Would seminal Beatles classic Abbey Road have been so memorable if it had been called Everest - and featured George Harrison smoking a cigarette in front of a snow-covered volcano on the cover instead of the Fab Four crossing the street in London? That is one of several questions posed by digital experts today - who have re-imagined how some of the world's most iconic album covers might have looked if they had been released under their original working titles. The study, from digital agency WMG, has used image generation technology instead of the names by which they are now known the world over. An AI bot has predicted what iconic album covers might have looked like if world-famous artists including The Beatles and Queen had plumped for the original record names. Queen's studio album The Miracle was released in 1989 and was named after a song included on the album tracklist Using the working titles of some of music's most legendary albums, SEO and digital marketing experts WMG used AI tool Midjourney to visualise what their covers could have looked like.

More than 60 years since they released their debut single, The Beatles now have their very own academic journal. 'The Journal of Beatles Studies', published by Liverpool University Press, is the first journal to establish The Beatles as an object of scholarly research. Articles in the first issue include'Beatlemania: On informational cascades and spectacular success' and '80 at 80: Commemorating Paul McCartney's eightieth birthday'. The biannual, peer-reviewed journal will publish original, rigorously researched essays and notes, as well as book and media reviews. The journal's first issue has just been published, while the second issue is due sometime in spring 2023 'The Journal of Beatles Studies' is the first journal to establish the band as an object of academic research Editors of the journal are Holly Tessler at the University of Liverpool and Paul Long at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

I may be many things, but I'm not a rapper. I discover this when I'm asked to freestyle a few verses on a visit to London's Abbey Road recording studios. Immediately lines from famous rappers flood into my head – some classic Biggie, a few Young Thug yelps, the theme to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air – but I've got to think up something original. Out of desperation, I decide to rap about my morning routine. Adopting a slow pace and simple rhyme scheme that even the Sugarhill Gang would disdain, I begin: "I wake up at seven and I brush my teeth."

With the success of Peter Jackson's Get Back, the documentary streaming on Disney Plus, Beatlemania is back. Watching Paul McCartney create the eponymous song out of seemingly nothing, as George Harrison stands nearby yawning, is one of 2021's cinematic pleasures. The Beatles are arguably the most successful pop group in history and, in the years since their heyday, countless artists, producers and songwriters, not to mention record companies and now music streaming services, have tried to recreate the same magic. The latest tool for capturing elusive pop music gold is artificial intelligence. Usually when we think of artificial intelligence creating art, it's making something bizarre or unintentionally hilarious. Take Google's horrifying Deep Dream with its thousands of dog eyes, or Sunspring, a movie written by an AI that was fed hundreds of sci-fi scripts.

Between 1962 and 1970, the Beatles recorded nearly all their singles and albums at London's Abbey Road Studios using one of EMI's innovative REDD mixing consoles. Five decades later, the studio is turning to startups to keep up with the pace of technological change. "We are aware of the studio's heritage of continually tracking technology as it changed over the years," says Jon Eades, innovation manager at Abbey Road Red, the studio's technology incubator, which launched in 2015. Abbey Road Red runs six-month mentoring programmes, giving music-technology startups access to the famous studio's experts and facilities, not to mention a foot in the door with Universal Music, which has owned the complex since buying out EMI in 2012. The third wave of startups graduate in October and their track record is impressive.

Spill a glass of wine on the wooden floor at Abbey Road and the studio triggers an emergency procedure. In this, England's most storied recording venue, change is resisted at a molecular level – and not only because, in 2010, the government listed the building as a heritage site to ward off vampiric property developers. A few years ago, decorators varnished the floor of Studio Two, whose decor is somewhere between a 1950s prep school gym and a ballroom on the Titanic. The room's acoustic resonance, made famous on most of the Beatles' albums, had changed. The varnish was promptly chipped off, at vast expense.