By Will McCurdy, PC Mag | Paul McCartney has said that AI could “rip off” future generations of musicians, the BBC reports. McCartney is one of two surviving members of The Beatles, who sold over 1 billion records and were one of the most popular musical groups of all time.
“You get young guys, girls, coming up, and they write a beautiful song, and they don’t own it,” he said on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. “They don’t have anything to do with it. And anyone who wants can just rip it off.
“The truth is, the money’s going somewhere. Somebody’s getting paid, so why shouldn’t it be the guy who sat down and wrote ‘Yesterday?’,” a reference to one of The Beatles hit songs.
The UK government is currently consulting on a scheme that would allow AI companies to scrape content from publishers and artists to train their models unless they “opt-out.” The proposal has already seen significant opposition from some members of the UK creative industries, who have dubbed it unfair.
McCartney was clear about his thoughts on the topic, saying: “We’re the people, you’re the government! You’re supposed to protect us. That’s your job.”
He added the government needs to “protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not going to have them.”
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But The Beatles themselves haven’t been above using AI to create music; in 2023 they used AI software to take deceased Beatle John Lennon’s vocals from a low-quality demo and revamped it into a fully fledged new track.
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Read more of what Paul had to say here:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/former-beatle-paul-mccartney-says-ai-could-rip-off-future-generations-of-musicians/
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Beatles Are a Big Story Ahead of the 2025 Grammys:Could the Beatles win another Grammy?
By Greg Walker, AudioPhix
In 1964, the Beatles earned their first Grammy with Best Performance By A Vocal Group for the song “A Hard Day’s Night,” along with a Best New Artist Grammy, the first of seven wins and 25 nominations with the Academy. Almost fifty years later, they’re competing for a Grammy in 2025: Record of the Year.
It’s up against some steep competition, with Beyonce’s “Texas Hold ‘Em,” Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” which Trent Reznor said was his song of the year at this year’s Golden Globes, and other hit songs by Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, and Chappell Roan. But there’s a chance!
The song, “Now and Then,” which was originally written in ballad form by John Lennon around 1977 as a solo home recording, was considered for release as a single on 1980’s Anthology, after Lennon’s death. But that never materialized.
With new technology, the Beatles were able to bring an old song to life.
In the late 1990s, the remaining Beatles gathered again to try and make the single a reality, but they were not happy with how much background sound there was on Lennon’s vocal track. (The sound of his television playing was purportedly gumming up the works.)
Almost three decades later, after George had also died, the remaining Beatles were able to figure it out. After Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back, which used “machine-learning assisted audio restoration technology” to isolate tracks, they had the proper technology to give the single a fighting chance.
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Read more on this technique here:
https://audiophix.com/beatles-are-big-story-ahead-of-2025-grammys
Photo: Paul McCartney |
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