Earlier this month, HYBE, the company behind some major K-pop acts, including BTS, acquired Supertone, a software company capable of creating “a hyper-realistic and expressive voice that [is not] distinguishable from real humans”. This week, BTS members announced they are about to go to the army to complete compulsory military service. Global News believes HYBE is preparing to fill the coming void with AI-made music. GN also lists other AI-powered music creation software such as AudioLM, Loudly, AVIA, DAACi, Beatoven...

generated recommendations, means: "Besieged by automated recommendations, we are left to guess exactly how they are influencing us, feeling in some moments misperceived or misled and in other moments clocked with eerie precision. At times, the computer sometimes seems more in control of our choices than we are".

"The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most" - Jan Swafford writes in her review of Beethoven's X symphony, which was finished by AI in the last two years. "Artificial intelligence can mimic art, but it can’t be expressive at it because, other than the definition of the word, it doesn’t know what expressive is. It also doesn’t know what excitement is, because there’s a reason people call excitement 'pulse-pounding', and computers don’t have pulses".

Warner Music Group‘s Chinese dance label Whet Records has signed a deal with Ha Jiang, in a first major label record deal with a virtual artist. "As with any form of fame, there are stars that cross over into music. ‘Virtual idols’ won’t be any different" - Jon Serbin, the CEO of Warner Music Greater China and Head of Whet Records tells in the MBW interview.

"A voice is inherently communal. I learned how to use my voice by mimicking the people around me through language, through centuries of evolution on that, or even vocal styles. A pop music vocal is often you're kind of emulating something that came before and then performing your individuality through that kind of communal voice. So I wanted to find a way to kind of reflect that communal ownership" - experimental musician Holly Herndon says to The Fader about her audio deep-fake AI Holly+. Herndon encourages her fans to upload audio files so they can be sung in her voice. She goes into the metaphysics of it: "I mean, we've been able to kind of re-animate our dead through moving picture or through samples, but this is kind of a brand new kind of field in that you can have the person do something that they never did. It's not just kind of replaying something that they've done in the past. You can kind of re-animate them in and give them entirely new phrases that they may not have approved of in their lifetime or even for living artists that they might not approve of. So I think it opens up a kind of Pandora's box".

Berlin-based musician and sound artist Holly Herndon has released a new artificial intelligence tool Holly+, which she refers to as her “digital twin”, that allows fans to upload any polyphonic audio and receive a new version of that music sung in Herndon’s own voice. Holly+ is as much a technological and artistic experiment, as it is a response to, and embrace of, the rise of deepfake technology, The Fader reports.

The A.I. Song Contest is an international competition exploring the use of A.I. in songwriting, which started last year and uses the Eurovision Song Contest’s format for inspiration, the New York Times reports. The contest welcomed 38 entries from teams and individuals around the world working at the nexus of music and A.I. They used deep-learning neural networks — computing systems that mimic the operations of a human brain — to analyze massive amounts of music data, identify patterns and generate drumbeats, melodies, chord sequences, lyrics and even vocals. The resulting songs included punk thrash, electronic dance, and folk. After an online ceremony broadcast on Tuesday from Liège in Belgium, a judging panel led by the musician Imogen Heap and including academics, scientists and songwriters praised 'Listen to Your Body Choir' for its “rich and creative use of A.I. throughout the song".

Mashable explores the incoming reality where artificial intelligence make music. Their main idea is that the evolution of technology always included some kind of progress in music. With AI in music the plus side is - "they're never late. The downside? Creepiness, obviously".

Factory New is a "virtual" record label with a roster comprised exclusively of virtual artists. Their first ‘signing’ is AI-powered robot rapper, FN Meka, who has 9 million followers (and over a billion views) on TikTok, MBW reports. FN Meka is voiced by a human, but everything else about him – from his lyrics to the chords and tempo underpinning his music – is based on AI. Anthony Martini, co-founder of FN, asks himself quite sensibly - “what is an ‘artist’ today? Think about the biggest stars in the world. How many of them are just vessels for commercial endeavors?”.

Toronto organization Over the Bridge has created “new” Nirvana, Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Doors songs using artificial-intelligence software to approximate their songwriting, Rolling Stone reports. In "new" Nirvana case, everything other than the vocals - the work of Nirvana tribute band frontman Eric Hogan - from the turns of phrase to the reckless guitar performance, is the work of computers. The tune, titled 'Drowned in the Sun', is part of Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, a project featuring songs written and mostly performed by machines in the styles of other musicians who died at 27: Cobain, Jimi Hendrix ('You're Gonna Kill Me'), Jim Morrison ('The Roads Are Alive'), and Amy Winehouse ('Man I Know'). Each track is the result of AI programs analyzing up to 30 songs by each artist and granularly studying the tracks’ vocal melodies, chord changes, guitar riffs and solos, drum patterns, and lyrics to guess what their “new” compositions would sound like. Over the Bridge helps members of the music industry struggling with mental illness.