Lyle Lovett

[ed. Live version here.]

Suno: The AI Music Race is Over

Video: Rick Beato

[ed. See also: The Truth About AI Music (Rowland's newsletter).]

For someone as profoundly unmusical as me, AI music generators are quite magical. I can barely sing a note, but in a few seconds I can make an entire track in any genre on any topic I want – like this soul song about Sky camera operator Phil Hooper. You can dismiss this as pure silliness for an audience of about five, but to me that’s the point! Thanks to AI, I get a little bit of musical joy that otherwise is completely out of reach.

Yet, as ever with technology, removing friction comes with a cost, and in this case the cost is a tsunami of musical spam. The stats on AI music are mind-boggling. In 2015, the entire US music industry made around 57,000 songs. Today, 60,000 AI tracks are uploaded to Deezer (aka French Spotify) *every single day* - that’s 21m a year, and this thing is just getting going.

The real problem isn’t the tracks, however, but the behaviour around them, because AI music is being used to try and steal from streamers (and by extension every legitimate musician on the site). Deezer estimate that 85% of listens to AI music are fraudulent – that is, made by bots set to stream the songs over and over in order to siphon royalties from the common pool. 

[ed. Do check out the soul song example mentioned above (with this accompanying video). Pretty scary... and sad.]

Brian Culbertson (feat. Mike Stern)

The Ravyns

Hawaiian Slack Key

(and, let no good deed go unpunished)

The Irsay Collection/Auction

Kurt Cobain’s famed Fender is part of $1 billion collection going to auction

In the summer of 1991, Nirvana filmed the music video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on a Culver City sound stage. Kurt Cobain strummed the grunge anthem’s iconic four-chord opening riff on a 1969 Fender Mustang, Lake Placid Blue with a signature racing stripe.

Nearly 35 years later, the six-string relic hung on a gallery wall at Christie’s in Beverly Hills as part of a display of late billionaire businessman Jim Irsay’s world-renowned guitar collection, which heads to auction at Christie’s, New York, beginning Tuesday. Each piece in the Beverly Hills gallery, illuminated by an arched spotlight and flanked by a label chronicling its history, carried the aura of a Renaissance painting.

Irsay’s billion-dollar guitar arsenal, crowned “The Greatest Guitar Collection on Earth” by Guitar World magazine, is the focal point of the Christie’s auction, which has split approximately 400 objects — about half of which are guitars — into four segments: the “Hall of Fame” group of anchor items, the “Icons of Pop Culture” class of miscellaneous memorabilia, the “Icons of Music” mixed batch of electric and acoustic guitars and an online segment that compiles the remainder of Irsay’s collection. The online sale, featuring various autographed items, smaller instruments and historical documents, features the items at the lowest price points.

A portion of auction proceeds will be donated to charities that Irsay supported during his lifetime.

Cobain’s Fender was only one of the music history treasures nestled in Christie’s gallery. A few paces away, Jerry Garcia’s “Budman” amplifier, once part of the Grateful Dead’s three-story high “Wall of Sound,” perched atop a podium. Just past it lay the Beatles logo drum head (estimated between $1 million and $2 million) used for the band’s debut appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” which garnered a historic 73 million viewers and catalyzed the British Invasion. Pencil lines were still visible beneath the logo’s signature “drop T.” [ed. Also includes Eric Clapton's Martin acoustic guitar used on 'Unplugged'].

It is exceptionally rare for even one such artifact to go to market, let alone a billion-dollar group of them at once, Walker said. But a public sale enabling many to participate and demonstrate the “true market value” of these objects is what Irsay would have wanted, she added.

Dropping tens of millions of dollars on pop culture memorabilia may seem an odd hobby for an NFL general manager, yet Irsay viewed collecting much like he viewed leading the Indianapolis Colts.

Irsay, the youngest NFL general manager in history, said in a 2014 Colts Media interview that watching and emulating the legendary NFL owners who came before him “really taught me to be a steward.”

“Ownership is a great responsibility. You can’t buy respect,” he said. “Respect only comes from you being a steward.”

The first major acquisition in Irsay’s collection came in 2001, with his $2.4-million purchase of the original 120-foot scroll for Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel, “On the Road.” He loved the book and wanted to preserve it, Walker said. But he also frequently lent it out, just like he regularly toured his guitar collection beginning 20 years later.

“He said publicly, ‘I’m not the owner of these things. I’m just that current custodian looking after them for future generations,’ ” Walker said. “And I think that’s what true collectors always say.”

At its L.A. highlight exhibition, Irsay’s collection held an air of synchronicity. Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics for “Hey Jude” hung just a few steps from a promotional poster — the only one in existence — for the 1959 concert Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were en route to perform when their plane crashed. The tragedy spurred Don McLean to write “American Pie,” about “the day the music died.”

Holly was McCartney’s “great inspiration,” Christie’s specialist Zita Gibson said. “So everything connects.”

Later, the Beatles’ 1966 song “Paperback Writer” played over the speakers near-parallel to the guitars the song was written on. [...]

Another fan-favorite is the “Wilson” volleyball from 2000’s “Cast Away,” starring Tom Hanks, estimated between $60,000 and $80,000, Gibson said.

Historically, such objects were often preserved by accident. But as the memorabilia market has ballooned over the last decade or so, Gibson said, “a lot of artists are much more careful about making sure that things don’t get into the wrong hands. After rehearsals, they tidy up after themselves.”

by Malia Mendez, Los Angeles Times/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image:Cover Images/ZUMA Press/TNS
[ed. Mentioned this in a previous post but still can't believe what's here.]

Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer

Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer. He precisely controlled modulation and feedback loops (IEEE Spectrum).

Image: James Provost

[ed. Everything was new and primitive back then. Jimi pushed these new tools to their limits.]

Tom Bukovac And Guthrie Trapp

Nashville Cats

[ed. Two of the best. Also really love this recording of a song with Nashville session players and Bukovac handling guitar duties.]

Well, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar pickers in Nashville
And they can pick more notes than the number of ants
On a Tennessee anthill
Yeah, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar cases in Nashville
And any one that unpacks 'is guitar could play
Twice as better than I will

                           ~ John Sebastian

Eric Escanes

The Jim Irsay Collection: Auction

Eric Clapton: The Martin 000-42 Acoustic Guitar Used For His Acclaimed Appearance on MTV Unplugged, 1992.
C.F. Martin & Company, Nazareth, Pennsylvannia, 1939

via: Christies Jim Irsay Collection: Hall of Fame

[ed. Insane music memorabilia auction.]

Jalen Ngonda

[ed. Kid's got some real Motown vibes.]

Ani DiFranco

Grey

... the sky is grey, the sand is grey, and the ocean is grey. i feel right at
home in this stunning monochrome, alone in my way. i smoke and i drink and
every time i blink i have a tiny dream. but as bad as i am i'm proud of the
fact that i'm worse than i seem... what kind of paradise am i looking for? i've
got everything i want and still i want more. maybe some tiny shiny thing will
wash up on the shore... you walk through my walls like a ghost on tv. you
penetrate me and my little pink heart is on its little brown raft floating out
to sea. and what can i say but i'm wired this way and you're wired to me, and
what can i do but wallow in you unintentionally?... what kind of paradise am i
looking for? i've got everything i want and still i want more. maybe some tiny
shiny key will wash up on the shore... regretfully, i guess i've got three
simple things to say. why me? why this now? why this way? overtone's ringing,
undertow's pulling away under a sky that is grey on sand that is grey by an
ocean that's grey. what kind of paradise am i looking for? i've got everything
i want and still i want more. maybe some tiny shiny key will wash up on the
shore...

[ed. Live version here.]

Bad Bunny Goes to the Super Bowl

Bad Bunny, Super Bowl LX
Image: ABC via (more)

[ed. What a show. Awesome (and I'm not especially a Bad Bunny fan). What did it all mean? All explained here. Meanwhile, in an effort to infuse politics into absolutely everything, there was that other competing, half-assed, halftime show:]

***

“Wear the mission. Text merch to 71776 for official TPUSA merch.”

Those were the first words greeting thousands of viewers as they joined Turning Point’s YouTube channel for the 15-minute countdown before their alternate All-American Halftime Show, as a chyron ran nonstop at the bottom of the screen, hawking merchandise and begging for text signups...

Unfortunately, the All-American Halftime Show was unable to evoke much more than a shrug, with halfhearted pop-country performances that showed the limitations of booking a big show with minimal talent. (...)

It’s jarring to remember that, prior to MAGA, Kid Rock’s biggest political affiliation was stumping for Mitt Romney’s milquetoast 2012 presidential campaign. Yet in 2016 — the year after his singles last hit the Billboard Hot 100 — he rode hard for the loud-mouthed Trump. Since then, he’s been riding that wave of partisan relevancy, popping up at random functions to rap at puzzled congressmen and sing mawkish ballads to wealthy donors. Hey, the Trump family is making money off of this MAGA thing — why can’t other grifters with merch stores full of American flag gear jump on the train?

Meanwhile, while the Turning Point show screamed about patriotism, Bad Bunny’s official show was filled with highlight after highlight of things that are exciting about America: a nation full of people who came here with talent and differences worth embracing. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, the visual storytelling evoked so many people living the American dream, from the workers in the opening segment, to elderly folks, female friendships, dancing, drinks, and unabashed jubilation and unity.

Ignore the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of a few guys grinding on each other, and there was even plenty that the MAGA crowd would enjoy if they bothered to watch it: A real-life wedding! Beautiful women dancing! A great, big declaration of “God Bless America”!

But there was never going to be a good-faith effort to meet Bad Bunny’s show halfway. Like clockwork, Trump sent out a long message on Truth Social minutes after it ended, slamming it as quickly as possible. (Note to Trump: “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying” … he sings in Spanish, dude! Better take that cognitive test again.)

In the end, the final words shown during Bad Bunny’s performance were seen on a massive video screen: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

The final words on the Turning Point broadcast? “Get involved,” next to a QR code begging for more money.

by William Earl, Variety |  Read more:

Mortal Soul

[ed. Impressive chops.]

via:

Jessie Welles

Jesse Welles Is the Antidote To Everything That Sucks About Our Time (CA)

[ed. The power of musical protest (why isn't there more of it?). Seems like nearly half the songs of the late-60s/early 70s were protest songs. Wonder what that says about successive generations or society today. More videos here.]

Nduduzo Makhathini

Measure Up

“My very dear friend Broadwood—

I have never felt a greater pleasure than in your honor’s notification of the arrival of this piano, with which you are honoring me as a present. I shall look upon it as an altar upon which I shall place the most beautiful offerings of my spirit to the divine Apollo. As soon as I receive your excellent instrument, I shall immediately send you the fruits of the first moments of inspiration I gather from it, as a souvenir for you from me, my very dear Broadwood; and I hope that they will be worthy of your instrument. My dear sir, accept my warmest consideration, from your friend and very humble servant.

—Ludwig van Beethoven”

As musical instruments improved through history, new kinds of music became possible. Sometimes, the improved instrument could make novel sounds; other times, it was louder; and other times stronger, allowing for more aggressive play. Like every technology, musical instruments are the fruit of generations worth of compounding technological refinement.

In a shockingly brief period between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the piano was transformed technologically, and so too was the function of the music it produced.

To understand what happened, consider the form of classical music known as the “piano sonata.” This is a piece written for solo piano, and it is one of the forms that persisted through the transition, at least in name. In 1790, these were written for an early version of the piano that we now think of as the fortepiano. It sounded like a mix of a modern piano and a harpsichord.

Piano sonatas in the early 1790s were thought of primarily as casual entertainment. It wouldn’t be quite right to call them “background music” as we understand that term today—but they were often played in the background. People would talk over these little keyboard works, play cards, eat, drink.

In the middle of the 1790s, however, the piano started to improve at an accelerated rate. It was the early industrial revolution. Throughout the economy, many things were starting to click into place. Technologies that had kind of worked for a while began to really work. Scale began to be realized. Thicker networks of people, money, ideas, and goods were being built. Capital was becoming more productive, and with this serendipity was becoming more common. Few at the time could understand it, but it was the beginning of a wave—one made in the wake of what we today might call the techno-capital machine.

Riding this wave, the piano makers were among a great many manufacturers who learned to build better machines during this period. And with those improvements, more complex uses of those machines became possible.

Just as this industrial transformation was gaining momentum in the mid-1790s, a well-regarded keyboard player named Ludwig van Beethoven was starting his career in earnest. He, like everyone else, was riding the wave—though he, like everyone else, did not wholly understand it.

Beethoven was an emerging superstar, and he lived in Vienna, the musical capital of the world. It was a hub not just of musicians but also of musical instruments and the people who manufactured them. Some of the finest piano makers of the day—Walter, Graf, and Schanz—were in or around Vienna, and they were in fierce competition with one another. Playing at the city’s posh concert spaces, Beethoven had the opportunity to sample a huge range of emerging pianistic innovations. As his career blossomed, he acquired some of Europe’s finest pianos—including even stronger models from British manufacturers like Broadwood and Sons.

Iron reinforcement enabled piano frames with higher tolerances for louder and longer play. The strings became more robust. More responsive pedals meant a more direct relationship between the player and his tool. Innovations in casting, primitive machine tools, and mechanized woodworking yielded more precise parts. With these parts one could build superior hammer and escapement systems, which in turn led to faster-responding keys. And more of them, too—with higher and lower octaves now available. It is not just that the sound these pianos made was new: These instruments had an enhanced, more responsive user interface.

You could hit these instruments harder. You could play them softer, too. Beethoven’s iconic use of sforzando—rapid swings from soft to loud tones—would have been unplayable on the older pianos. So too would his complex and often rapid solos. In so many ways, then, Beethoven’s characteristic style and sound on the keyboard was technologically impossible for his predecessors to achieve... 

Beethoven was famous for breaking piano strings that were not yet strong enough to render his vision. There was always a relevant margin against which to press. By his final sonata, written in the early 1820s, he was pressing in the direction of early jazz. It was a technological and artistic takeoff from this to this, and from this to this.

Beethoven’s compositions for other instruments followed a structurally similar trajectory: compounding leaps in expressiveness, technical complexity, and thematic ambition, every few years. Here is what one of Mozart’s finest string quartets sounded like. Here is what Beethoven would do with the string quartet by the end of his career.

No longer did audiences talk during concerts. No longer did they play cards and make jokes. Audiences became silent and still, because what was happening to them in the concert hall had changed. A new type of art was emerging, and a new meta-character in human history—the artist—was being born. Beethoven was doing something different, something grander, something more intense, and the way listeners experienced it was different too.

The musical ideas Beethoven introduced to the world originated from his mind, but those ideas would have been unthinkable without a superior instrument.

—

I bought the instrument I’m using to write this essay in December 2020. I was standing in the frigid cold outside of the Apple Store in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., wearing a KN-95 face mask, separated by six feet from those next to me in line. I had dinner with a friend scheduled that evening. A couple weeks later, the Mayor would temporarily outlaw even that nicety.

I carried this laptop with me every day throughout the remainder of the pandemic. I ran a foundation using this laptop, and after that I orchestrated two career transitions using it. I built two small businesses, and I bought a house. I got married, and I planned a honeymoon with my wife. (...)

In a windowless office on a work trip to Stanford University on November 30, 2022, I discovered ChatGPT on this laptop. I stayed up all night in my hotel playing with the now-primitive GPT-3.5. Using my laptop, I educated myself more deeply about how this mysterious new tool worked.

I thought at first that it was an “answer machine,” a kind of turbocharged search engine. But I eventually came to prefer thinking of these language models as simulators of the internet that, by statistically modeling trillions of human-written words, learned new things about the structure of human-written text.

What might arise from a deeper-than-human understanding of the structures and meta-structures of nearly all the words humans have written for public consumption? What inductive priors might that understanding impart to this cognitive instrument? We know that a raw pretrained model, though deeply flawed, has quite sophisticated inductive priors with no additional human effort. With a great deal of additional human effort, we have made these systems quite useful little helpers, even if they still have their quirks and limitations.

But what if you could teach a system to guide itself through that digital landscape of modeled human thoughts to find better, rather than likelier, answers? What if the machine had good intellectual taste, because it could consider options, recognize mistakes, and decide on a course of cognitive action? Or what if it could, at least, simulate those cognitive processes? And what if that machine improved as quickly as we have seen AI advance so far? This is no longer science fiction; this research has been happening inside of the world’s leading AI firms, and with models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3, we see undoubtedly that progress is being made.

What would it mean for a machine to match the output of a human genius, word for word? What would it mean for a machine to exceed it? In at least some domains, even if only a very limited number at first, it seems likely that we will soon breach these thresholds. It is very hard to say how far this progress will go; as they say, experts disagree.

This strange simulator is “just math,”—it is, ultimately, ones and zeroes, electrons flowing through processed sand. But the math going on inside it is more like biochemistry than it is like arithmetic. The language model is, ultimately, still an instrument, but it is a strange one. Smart people, working in a field called mechanistic interpretability, are bettering our understanding all the time, but our understanding remains highly imperfect, and it will probably never be complete. We don’t quite have precise control yet over these instruments, but our control is getting better with time. We do not yet know how to make our control systems “good enough,” because we don’t quite know what “good enough” means yet—though here too, we are trying. We are searching.

As these instruments improve, the questions we ask them will have to get harder, smarter, and more detailed. This isn’t to say, necessarily, that we will need to become better “prompt engineers.” Instead, it is to suggest that we will need to become more curious. These new instruments will demand that we formulate better questions, and formulating better questions, often, is at least the seed of formulating better answers.

The input and the output, the prompt and the response, the question and the answer, the keyboard and the music, the photons and the photograph. We push at our instruments, we measure them up, and in their way, they measure us. (...)

—

I don’t like to think about technology in the abstract. Instead, I prefer to think about instruments like this laptop. I think about all the ways in which this instrument is better than the ones that came before it—faster, more reliable, more precise—and why it has improved. And I think about the ways in which this same laptop has become wildly more capable as new software tools came to be. I wonder at the capabilities I can summon with this keyboard now compared with when I was standing in that socially distanced line at the Apple Store four years ago.

I also think about the young Beethoven, playing around, trying to discover the capabilities of instruments with better keyboards, larger range, stronger frames, and suppler pedals. I think about all the uncoordinated work that had to happen—the collective and yet unplanned cultivation of craftsmanship, expertise, and industrial capacity—to make those pianos. I think about the staggering number of small industrial miracles that underpinned Beethoven’s keyboards, and the incomprehensibly larger number of industrial miracles that underpin the keyboard in front of me today. (...)

This past weekend, I replaced my MacBook Air with a new laptop. I wonder what it will be possible to do with this tremendous machine in a few years, or in a few weeks. New instruments for expression, and for intellectual exploration, will be built, and I will learn to use nearly all of them with my new laptop’s keyboard. It is now clear that a history-altering amount of cognitive potential will be at my fingertips, and yours, and everyone else’s. Like any technology, these new instruments will be much more useful to some than to others—but they will be useful in some way to almost everyone.

And just like the piano, what we today call “AI” will enable intellectual creations of far greater complexity, scale, and ambition—and greater repercussions, too. Higher dynamic range. I hope that among the instrument builders there will be inveterate craftsmen, and I hope that young Beethovens, practicing a wholly new kind of art, will emerge among the instrument players.

by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: 1827 Broadwood & Sons grand piano/Wikipedia

[ed. Thoughtful essay throughout, well deserving of a full reading (even if you're just interested in Beethoven). On the hysterical end of the spectrum, here's what state legislators are proposing: The AI Patchwork Emerges. An update on state AI law in 2026 (so far) (Hyperdimensional):]

***

State legislative sessions are kicking into gear, and that means a flurry of AI laws are already under consideration across America. In prior years, the headline number of introduced state AI laws has been large: famously, 2025 saw over 1,000 state bills related to AI in some way. But as I pointed out, the vast majority of those laws were harmless: creating committees to study some aspect of AI and make policy recommendations, imposing liability on individuals who distribute AI-generated child pornography, and other largely non-problematic bills. The number of genuinely substantive bills—the kind that impose novel regulations on AI development or diffusion—was relatively small.

In 2026, this is no longer the case: there are now numerous substantive state AI bills floating around covering liability, algorithmic pricing, transparency, companion chatbots, child safety, occupational licensing, and more. In previous years, it was possible for me to independently cover most, if not all, of the interesting state AI bills at the level of rigor I expect of myself, and that my readers expect of me. This is no longer the case. There are simply too many of them.

The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul; Fifty People Control the Culture

Everybody can see there’s a crisis in New York publishing. Even the hot new books feel lukewarm. Writers win the Pulitzer Prize and sell just few hundred copies. The big publishers rely on 50 or 100 proven authors—everything else is just window dressing or the back catalog.

You can tell how stagnant things have become from the lookalike covers. I walk into a bookstore and every title I see is like this.

They must have fired the design team and replaced it with a lazy bot. You get big fonts, random shapes, and garish colors—again and again and again. Every cover looks like it was made with a circus clown’s makeup kit.

My wife is in a book club. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they read the same book every month. It’s those same goofy colors and shapes on every one.

Of course, you can’t judge a book by its cover. But if you read enough new releases, you get the same sense of familiarity from the stories. The publishers keep returning to proven formulas—which they keep flogging long after they’ve stopped working.

And that was a long time ago.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

How did we end up here?

It’s hard to pick a day when the publishing industry made its deal with the devil. But an anecdote recently shared by Steve Wasserman is as good a place to begin as any.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I'll never buy a book that looks like this, no matter what the reviews say. I'd be embarrassed to be seen in public with it, let alone display it on my bookshelf. See also: Fifty People Control the Culture (HB).]

Willie Bobo