Stereogum jumps into the audio deepfakes wagon discussion with a long read about human creativity and the future of music generated by artificial intelligence. The story kicked off on April 30 when audio deepfakes were made public by an independent research organization out of San Francisco called OpenAI. It took recordings of real artists - Jay-Z, Elvis, the Beatles, and thousands of others - a total of 1.2 million songs, entered them into its open source model powered by a neural network, which was then given various levels of guidance and instructed to generate new works. The artificial intelligence finally made some deepfakes. General Intelligence and Pitchfork already published their takes on the story.

Venues have become ill-suited to the COVID-19 age. Instead, future productions will have to find less finely tailored venues, like outdoor public spaces and hangarlike halls, Vulture argues and suggests ideas. Performances scattered across campus - on plazas, lawns, arcades, parks, and venues of various sizes; or - guiding an audience safely through a landscape while performers remain still could be fruitful and sublime...

Watch any K-pop music video and you’ll likely be met with loud hair colors, elaborate outfits, flawless skin, heavily made-up eyes and painted lips. To South Korean stars - or idols as they're called there - it’s not only the norm, it’s also specifically calibrated for audience appeal - Rafinery 29 writes in an analysis of young beautiful South Korean boy bands.

What will the future bring for the audio deepfakes - AI-generated imitations of human voices, Pitchfork tries to find answers in an analysis of Jay-Z deepfakes. YouTube channel called Voice Synthesis posted several Jay-Z deepfakes in April - Shakespeare’s 'To Be, Or Not to Be' soliloquy from 'Hamlet', Billy Joel’s 'We Didn’t Start the Fire', and a decade-old 4chan meme. They were removed two days after due to a copyright claim, but soon they returned. The software has to be “trained” with audio samples and text transcripts, and the actual voice is used in the creation but from there it’s all ones and zeros from the AI, so it's a legal grey zone. Musicians and fans could potentially be grappling with the weird consequences of AI voice manipulations long into the future - the P is guessing, with high probability actually.

In today’s world of fear and unease and social distancing, it's hard to imagine sharing experiences like these ever again. I don’t know when it will be safe to return to singing arm in arm at the top of our lungs, hearts racing, bodies moving, souls bursting with life. But I do know that we will do it again, because we have to. It’s not a choice. We’re human. We need moments that reassure us that we are not alone - Dave Grohl, The Atlantic.

People will leave a comment on SoundCloud, maybe send a message, and do a repost, but that’s a very narrow spectrum of interaction among communities of creatives. Where do people share their work-in-progress music? Where do artists share their excitement about releases of other artists in their community? Where do people ask for feedback and create back-and-forths around creative expression? Instagram - Music / Tech / Future says in an analysis of a shift in user's behavior. A way for SoundCloud to get back into center - AI.

There probably aren't gonna be any big concerts in 2020, so the live music industry is thinking about ways to make up the loss. Variety shared some of the ideas for the future of shows - pay-per-view tours that are “geo-blocked” or limited to a specific area; streaming concerts into a separate, socially distanced venue, possibly with food, drinks, merch and the usual concert amenities; virtual merchandise sold during the stream...

Women in hip-hop have been pitted against each other since 1980s, and even as recently as 2018 Cardi B threw a shoe at Nicki Minaj during a red carpet confrontation. Just two years later, however, the mood has changed and this kind of spat is rare and feels undignified, Guardian writes in an article about a change of stance in lady's hip-hop. Now displays of friendship and support, along with in-jokes on social media timelines are much more common. Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B, Doja Cat, Stefflon Don, and Ms Banks and tens of other female rappers are breaking through by embracing sisterhood and shaking off the prejudices of the past...

Many DJs juggle nocturnal activities with full-time or part-time work - Mix Magazine says in its article about the new generation of electronic DJs who continue to work at their 5-to-9 jobs and manage to DJ at night. Mix analyzes a few essentials: How can jobs help and hinder success? Is everyone suited to DJing and making music full-time? And if you had the chance to give up the day job, would you?

Rolling Stone has yet another story about the power of TikTok - snippets of songs are often becoming popular on TikTok faster than the songs themselves. Fans identify those snippets with certain phrases, not necessarily the titles as labels have tagged them, which made labels start tailoring song titles to make searches on streaming platforms more effective. Or, if there's already a title that's not working, they change the title of the song to the version that the fans are most familiar with.

GQ has an interesting piece about how celebrities, in lockdown just like everybody else, have found a common global venue: "Instagram Live has become a digital smorgasbord, catering to all manner of pop-culture predilections. It’s now the premier venue for a collection of semiregular events that attract viewership from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands. While all these shows differ in content, there’s an energetic thread that runs throughout them: a quaint clumsiness and a spontaneous sort of humanity that you rarely encounter in such abundance on celebrity social media channels".

"Bohannon tracks were huge in the Chicago clubs that gave birth to house music: Frankie Knuckles played a re-edit of Let’s Start the Dance at the Warehouse while Ron Hardy did the same with Caroline Crawford’s Bohannon-penned and produced Coming On Strong at the Music Box" - Alexis Petridis writes about Hamilton Bohannon, disco and Motown star, who died last week aged 78. "The list of house and techno artists who have sampled his work is huge: DJ Pierre, Cajmere, Underground Resistance, Danny Tenaglia, Dimitri From Paris. And house music gave Bohannon his biggest hit of all: Paul Johnson’s Get Get Down, a top 10 hit in 1999, was based on Bohannon’s 1978 track Me and the Gang". He was influential in hip-hop as well - Jay-Z, Mary J Blige, Public Enemy, the Ultramagnetic MCs and Pete Rock all sampled Bohannon's tracks.

This month saw the streaming site introduced a function that allows listeners to tip specific artists they like, much as you might once have dropped a pound coin into a busker’s guitar case or compensated a starving bassist with van-based sexual favours... Should musicians depend on charity and goodwill to survive, making them ever more reliant on a platform making vast sums from their efforts alone and paying them a pittance? Now they’re posting monster multi-million-dollar profits, Spotify need to be rapidly increasing their payments until their suppliers – the musicians – can make a fair living off of significant streams - Mark, My Words takes a clear stand in his latest blog post.

Australian music writer Ben Freeman went into mandatory 14 days of quarantine after returning to Sydney from Berlin, and found his hotel room to be a - nightclub just for himself. He described it to Guardian: "On my first day, after doing a lousy excuse for a hotel workout, I began to just naturally have a boogie to whatever house mix I was listening to. All of a sudden, the anxiety about returning home and feeling confined subsided; I closed my eyes and was back on the dancefloor. What began as just a random shake of my ass quickly turned into a daily ritual. I was content with the fact I was dancing alone in my quarantine hotel room, lapping up the ridiculousness of it all. Funnily, both feelings weren’t dissimilar, I felt as alone in the world when I envisioned myself in a club and when I looked out the hotel window at Sydney Harbour. Finding comfort in solitude was calming and cathartic when the world felt so distant".

Large festivals, keen not to lose a year’s worth of planning and income, are rescheduling for after the pandemic has passed its peak in summer, but before a potential second wave of infection in winter. In the UK, the large-scale Newcastle indie festival This Is Tomorrow has been moved from May to August. In September and October there are revised dates for Detroit’s Movement, Tennessee’s Bonnaroo, EDC in Las Vegas and both legs of Coachella in California. In Ibiza, a marketing blitz is under way to move spring events to autumn. The Guardian is reporting on the possibility of big gatherings in the autumn, and on the willingness of fans to attend such events.

The great Cherie Hu has identified five major music-tech pivots happening right now that are impacting all corners of the music industry with potential for far-reaching systemic consequences:

• Digital media is becoming a core part of the fan experience, not just a means to an end
• Immersive, at-home video, not lean-back audio, is now the highest source of music consumption growth
• Artists and fans are turning to direct-to-consumer revenue models over third-party aggregation models
• Social isolation has led to a surge in demand for social music tech
• Without touring, digital scarcity could become a financial necessity for music

"The current situation is going to dramatically change the music business, as a huge accelerator of user behavior on the digital side" - Denis Ladegaillerie from the big French distribution company Believe wrote in Music Business Worldwide. He added - "we are making the assumption when physical sales return in September, they will return at levels that are 50% lower than they were pre-this crisis... Yet, on the plus side, because of this expected change in user behavior, we are expecting a substantial surge in online digital usage. This could accelerate a physical-to-digital music consumer transition... Believe’s key message to artists and labels today is to try to make the best out of this situation by accelerating your knowledge of the digital business in response to the likelihood that you will be a more digital artist at the end of this".

Guardian journalist Brigid Delaney curated her own three-day multi-arts, multi-platform culture festival, from the comfort of her own home. She went to a nightclub - "it’s so fun, no one’s sleazing on anyone and I don’t have to worry about getting an Uber home" - and danced from 9:45 p.m. to 1 a.m.; she watched Isolaid for two hours - "not only reconnected me with my favourite artists (and their houses) but introduced me to a heap of new music"; she saw Australian Chamber Orchestra play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony while drinking wine, texting wine and eating pepperoni pizza - "but this immense work by Beethoven remains undimmed"; dropped by a Broadway piano bar - "singing via the internet is better than having no singing at all". Her conclusion after three days of some of the best art and culture the world has to offer – "without the festival crowds and a posse of friends it’s like the proverbial tree falling in the forest".

"It’s not just that songs seem to have taken on new, apposite resonances given the current situation, but music that you unexpectedly find yourself leaning towards, because you find it chimes with your mood: it’s comforting, elevating or transporting" - Alexis Petridis says in an analysis of fans' music listening habits. His Guardian colleague Ben Beaumont-Thomas sees a change coming in rap lyrics - "like a bond market, the most shallow rap lyricism needs constant activity to keep it alive – without an engine of expenditure, or antipathy stoked by confected beef, their subject matter collapses".

An amusing article in the Vice about how joggers prefer bad music while running - a landmark example coming from Haile Gebrselassie, the Ethiopian runner who broke the 10,000 meter record while 'Scatman' was playing. "Music you can easily synchronize with is also beneficial to quite some people - it can help you to maintain a steady pace, which is beneficial, but it also has a sort of psychological effect of feeling as if you are supported by the music in a way" - dr. Edith Van Dyck, a musicologist, explains the science behind this. Dr. Jasmin C. Hutchinson, who studied music's effect on running, also said that "beat perception is a pretty low order brain function", and the brain's bandwidth is being used up by the act of running, possibly unable to process double entendres or themes self-actualization.

Bands and festivals are hoping that they'll restart in the fall, maybe even in late summer, but Zeke Emanuel, oncologist, bioethicist, senior fellow at the American Center for American Progress is far more pessimistic. His estimate, given to the New York Times, is it'll take a year and a half for concerts to begin again: "Restarting the economy has to be done in stages, and it does have to start with more physical distancing at a work site that allows people who are at lower risk to come back. Certain kinds of construction, or manufacturing or offices, in which you can maintain six-foot distances are more reasonable to start sooner. Larger gatherings — conferences, concerts, sporting events — when people say they’re going to reschedule this conference or graduation event for October 2020, I have no idea how they think that’s a plausible possibility. I think those things will be the last to return. Realistically we’re talking fall 2021 at the earliest".

Everybody is isolated, many are alone, so everyone wants some connection, The Atlantic argues in an excellent article about livestreams. No wonder the Instagram live hip hop battles are so popular, live-streamed concerts in which performers take requests have healthy viewership also, as well as live-streamed DJ sets in which viewers can see other people dancing at home. Some artists are also focusing on interactivity. Grimes put out a music video with a green-screen background on which fans were supposed to doodle, The Armed released audio stems of a song they wanted others to finish, Charli XCX is doing a similar thing with her new album.

Cherie Hu published a well researched and highly valuable article on her Water & Music blog about music licensing in this time of mass music livestreams. The area is, as it turns out, highly unregulated, with sporadic solutions here and there - Facebook and YouTube have blanket deals for on-demand content, Twitch has "flat-fee agreements... to avoid litigation for 12 to 18 months as its business matures". Some people in the music business consider livestream-only performances to be "ephemeral" uses that don’t require sync licenses. Several publishing companies disagree. An essential read.

A great text on Pitchfork about why we need to listen to new music, especially now: "The world will keep spinning and culture must move with it, even if we are staid and static in our homes... The choice to listen to new music prioritizes, if for one listen only, the artist over you. It is an emotional risk to live for a moment in the abyss of someone else’s world.... It also appears that we are in the most impressionable era in generations... Don’t let history be recursively defined by a feedback loop. Steer into the skid, pour the fear and dread leaking through your roof into something unfamiliar, because it could be the new artifact that exclusively defines this moment for you".

Guardian's Mark Beaumont shared some advice on how to make a good live stream. First, there are some "dos": finish your songs (unlike Chris Martin who slaughtered his nice songs to just a few seconds of duration); put on a show; have an enthusiastic spouse (like Nicole Kidman, and unlike Chrissy Teigen); think big (like Willie Nelson who seriously upped the game with his ’Til Further Notice). There are, of course, some "don'ts": use Facebook (they cut Frant Turner's show for “violating community standards”); hold your own camera (Bono mistake); let quality control slip (like with John Lennon's 'Imagine' rendition); give up now.

The Guardian has an encouraging article about how music helped the humanity during the times of pandemics. When plague struck Sparta in the 7th century BC, city leaders petitioned the poet Thaletus to sing hymns. In summer of 1576, when plague of Saint Charles devastated much of the Italian north, thousands of Milanese men, women and children opened their windows and sang. Now, people in Italy, Spain, Canada and the wider world have used music to bring their communities together on a truly impressive scale. Dr. Chris Macklin, a former professor of musicology at Mercer University, explained to the G that “music was not a luxury in times of epidemic uncertainty – it was a necessity”.

Denis Ladegaillerie from one of the biggest players in the global record industry, Paris-based Believe shared some advice with Music Business Worldwide for artists waiting in the shadow of the big lockdown: "If you are an artist who is digitally-driven with a very strong fanbase, it’s actually in your interest to release rapidly right now. That’s especially true if you’re an independent artist because, as major labels are postponing a lot of big releases. With fewer new big releases, artists releasing music during a quiet time benefit. If they have strong and engaged fanbases, they benefit even more". Believe’s own, recently-released Creative Marketing Playbook is packed with further guidance for artists right now.

Dua Lipa, Sam Hunt, and The Weeknd are pop stars who decided to release their new albums despite the big lockdown. Lady Gaga, Haim, and Sam Smith have decided to wait. Dua Lipa said, as Variety reports, she "thought I’d be doing them a disservice to delay it, especially during this time”, while Lady Gaga said - “it just doesn’t feel right to me to release this album with all that is going on during this global pandemic”. Whether to release an album or not depends on the genre also - hip-hop sells close to 100% in digital formats so there's a good chance of selling the album in expected numbers, while some older-demographic artists are still selling 70%-80% physical, and the records stores are closed... Tours are equally cancelled for both sides.

Billboard sees grim future for the indie live music business when concerts start happening again: After the big shutdown, billions of dollars in ticket revenue and artist payments were frozen in accounts controlled by, respectively, Live Nation and AEG, and the four major talent agencies: WME, Creative Artists Agency (CAA), Paradigm and UTA. Everyone else in the business — indie promoters, staging companies and food/merchandise vendors — continued to receive bills but not the money they were counting on to pay them. When concerts do start happening again, the industry behind them will have changed significantly. Venue contracts will be renegotiated to account for months of inactivity, and the brands that sponsor tours and festivals will almost certainly slash their budgets. Most importantly, at least some indie promoters (and promoters that lack the resources of their larger competitors) may shutter, unable to weather the storm or get the credit they need to endure it — leaving their giant rivals with even more power.

"After a weekend of watching a number of impressive online performances, I am beginning to feel a little better about things" - the Quietus wrote about online concerts in a time of general shutdown. Why? - "It's actually pretty good, this live-streaming lark. You don't have to squeeze through a sea of bloated hoodies to nip to the toilet and back. No one is standing in front of you filming the entire set for their YouTube channel because it basically already is one. The drinks are cheaper. Before you attend, you don't have to worry about what you're going to wear to the gig anymore. Be as uncool as you like, people, nobody's judging you anymore".