotify and Apple Music, but was only available in Indonesia, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and Mexico. Users have until October 28th to transfer their TikTok Music playlists to other platforms.

It’s the latest addition to the company’s Aira line of portable music makers and is primarily designed as a sampler allowing musicians to record and edit up to 48 samples and piece them together into a song with a 64 step sequencer.

It features a built-in mic, inputs for attaching higher quality microphones, and costs $220.

Grant Kirkhope created music for games like Donkey Kong 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, but they’ve returned to what is probably their most recognizable work with an HD version of GoldenEye 007’s pause screen soundtrack.

It’s now available on Spotify or Apple Music and uses the same samples as the original, but without the N64’s aggressive audio compression.

The fraud was less about all the fake bands releasing fake songs created in partnership with an unnamed exec at an AI music company, and more about the many, many accounts he made to stream all of his AI tunes on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music in order to get paid.

Impressively, he was ahead of the AI hype. His scheme started in 2017.

Kamala Harris is the latest participant on Track Star, a TikTok game show where players identify a song for money.

Internet shows like Track Star are a new kind of media circuit for public figures. Democrats want these viral moments — and they’re trying hard to make them happen.

The music producer recently confirmed that he composed two ringtones for Apple: “Daybreak” and “Chalet”. The tones were released back in 2019 putting them on iOS version 13 and later. Both tones have a relaxing vibe to them that would have fit right in with Flylo’s Adult Swim bumps that rewired an entire generation’s musical tastes...or at least just mine.

Colombian singer-songwriter Karol G will be the star of Fortnite Festival’s fifth season, which launches tomorrow. Like with other Festival seasons, there will be themed items based on the artist that you can acquire.

Epic Games also will be hosting a playable Karol G concert inside Fortnite (made by Magnopus, the team behind the recent Metallica show) that debuts on August 23rd.

The new store lets “a select number” of Next Pro artists design merch that SoundCloud will create and sell for them, all while artists collect 100 percent of the profits. So far, the SoundCloud Store features merch from artists like Wiz Khalifa, Denzel Curry, Bktherula, and others.

Panasonic resurrected the legendary Technics 1200 turntable eight years ago, but Tamás Borján’s version will appeal to both nostalgic DJs and Lego fans.

This 2,215-piece Technics SL-1200 MK2 won’t actually play records but it’s got a motorized platter that spins, a movable tone arm with an adjustable counter balance, and a sliding pitch fader.

The EP-1320 “instrumentalis electronicum” is preloaded with Dark Ages instruments and effects, including the hurdy gurdy, gittern, tambour, plus swordfights and “two separate witches.”

Yes, it’s an even-less-scrutable version of the EP-133 sampler I couldn’t make hide nor hair of, but sore tempted am I to drop $299 and annoy the hell out of my D&D group.

Responding to the RIAA’s copyright lawsuit, AI songmaker sites defended their models as being like kids learning rock and roll or tools enabling creativity. Country artist Tift Merritt had a different take after being shown a song AI music generator Udio spat out when prompted to mimic her style:

... the “imitation” Udio created “doesn’t make the cut for any album of mine.”

“This is a great demonstration of the extent to which this technology is not transformative at all ... It’s stealing.”

I had similar thoughts back in March.

The new video for Porter Robinson’s “Easier to Love You” features some gorgeous animation, courtesy director Tomoyasu Murata. It’s almost enough to make you forget how sad it is. (For those unfamiliar with his work, check out this interview I did with Robinson back in 2022.)

Splice got itself in some trouble a couple weeks ago when it issued a YouTube copyright strike against Krystle Delgado, a music attorney who showed one of the company’s sample licenses on screen. Splice wised up and retracted the strike last week, CEO Kakul Srivastava tell me. “We fundamentally support the rights of creators to express themselves – even if we disagree,” she wrote in an email to Delgado.

For her part, Delgado confirmed that the strike was indeed retracted by YouTube, and tells me that she wishes she could have spoken to to Srivastava directly before Splice’s lawyers escalated the situation.

As always, I will remind everyone that copyright law is the only functional speech regulation on the internet, and using it to chill speech or block criticism never tends to go well!

The star takes the electric SUV through a cinematic montage of situations to the sounds of Training Season — while explaining how she’d direct a Porsche commercial in ways that “Porsche guys” wouldn’t.

A new approach to marketing the Macan makes sense, considering recent Taycan sales numbers ahead of that SUV’s impending refresh.

Apple Music Classical now has a Top 100 chart. A collection of keyboard concertos composed by Johann Sebastian Bach is at number one, followed by recordings of Johannes Brahms-composed symphonies.

Apple updates placement on Mondays, using data from Apple Music / Music Classical, iTunes, and Shazam, according to MacRumors.

The streaming music service has launched a new Parental Guide detailing its tools for managing your kids’ listening habits as well as its efforts to keep the platform safe.

Spotify’s actual parental controls are limited to filtering out explicit content and controlling the playback of certain artists. For a fully curated experience, you’ll need to spring for Spotify Kids, which is part of the Premium Family package.

House music and technology are my two favorite things, and finally, I’ve found a way to write about them both.

Thanks to the CrowdStrike fail that caused chaos in systems across the globe, a DJ named Chris Lake is facing challenges with his concert in New York tonight. One of the DJs, Andruss, can’t make it, so they’ve had to adjust the lineup to fill his spot.