Operating Vocaloid, by comparison, is like learning to pilot a submarine. It requires an enormous amount of practice and specific expertise to utilize the software effectively.
If this happened, he believed creators would become highly motivated to feature Miku in their own works in order to expose them to her audience
Miku’s self-replicating fame would then provide Crypton with innumerable opportunities to make money licensing her image and selling official merchandise.
She is not a digital facsimile of record industry superstars like Elvis Presley. She is something entirely different. Miku’s business model is a new development, one that is inseperable from the Vocaloid technology she emerged from. The onerous, specialized nature of that software has so far prevented others from replicating her success. That is, at least, until last month.
• Lyrics shifted from simple to complex. • Lyrics shifted from sentimental or romantic to harsh and realistic. • Voices shifted from smooth and mellow to harsh and naturalistic (Bing Crosby became Bob Dylan or Rod Stewart). • Articulation shifted from clear and accessible to difficult and sometimes obscured
Once records, rather than songbooks, became the primary means through which the mass audience bought songs, live performers had to start focusing on recreating the exact sound of specific recordings onstage rather than interpreting a piece of sheet music in their own style.
Audiences became very interested in the specific creative decisions and personal stories of individual performers rather than the broad, accessible songwriting favored by Tin Pan Alley
Crowd-pleasing crooners like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, who made a living singing everything the audience wanted to hear with no complaints, were replaced in the firmament by complicated, difficult singer/songwriters like Bob Dylan who resented feeling pressured to play anything they didn’t want to
The notion of a special, unique talent who makes recordings of themselves for a living made the most sense in the sixties, when vinyl albums could move millions of units at a price point equivalent to sixty dollars in today’s money. Does it still make sense now that everything about the way music is made, distributed, marketed, and sold has completely changed?
business. She doesn’t work for fans anymore. Our collective desire to see what she will do next is functionally just a bargaining chip in negotiations with the only audience that really matters anymore: multinational corporations like Disney, which owns both the Black Panther franchise and the broadcast network on which the Super Bowl airs.
Predictive text generators may be able to spit out legible rhyming couplets, but they cannot write hooks. Entirely different disciplines.
The narrative being advanced by “Heart On My Sleeve” is a story about control of Drake’s voice being handed over to the open market, where anyone can use it to say anything. Does he want that? Should he? Should you?
He figured out the recipe before anyone else: long albums, to monopolize as much of the listener’s time as possible before the algorithm sends them off to hear someone else’s record. Soothing, atmospheric production that doesn’t grate the way the bright, thrillingly annoying hooks of the radio era did. Emotionally ambiguous lyrics and melodies that feel appropriate in a variety of contexts. Melodic, digitally-processed vocals that locate a comfortable middle ground between rapping and singing.
Drake’s formula — long, atmospheric, emotionally ambiguous albums — was optimized for the streaming platform’s incentive structure. The question is what form will emerge when the next transition arrives: collectively generated music, where anyone can produce it. Each distribution shift (sheet music → radio → vinyl → streaming) has demanded a new aesthetic form. The next one will too.Pusha’s attacks on Drake became mainstream talking points because his social proximity to Drake gave his accusations credibility. He claimed to know things about Drake that the general public did not, and was able to use this information to control the conversations about Drake that were taking place on gossip blogs and social media.
The legend of Drake’s ghostwriter was now inexorably part of his story.
Pusha presented it without explanation, prompting Drake’s fans to wonder what other skeletons might still be locked away in his closet.
Drake’s talks with Adidas fell apart in the aftermath. When asked about the dissolution of the deal directly, Pusha described himself as a “gatekeeper” of the practice of corporations like Adidas “embracing tastemakers and that whole energy.”
Pusha T positions himself not as someone advancing the art form but as a “gatekeeper” of corporate partnership — his value defined by proximity to the changing tide, not by creative contribution. When the relevant skillset shifts from making music to brokering deals, the artist’s self-description follows.He could transition from being a recording artist into something more like a landlord, renting out his own voice to aspiring record producers. Though this sort of business model has no precedent in the western record business, the artist-as-platform model has been powering Hatsune Miku’s success in the Japanese market for over fifteen years
A constant flood of new, low-effort Drakeface content on streaming platforms would undermine Drake Prime’s efforts to make his own official new releases feel like events, which would in turn make it harder for him to promote concert tours and sell merchandise.
The power to force those storylines into the mainstream used to be limited to insiders like Pusha T and Meek Mill, but the platform model could let anyone participate
In order to understand if the platform model would be good for an artist like Drake, we have to look at the impact it would have on each one of these sources of income.
In a curation-driven future, listeners hold the power to cast an artist’s work in their own narrative — the listener becomes the taste curator. This may not generate more revenue for artists, but it does generate more narrative material for them to draw from. The tension: if AI can also craft the artist’s storyline, the artist loses control of their own mythology. Streaming platforms are already moving toward live events and merch as revenue sources, but the deeper shift is who controls the story.the artist-as-platform model likely wouldn’t increase Drake’s publishing income. Ghostwriter, for example, used Drake’s voice on an original composition. Whoever wrote the song would be the one receiving royalties through their publisher, not Drake.
will audiences still pay premium prices to see him? Will they expect him to sing viral Vocaloid hits that he had no direct involvement in creating?
Aubrey Graham might not make a dime from any of it. The platform model would work best for artists who are unwilling or unable to tour.
The merch on his official website is sorted by album, which implies that fans are primarily motivated to purchase Drake-branded apparel based on their attachment to specific recordings
Fan attachment to specific recordings is narrative-driven — the album serves as a chapter in the artist’s story. The open question: when name and likeness become raw material for anyone to use, narrative itself is commoditized. The album-as-chapter model breaks when anyone can write new chapters.It continues to be the case that in streaming era, recording income is much lower than in the physical music era. Many big artists can scarcely be bothered to chase after it anymore,
The platform model would need to do an enormous amount of heavy lifting just to make recordings appealing as a revenue stream again, and that’s assuming it wouldn’t also do irreperable harm to the other pillars of a traditional recording artist’s business in the process
“artist careers” have been driven by scarcity since the dawn of the recorded music era itself. As a society, we simply did not care so much about individual performers until after recordings became the primary way we all engage with music.
This is what advocates of “AI” are pushing for when they call for established artists to “open-source” their names, voices, and likenesses. They don’t understand how any of this works, and they don’t want to. They’re just here to break things. It’s all they know how to do.
Music streaming as we currently understand it is just a tourniquet, a way for the record industry to temporarily stop the bleeding while it waits for help to arrive.
The less valuable recordings are, the less special artists become.
I wonder if people are getting tired of artists. It certainly does seem like artists are getting tired of increasing pressure to justify their own existence for steadily diminishing returns
What if artists could be replaced with a type of performer that was designed from the ground up to be responsive to the audience’s desires?
. Performers who always look exactly the way audiences expect them to, who always smile and do elaborate choreography onstage. Performers who never age or self-destruct. Eternally youthful teenage pop idols that never say “no” unless that’s what the customer specifically asked for
The vision of eternally compliant virtual performers assumes the artist’s value lies in records and identity — output and brand. But humans crave something that speaks to them, and the deeper function of an artist may be connection between people, not performance for them. If the replacement model optimizes for compliance rather than connection, it solves the wrong problem.This thirst for new, more profitable models to replace the traditional “recording artist” career is not unique to Britney’s abusers. It fueled the major labels’ uncritical embrace of half-baked tech fads like the NFT mania of twenty twenty-two, as well as their controversial dalliance with the “virtual rapper” FN Meka
He cut those early small band records as a side project in between the live dates that actually paid his bills. Records were still a niche product compared to sheet music, and “race records” were among the most popular records on the market. For fans of this music, these records provided an extremely welcome alternative to what the publishing ecosystem was offering.
Before the advent of radio, Tin Pan Alley relied heavily on vaudeville performers to turn new songs into hits, which often meant penning the nostalgic ballads that minstrels used to make their noxious case to audiences that everything was better and simpler back in the good old days.
Tin Pan Alley’s hit-making machinery depended on vaudeville performances rooted in minstrelsy — blackface performers (often Irish immigrants) subjugating Black culture for white audiences. The recording era’s shift to authenticity disrupted this model by making it possible for Black artists to control their own representation.This is why Armstrong loved to record himself and the other important people in his life. He believed recordings would allow them to be remembered as they actually were. As long as his recordings endured, he thought, ignorant whites wearing cartoonish disguises would never be able to twist his story into a narrative that reinforces the lie of white supremacy.
His life and works would never become raw material for propaganda designed to undermine his very humanity. “Authenticity” is treated like more of an abstract concept in music today, but to Armstrong, it was all-important. To him, the idea that authenticity matters was the silver bullet that killed the minstrel tradition. Ever since then, Black music has been America’s most beloved and significant cultural export. It’s basically the only thing the rest of the world likes about us, and they experience it primarily through records.
Authenticity killed minstrelsy, but the Black music that replaced it also became a vehicle for exporting American materialism and the brokenness of urban life. Authenticity is not a pure good — it can proliferate the very capitalism and consumer culture that Armstrong’s recordings were meant to transcend. The export is double-edged.Armstrong’s tapes make it clear that he was deeply concerned with the racism he encountered in the entertainment business. As such, I have to wonder how he would respond if it were explained to him that in the future, his vast archive of homemade tapes and professional recordings could be used to create a digital facsimile of his voice
That some anonymous figure literally wearing a white sheet to conceal their identity has already done this two of the pre-eminent Black entertainers of our time.
What would someone who experienced the liberatory potential of new technology on that level think about all of this? Would it look like progress to him, or just an elaborate way to bring minstrelsy back?
