There’s a lot of hubbub in the news and online about the “new Beatles song” that dropped yesterday. As a life-long semi-pro musician, this headline hits a sour note with me.
Hah! See what I did there? Anyway, my thoughts…
This song was one of many demos Lennon did after the band broke up. This is key. While we don’t know for sure, it’s unlikely he said to himself “This would be a great Beatles song. I should ring up the lads.” when composing the tune.
Lennon’s widow “gave” the demo tapes to the remaining Beatles years after his tragic murder and even longer after the band had officially broke up. The tape Yoko turned over is purported to contain at least three of Lennon’s demos, not just this one song.
Paul, George, and Ringo messed around with the recording, laying down all new tracks for the song. I’m sure they did this with the other demo songs too. But that’s all it is; they messed around with a demo of their deceased former bandmate. Lennon was not there to collaborate as a band member. Releasing a song as a “band” means all members have provided input on the final product. This fact alone makes the song not a Beatles song.
Fast forward 25 years. Now we have machine learning that can digitally enhance anyone’s voice, and even reproduce a near perfect representation of vocals from unrelated sample files. This is how Lennon’s lyrics were included in the song – by digitally reproducing and enhancing something that was barely audible to begin with. Ultimately, these are not Lennon’s true vocals. They are a damn good representation of the man’s voice enhanced by computers.
The use of AI bodes poorly for musicians who create their art. Will we start seeing demos of other bands which were never intended to see the light of day getting released by record labels as “the lost album of (band name here)”? I bet we will. We already are. As a result, the soul of recorded music is lost and it’s just become about the money for record labels.
The list of credits for this song is long. But in the end, it’s still just a well (over?) produced John Lennon demo and not a Beatles recording. He is the only “songwriter” who I believe should be credited.
Ahhh… Fall has finally come to Southern California. The Santa Ana’s are blowing hot, the air is full of dust & pollen, and my lips are starting to chap. Time to take down the umbrellas, bring anything that’s not tied down inside, shut all the windows, and take an allergy pill.
I only received a couple of replies to my Micro.blog Mastodon users question last week, but I decided to alias my Mastodon account to Micro.blog and import those I was following anyway. I like the choice of having one “place” for my online presence thus far. It’s much quieter.
It took a minute to wrap up, but I’m happy to announce that my Tinylytics for Micro.blog plugin has been updated to version 3.0, adding a bunch of new options to bring it to parity with Tinylytics.app features @vincent has released over the last couple of months.
Notable enhancements made:
The ability to show the country flags of your Micro.blog visitors in either a footer embed or shortcode on a page. See the footer of this page for an example.
The option to show a Tinylytics Webring link with custom link text in the footer embed. Again, see the footer for an example.
A complete rewrite of the backend logic to make it scale better as Vincent adds more features.
New Users Save 20%
If you’re a Micro.blog user and you’ve been on the fence about signing up for a Tinylytics account, today is your day. New users can get a 20% discount on their first year of Tinylytics when using the coupon code found in the README file on the Github project page. That’s a whole $10 back in your pocket!
Note: This offer is only good for new users who select the one-year plan at sign up.
Updating
If you’re a current user on the Micro.blog platform, you should see a new version available in your site plug-ins area already. Just click the “Upgrade” button, then check out the settings to enable new features.
For more details about using the plug-in, see the README on the Github project page.
If you have any other questions or find a bug, contact me through any of the methods in my site footer below.
Note: Uptime monitoring is a paid feature of Tinylytics. You’ll need to have a paid account for uptime stats to show via this plugin.
Thought of the day… There is no such thing as “it should be as simple as…” when it comes to software (or web) development.
I put some work in on my Tinylytics for Micro.blog plugin tonight to bring it to parity with all the nifty features @vincent has added over the last few months.
I have some dog-food testing to complete, but expect a release to drop before the end of the week. Sorry it’s taken so long to get this done!
There’s something that feels wrong in the fact the app on my smartwatch told me it’s sunrise right as I was walking in the door of the office today…
Let’s be honest… Is there really anyone who waits for the oven to preheat before starting to cook? I didn’t think so.
A question for the Micro.bloggers with a Mastodon account… Do you alias your Micro.blog ActivityPub compatible username to Mastodon, or do you alias Mastodon to Micro.blog? What is your reason for the choice you’ve made? I’m torn and have gone back and forth myself. I’d like to get some community input on this. Discuss below!
And my case-less iPhone experiment comes to an end. While l liked the smaller form factor in my hand, I was just too nervous about potentially dropping the phone. Fortunately, I never did drop it, but it was always foremost in my mind while using it. Better safe than sorry, as they always say.
And just like that, a new car is sitting in the driveway. It’s funny how plans you think are the smartest turn out to be not so smart. We were going to buy out the lease on our truck, but it was financially smarter to lease a new hybrid vehicle instead…
I’ve been a case on the iPhone kind of guy forever, but I removed the case from my 14 Pro last night and actually like how it feels in my hands. I think I’ll give it a go for a bit…
I decided to switch over to a theme I’ve been tinkering with for a while now. It’s not quite complete, but having it “in production” will be the motivation to fix the little oddities that linger. When it’s ready for prime-time, I might make the repo available. We’ll see…
📷 The North Shore of O’ahu. More beautiful than I imagined it would be.
📷 Sunrise over Waikiki.
Thirty years in between with lots of ups and downs, the story turned out just how we hoped it would. So grateful for our many blessings along the journey.
If you’re a Tinylytics for Micro.blog plugin user on Micro.blog, I promise it will get updates soon to match the great enhancements @vincent has recently made to his analytics platform, Tinylytics. Sometimes there are just not enough hours in a day anymore…
