In case you missed it, at this past weekend’s Grammy Awards, the Beatles took home the win for Best Rock Performance for the AI-assisted track “Now and Then.” Before you go down the rabbit hole of seeing this as the first step in the music apocalypse, it’s important to note exactly what was done here. This was not a new track created by AI trained on all the past recordings of the Beatles. Rather, it was an effort to use AI tools to clean up a decades-old muffled track of an original recording from the band that was never good enough to be released. Thanks to new audio isolation techniques enabled by AI, the surviving Beatles were able to extract John Lennon’s original vocals as a track and then rerecord and remix the song in studio.
This has huge implications for the library of content that exists for many of the most popular musicians of the last 75 years. If older recordings can be remastered, rebuilt and rereleased, they can unlock a wave of “new” music from beloved acts of the past. There is also the potential for this same technology to allow all of us to unlock our own memories of the past. Imagine being able to take footage of your parents (or grandparents) and remaster it into something that is higher quality, easier to hear and possible to share more easily. The potential impact on the music industry is important, but the idea that we might use it to unlock the magic of our own family histories is even more exciting.
