Shortly after Thursday's release of Grand Theft Auto: The Definitive Edition, the Rockstar Games Launcher on PC went down, leaving most Rockstar titles unplayable, reports PC Gamer.

They also identified possible issues explaining why: Firstly, the Trilogy has shipped with internal developer comments visible on the code, such as... "This shit doesn't work the way they wrote it below so we'll just show the text and place the blip at the beginning of the mission...."

Coders leaving funny comments is one thing: even if you might not want the public to see it, who really cares. However some dataminers have found that Vice City and San Andreas may have shipped with songs that have technically been 'removed' from the game because the licenses have expired... The presence of unlicensed music could in theory be a big headache for Rockstar. While the music may not be accessible to the average user, it is in the product's files and can be accessed using certain tools. And, oh yeah, without the appropriate license.
One dataminer told the site that the audio codec used in these games is the open source OGG-VORBIS, and for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, "EVERY song is there." And then Thursday the official Twitter feed for Rockstar Support announced their Games Launcher was "temporarily offline for maintenance." PC Gamer reported it remained down for more than 16 hours.

Friday night Rockstar Support announced their Launcher was now back online — but that GTA: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition "is unavailable to play or purchase as we remove files unintentionally included in these versions.

"We're sorry for the disruption and hope to have correct ones up soon."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: 40 years ago the Rolling Stones released the song "Start Me Up" as part of their album Tattoo You. Then over the next four decades they built a reputation as a surprisingly tech-savvy band...

In 1994 they became the first major recording artists to broadcast live online using the experimental "Mbone" backbone/virtual network built on top of the Internet, and made one of their new songs available for download on an FTP site. In 1995 they licensed "Start Me Up" for an ad campaign promoting Microsoft's Windows 95 (the first version of Windows including a Start button). Now on the 40th anniversary of Tattoo You, the Rolling Stones have re-released the album with nine previously unreleased tracks from the same era, "recently completed and enhanced with additional vocals and guitar." And, according to Rolling Stone magazine, they've also collaborated with Boston Dynamics to recreate the "Start Me Up" music video "with the tech company's robot dogs....the first time Boston Dynamics have employed the technology to reenact a music video."

"Pout. Prance. Repeat," quips a headline at CNET. "Robo-dog Spot performs a rollicking Rolling Stones tribute..." noting there's also additional Spot robots standing in for the other members of the band. ("There's a Spot-Jagger, a Spot-Keith Richards, a Spot-Ronnie Wood and a Spot-Charlie Watts..." Though for some reason there's no robot for bassist Bill Wyman.)

It's being billed as a collaboration between Boston Dynamics and the Rolling Stones, and Friday the band's official Twitter account tweeted a highlight from the video — along with their reaction.

"Thank you to the Boston Dynamics team for making this happen."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: On October 23, 2001, Apple released the iPod -- a portable media player that promised to overshadow the clunky design and low storage capacity of MP3 players introduced in the mid-1990s. The iPod boasted the ability to "hold 1,000 songs in your pocket". Its personalized listening format revolutionized the way we consume music. And with more than 400 million units sold since its release, there's no doubt it was a success. Yet, two decades later, the digital music landscape continues to rapidly evolve.

The iPod expanded listening beyond the constraints of the home stereo system, allowing the user to plug into not only their headphones, but also their car radio, their computer at work, or their hi-fi system at home. It made it easier to entwine these disparate spaces into a single personalized soundtrack throughout the day. [...] The rise of touchscreen smartphones ultimately led to the iPod's downfall. Interestingly, the music app on the original iPhone was called "iPod." The iPod's functions were essentially reappropriated and absorbed into the iPhone. The iPhone was a flexible and multifunctional device: an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator all in one -- a computer in your pocket. And by making the development tools for their products freely available, Apple and Google allowed third-party developers to create apps for their new platforms in the thousands.

As of this year, mobile devices are responsible for 54.8% of web traffic worldwide. And while music piracy still exists, its influence has been significantly reduced by the arrival of streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube. These platforms have had a profound effect on how we engage with music as active and passive listeners. Spotify supports an online community-based approach to music sharing, with curated playlists. [...] As of February this year, more than 60,000 tracks were being uploaded to Spotify each day. The experience of listening to music will become increasingly immersive with time, and we'll only find more ways to seamlessly integrate it into our lives.

Long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker writes: Everyone's favorite security focused operating system OpenBSD released version 7.0 Thursday. In addition to the usual bug fixes and performance enhancements, support for RISC-V processors has been added.
It's 26 years old, and still chugging along. One interesting feature highlighted by Phoronix: Improving the ARM64 platform support with improved drivers for the Apple Silicon / Apple M1 but still not considered ready yet for end-users. OpenBSD 7.0 improvements on the Apple M1 include support for installing on a disk with a GPT and various Apple driver improvements for USB, GPIO, SPMI, NVMe storage, and other Apple M1 hardware components.
Also check out the 7.0 Song: "The Style Hymn" (part of an archive of all the OpenBSD release songs).

League of Legends developer Riot Games released a 37-track album of ambient tunes (now on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music) "that will let gamers stream their sessions accompanied by music that doesn't infringe copyright protections," reports Bloomberg.

And that's just one response to aggressive copyright enforcement: For example, a new Guardians of the Galaxy game to be released later this year will be loaded with a soundtrack with songs by Iron Maiden, KISS, Wham!, Blondie and more. To stay on the good side of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the studio behind the game, Eidos Montreal, has created a toggle switch that will allow gamers to turn off the soundtrack when live streaming, Venturebeat has reported. Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt SA also created an option for players to turn off certain songs that could cause trouble and replace them with an alternative.

After largely ignoring streaming platforms for years, last spring the music industry suddenly bore down on Twitch, owned by Amazon.com Inc. and started sending users thousands of DMCA takedowns for copyright violations. Twitch responded by telling users they could no longer use copyrighted material and also had to remove old posts that violated the rules. Some games are still struggling to adapt. Earlier this month, a number of music publishers, including those that represent Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande, sued Roblox Corp. for copyright infringement, saying the company hasn't licensed the music many of its creators have used in their games. The lawsuit is seeking at least $200 million in damages, the Wall Street Journal reported...

The collection is just the beginning and Riot said it's committed to creating more projects like Sessions in the future.

Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: A US police officer played a Taylor Swift song on his phone in a bid to prevent activists who were filming him uploading the video to YouTube. The video platform regularly removes videos that break music copyright rules. However, the officer's efforts were in vain as the clip of the encounter in Oakland, California promptly went viral. Alameda County police told the BBC it was not "approved behavior."

The video was filmed by members of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), which says it is a coalition that seeks to "eradicate police terror in communities of color." Some of them were protesting outside the courthouse at the pre-trial hearing of a San Leandro officer charged with the manslaughter of a black man. In the video, the officer says: "You can record all you want, I just know it can't be posted to YouTube." When asked if playing music in this way is procedure, the officer responds: "It's not specifically outlined." Later in the video, he confirms: "I'm playing music so that you can't post on YouTube." The sheriff's department said: "We have seen the video and referred it to our internal affairs bureau. This is not approved behavior. It will not happen again." Earlier this year, Motherboard reported on cases of other California-based officers starting to play Beatles songs while being filmed so that the clips would be removed for copyright issues when uploaded to social media sites.

Twitch has received a "batch" of new takedown notices from music publishers over copyrighted songs in recorded streams (known as VODs), the company said in an email to streamers today. From a report: The notice may be worrying for some streamers who were affected by the waves of takedowns that hit last year, because if a user gets three copyright strikes on their channel, they will be permanently banned from the platform, according to Twitch's policies. With this advance warning, it seems Twitch is trying to get ahead of a sudden flurry of takedowns and give streamers some time to remove potentially offending VODs.

"We recently received a batch of DMCA takedown notifications with about 1,000 individual claims from music publishers," Twitch said in an email Friday, which was sent to a Verge staffer. "All of the claims are for VODs, and the vast majority target streamers listening to background music while playing video games or IRL streaming." [...] In Friday's email, Twitch noted that the only way to avoid DMCA (or Digital Millennium Copyright Act) strikes is to not stream copyrighted material in the first place, and said that if a streamer does have unauthorized content in their VODs or clips, "we strongly recommend that you permanently delete anything that contains that material."

Apple Music subscribers will find a big chunk of the catalog sounds better next month: The service is adding support for high-quality, lossless and spatial audio through Dolby Atmos at no additional cost, it said Monday. It'll have 20 million lossless audio songs to start, with 75 million available by the end of 2021. From a report: To try out lossless audio, you should make sure you have the latest version of Apple Music and go to Settings, Music, then Audio Quality. You can choose different resolutions for cellular and Wi-Fi connections, or just download the track. The lossless tier starts at CD quality, which is 16 bit at 44.1 kHz, and goes up to 24 bit at 48 kHz and is playable natively on Apple devices. If you use external audio equipment, you can crank the quality up to 24 bit at 192 kHz. Further reading: AirPods Max, priced at $549, don't support Apple Music's lossless songs, Apple says.

TikTok is facing a legal challenge from former children's commissioner for England Anne Longfield over how it collects and uses children's data. The BBC reports: The claim is being filed on behalf of millions of children in the UK and EU who have used the hugely popular video-sharing app. If successful, the children affected could each be owed thousands of pounds. TikTok said the case was without merit and it would fight it.

Lawyers will allege that TikTok takes children's personal information, including phone numbers, videos, exact location and biometric data, without sufficient warning, transparency or the necessary consent required by law, and without children or parents knowing what is being done with that information. The claim is being launched on behalf of all children who have used TikTok since 25 May 2018, regardless of whether they have an account or their privacy settings. Children not wishing to be represented can opt out. "TikTok is a hugely popular social media platform that has helped children keep in touch with their friends during an incredibly difficult year," says Ms. Longfield. "However, behind the fun songs, dance challenges and lip-sync trends lies something far more sinister."

She alleges the firm is "a data collection service that is thinly veiled as a social network" which has "deliberately and successfully deceived parents." She added that those parents have a "right to know" what private information is being collected via TikTok's "shadowy data collection practices."

In response, TikTok said: "Privacy and safety are top priorities for TikTok and we have robust policies, processes and technologies in place to help protect all users, and our teenage users in particular. We believe the claims lack merit and intend to vigorously defend the action."

According to a new report by industry analysts Mark Mulligan and Keith Jopling of Midia Research, songwriters are getting drastically short-changed in the music-streaming economy. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The 35-page report, which is available here for free, lays out both the history of this dilemma and some (admittedly difficult) proposed solutions, but what may be unprecedented is the way that it lays out how skewed against songwriters the new music economy is. A handful of the many statistics from the study follow:

- The global music industry revenues (recordings, publishing, live, merchandise, sponsorship) fell by 30% in 2020 due to the combined impact of COVID-19 and a recession
- Streaming has created a song economy, making the song more important than ever, yet music publisher royalties are more than three times smaller than record label royalties
- Streaming will bring further strong industry growth, reaching 697 million subscribers and $456 billion in retail revenues, but the royalty imbalance means that label streaming revenue will grow by 3.3 times more than publisher streaming revenue
- The current royalty system assumes all songs are worth the same - they are not - and rewards poor behavior that dilutes artist and songwriter royalties
- Music subscribers believe in the value of the song: twice as many (60%) state that the song matters more than the artist, than think the artist matters more (29%)
- They also believe that songwriters should be remunerated properly: 71% of music subscribers consider it important that streaming services pay songwriters fairly

In a section titled "The Songwriter's Paradox," it lays out the ways that the song has become more important than ever, but, paradoxically, the songwriter has less income and influence:

- Big record labels have weaponized songwriting: In order to try to minimize risks, bigger record labels are turning to an ever more elite group of songwriters to create hits.
- The emergence of the song economy: The audience has shift its focus from albums to songs.
- Writing and production are fusing: As music production technologies have become more central to both the songwriting process and to the formation of the final recorded work, there has been a growing fusion of the role of production with writing. This has led to a growing body of superstar writer-producers.
-The industrialization of songwriting: Record labels are reshaping songwriting by pulling together teams of songwriters to create "machine tooled" hits - finely crafted songs that are "optimized for streaming." While the upside for songwriters is more work, the downside is sharing an already-small streaming royalties pot with a larger team of creators and co-writers.
- Decline of traditional formats: Songwriters have long relied upon performance royalties from broadcast TV and radio. However, as the audiences on these platforms migrate towards on-demand alternatives, performance royalties face a long-term decline. Similarly, the continued fall in sales means fewer mechanical royalties for songwriters.
- Streaming royalties: The song is the first in line culturally but it is last in line for streaming royalties. Of total royalties paid by streaming services to rights holders, between a fifth and a quarter is paid for publishing rights to the song. Labels are paid more than three times higher than publishers on streaming. An independent label artist could earn more than three thousand dollars for a million subscriber streams, whereas a songwriter could expect to earn between $1,200 and $1,400, and even then, only if they are the sole songwriter on the track. On average, songwriters will therefore earn between a third and a half of what artists do. After proposing a series of solutions, such as implementing "fan-centric licenses" and revised streaming prices, the report concludes: "What is clear is that today's' song economy is not working as it should and that everyone across the value chain will benefit from a coordinated program of change."

On the 27th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death, Engadget reports: Were he still alive today, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain would be 52 years old. Every February 20th, on the day of his birthday, fans wonder what songs he would write if he hadn't died of suicide nearly 30 years ago. While we'll never know the answer to that question, an AI is attempting to fill the gap.

A mental health organization called Over the Bridge used Google's Magenta AI and a generic neural network to examine more than two dozen songs by Nirvana to create a 'new' track from the band. "Drowned in the Sun" opens with reverb-soaked plucking before turning into an assault of distorted power chords. "I don't care/I feel as one, drowned in the sun," Nirvana tribute band frontman Eric Hogan sings in the chorus. In execution, it sounds not all that dissimilar from "You Know You're Right," one of the last songs Nirvana recorded before Cobain's death in 1994.

Other than the voice of Hogan, everything you hear in the song was generated by the two AI programs Over the Bridge used. The organization first fed Magenta songs as MIDI files so that the software could learn the specific notes and harmonies that made the band's tunes so iconic. Humorously, Cobain's loose and aggressive guitar playing style gave Magenta some trouble, with the AI mostly outputting a wall of distortion instead of something akin to his signature melodies. "It was a lot of trial and error," Over the Bridge board member Sean O'Connor told Rolling Stone. Once they had some musical and lyrical samples, the creative team picked the best bits to record. Most of the instrumentation you hear are MIDI tracks with different effects layered on top.
Some thoughts from The Daily Dot: Rolling Stone also highlighted lyrics like, "The sun shines on you but I don't know how," and what is called "a surprisingly anthemic chorus" including the lines, "I don't care/I feel as one, drowned in the sun," remarking that they "bear evocative, Cobain-esque qualities...."

Neil Turkewitz went full Comic Book Guy, opining, "A perfect illustration of the injustice of developing AI through the ingestion of cultural works without the authorization of [its] creator, and how it forces creators to be indentured servants in the production of a future out of their control," adding, "That it's for a good cause is irrelevant."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Play Music stopped working at the start of December, but the files you uploaded to the cloud locker and other data remain available for export. That will be changing later in February when Google deletes all information associated with Play Music. Besides all the songs you've uploaded to the cloud locker since the service's inception in 2011, Play Music data includes purchases, playlists, stations, albums/songs saved to your library, and likes/dislikes.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In India, parents are being aggressively sold the idea that their children must start coding at 4 or 5 or be future failures, prompting Neelesh Misra [a writer, audio storyteller, and founder of a media and organic products company] to ask Do Children Really Need to Learn to Code? [Alternate URL here] In a New York Times Opinion piece that's sparked 1,000+ comments, Misra writes that "Aggressive campaigns pushing Indian parents and schools to embrace coding might help meet corporate targets, but they are creating a fear that a generation of children will lose out if their parents don't sign them up for these coding programs. Parents struggle to resist these shrewdly framed campaigns."
From the writer/storyteller/founder's piece: WhiteHat Jr., which operates in India and the United States, mounted an advertising blitzkrieg in India telling parents that our children need to learn coding from the age of 4, 5 or 6 — or they will fall behind in life. Indian celebrities promoted the brand and spread the fear of losing out among families... Although numerous experts advise against teaching children to code, a skill that will soon become redundant, the WhiteHat Jr. campaign taps into a parent's deepest fear: Will my child be left behind...?

Relentless advertising campaigns are telling Indian parents that coding is critical because making children code will develop their cognitive skills. Storytelling does all that too. And singing songs. And asking questions or being offered choices or visiting interesting places...

I realize that our world is about to change unrecognizably. Robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual and augmented reality shall soon be concepts and a way of living that will be second nature to our children. The future should excite us, not make our children feel afraid and ill equipped. The future should — and I am sure will — have a place for dreamers and doers, and not just those hunched forever over a computer.

Spotify has joined the ranks of streaming services like SoundCloud and YouTube as a hub for bootlegs of popular songs. From a report: With obscured titles like "Jocelyn Flores but you're in the bathroom at a party" by eraylandin, a new take on XXXTentacion's popular "Jocelyn Flores," and "Dead To Me -- Kali Uchis (slowed + bass boosted)" by user Unreal sounds, a rework of Uchis' popular track from her 2018 album "Isolation," these underground remixers have chosen to upload their creations as podcast episodes, hoping to circumvent copyright infringement detection by the platform. Using simple keywords and terms like "chopped and screwed," "slowed and reverbed," "remix," and "mashup" in Spotify's search bar, users can track down bootlegged reworks of songs by many top artists which live on Spotify's podcast hub. Late rapper Juice WRLD, who still commands a cult following, has a full 'podcast series' dedicated to revealing his unreleased songs, like user No Si's podcast titled, "Instagram @xricardol.tx." The podcast contains 'episodes' like "Sugarfish (Leaked)," a song Juice WRLD wrote with The Chainsmokers that was never officially released, despite online rumors that the collaboration would become available in December 2019. These podcasts, like "Instagram @xricardol.tx," only contain the audio of specific songs and almost always list the tracks as individual episodes. There is nothing that resembles the typical characteristics of a podcast.

Weighing up to 380,000 pounds and stretching some 100 feet long, the blue whale -- the largest creature to have ever lived on Earth -- might at first seem difficult for human eyes and ears to miss. But a previously unknown population of the leviathans has long been lurking in the Indian Ocean, leaving scientists none the wiser, new research suggests. From a report: The covert cadre of whales, described in a paper published last week in the journal Endangered Species Research, has its own signature anthem: a slow, bellowing ballad that's distinct from any other whale song ever described. It joins only a dozen or so other blue whale songs that have been documented, each the calling card of a unique population. "It's like hearing different songs within a genre -- Stevie Ray Vaughan versus B. B. King," said Salvatore Cerchio, a marine mammal biologist at the African Aquatic Conservation Fund in Massachusetts and the study's lead author. "It's all blues, but you know the different styles."

The find is "a great reminder that our oceans are still this very unexplored place," said Asha de Vos, a marine biologist who has studied blue whales in the Indian Ocean but was not involved in the new study. Dr. Cerchio and his colleagues first tuned into the whales' newfound song while in scientific pursuit of a pod of Omura's whales off the coast of Madagascar several years ago. After hearing the rumblings of blue whales via a recorder planted on the coastal shelf, the researchers decided to drop their instruments into deeper water in the hopes of eavesdropping further. A number of blue whale populations, each with its own characteristic croon, have long been known to visit this pocket of the Indian Ocean, Dr. Cerchio said. But one of the songs that crackled through the team's Madagascar recordings was unlike any the researchers had heard.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Music Business Worldwide: According to a document published last week, Daniel Ek's company is seeking a patent for its "Plagiarism Risk Detector And Interface" technology, which pertains to "Methods, systems and computer program products..for testing a lead sheet for plagiarism." As explained in the filing -- and as our songwriter/musician readers will already know -- a "lead sheet" is a type of music score or musical notation for songs denoting their melody, chords and sometimes lyrics or additional notes. Spotify's invention would allow for a lead sheet to be fed through the platform's "plagiarism detector," which would then, "having been trained on a plurality of preexisting encoded lead sheets," immediately compare the composition in question to all other songs stored in its database.

A set of messages would then be displayed -- describing a detected level of plagiarism regarding "a plurality of elements" such as a chord sequence, melodic fragments, harmony, etc. of a song. The AI software would also potentially calculate "a similarity value" of the song in question vs. other songs in the Spotify lead sheet library. These technology could work the other way around, too, says Spotify's filing, reassuring a songwriter that "the melodic fragment [of your song] appears to be completely new." One particularly interesting element of this is that it would take place in near-real time, allowing a songwriter or composer to tweak elements of their work to avoid infringement before they (and/or their record label) spent the big bucks on recording a final version. Spotify's filing adds that "in some embodiments a link to the media content item that might be infringed (e.g., a track of an album) is provided so that a [songwriter] can quickly... listen to the potentially plagiarized work."

Wednesday Twitch warned its users to delete any videos containing copyrighted music. PC Gamer reports on what happened next: Since October, Twitch has been deleting significant quantities of videos over copyright claims, leaving the affected streamers with no way to respond or issue counter-claims. Twitch eventually explained that the number of DMCA notifications it receives from major record labels has surged, going from "fewer than 50" each year to "thousands" beginning in May. The recommendation offered to streamers was to play games with the music muted, which obviously isn't great advice when it comes to rhythm games, or games that don't have the option to mute music separately from other audio. Meanwhile, some streamers have had videos muted due to sound effects, with claims coming via automated content recognition software Audible Magic. These claims can be contested, but it's still frustrating for those affected by content ID software that can't tell the difference between copyrighted audio and the noise of a grandfather clock chiming in a horror game.

In response, streamers have been protesting by playing games with the sound off completely to highlight the absurdity of the situation, some using the hashtag #DMCAsoundoff. Watching Rocksmith players grunt or silently nod along to songs nobody can hear highlights the problem while still entertaining their viewers, as does hearing them improvise their own the sound effects for games like Resident Evil 2.
Polygon argues it's "alarming that these are the lengths players are going to in order to try and protest Twitch's policy..." But they also applauded the creativity of the protesters It's a surprising look at the transformative nature of streaming. When players are forced to play in dead silence, people still tune in and watch. Even while complying with copyright law to the absolute letter, each stream is different, and each act of protest feels wholly unique.

Twitch recently posted a long statement in response to the controversy, writing: "Your frustration and confusion with recent music-related copyright issues is completely justified. Things can — and should — be better for creators than they have been recently. We should have developed more sophisticated and user-friendly tools long ago. To all the creators who lost their community's best moments, we're sorry. This shouldn't have happened."

Despite the statement, Twitch has yet to provide concrete solutions for the ongoing problem, and the platform has yet to address the issue of in-game audio triggering the DMCA process (besides a suggestion to mute in-game audio.)

An anonymous reader shares a column: Google Music is dead, and with it one of the few remaining connections I have to the company that doesn't feel like a gun to my head. The service, now merged haphazardly with YouTube Music, recalled the early days of Google, when they sometimes just made cool internet things. It made it nearly a decade, though -- pretty impressive for a one of their products. I'll just say it up front: I'm a lifelong music pirate. Oh yes, I've reformed in recent years, but I've got a huge library of tracks that I've cultivated for decades and don't plan to abandon any time soon (likewise you can pry Winamp from my cold, dead hands). So when Google announced back in 2011 I could stream it all to myself for free, it sounded too good to be true. And indeed it was a relic of the old Google, which was quite simply all about taking things that are difficult to do yourself (find things online, set up a new email address, collaborate on a spreadsheet) and make them easier. Google Music -- as we'll call it despite it having gone through several branding changes before the final indignity of being merged into another, worse service as a presumably short-lived tab -- was not first to the music-streaming or downloading world by a long shot, but its promise of being able to upload your old music files and access them anywhere as if they were emails or documents was a surprisingly generous one. Generous not just in that it was providing server space for 20,000 songs (!) for free and the infrastructure for serving those songs where you went, but in its acknowledgement of other models of owning media. It didn't judge you for having 20,000 MP3s -- they weren't subjected to some kind of legitimacy check, and they didn't report you to the RIAA for having them, though they certainly could have. No, Google Music's free media locker was the company, or at least a quorum of the product team, announcing that they get it: not everyone does everything the same way, and not everyone is ready to embrace whatever business model tech companies decide makes sense. (Notably it has shifted several times more since then.)

Artificial intelligence is being used to create new songs seemingly performed by Frank Sinatra and other dead stars. 'Deepfakes' are cute tricks -- but they could change pop for ever. From a report: "It's Christmas time! It's hot tub time!" sings Frank Sinatra. At least, it sounds like him. With an easy swing, cheery bonhomie, and understated brass and string flourishes, this could just about pass as some long lost Sinatra demo. Even the voice -- that rich tone once described as "all legato and regrets" -- is eerily familiar, even if it does lurch between keys and, at times, sounds as if it was recorded at the bottom of a swimming pool. The song in question not a genuine track, but a convincing fake created by "research and deployment company" OpenAI, whose Jukebox project uses artificial intelligence to generate music, complete with lyrics, in a variety of genres and artist styles. Along with Sinatra, they've done what are known as "deepfakes" of Katy Perry, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, 2Pac, Celine Dion and more. Having trained the model using 1.2m songs scraped from the web, complete with the corresponding lyrics and metadata, it can output raw audio several minutes long based on whatever you feed it. Input, say, Queen or Dolly Parton or Mozart, and you'll get an approximation out the other end.

"As a piece of engineering, it's really impressive," says Dr Matthew Yee-King, an electronic musician, researcher and academic at Goldsmiths. (OpenAI declined to be interviewed.) "They break down an audio signal into a set of lexemes of music -- a dictionary if you like -- at three different layers of time, giving you a set of core fragments that is sufficient to reconstruct the music that was fed in. The algorithm can then rearrange these fragments, based on the stimulus you input. So, give it some Ella Fitzgerald for example, and it will find and piece together the relevant bits of the 'dictionary' to create something in her musical space." Admirable as the technical achievement is, there's something horrifying about some of the samples, particularly those of artists who have long since died -- sad ghosts lost in the machine, mumbling banal cliches. "The screams of the damned" reads one comment below that Sinatra sample; "SOUNDS FUCKING DEMONIC" reads another. We're down in the Uncanny Valley. Deepfake music is set to have wide-ranging ramifications for the music industry as more companies apply algorithms to music. Google's Magenta Project -- billed as "exploring machine learning as a tool in the creative process" -- has developed several open source APIs that allow composition using entirely new, machine-generated sounds, or human-AI co-creations. Numerous startups, such as Amper Music, produce custom, AI-generated music for media content, complete with global copyright. Even Spotify is dabbling; its AI research group is led by Francois Pachet, former head of Sony Music's computer science lab.

Two weeks ago the RIAA asked GitHub to remove the open-source stream-ripper software youtube-dl. This request wasn't well-received by developers, many of whom retaliated by posting copies of the code. Yesterday, things went from bad to worse when a user with the name 'FuckTheRIAA' uploaded three MP3s of the songs the RIAA mentioned in its takedown notice. TorrentFreak reports: A few hours ago we spotted a new GitHub user named 'FuckTheRIAA' who uploaded a copy of youtube-dl as well as a 'FuckTheRIAA' repository that includes three songs. These songs from Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, and Icona Pop, were not chosen randomly. The same tracks were mentioned in the RIAA's original takedown request, as the YouTube videos were highlighted in the youtube-dl code.

This is yet another example that shows how the RIAA's takedown request has actually made things worse for the music group, at least for now. After nearly a day the three MP3 files are still available on GitHub. [I]t seems likely that it will send another DMCA takedown request to remove the tracks from GitHub. Whether the RIAA will also file takedown notices to remove all of the new youtube-dl forks has yet to be seen. For now, its takedown efforts have only made things worse, so they may let things cool down for a while first while exploring other options.