Musos and gamers were left scratching their heads last Wednesday as Bandcamp, the online record store hailed by independent artists as a bankable alternative to the razor-thin royalties of streaming, announced its acquisition by Epic Games, makers of the online gaming phenomenon Fortnite. Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond framed the deal as a boon for artists, saying that the two US companies shared a vision of building "the most open, artist-friendly ecosystem in the world". A blogpost from Epic underlined the need for "fair and open platforms" to enable "creators to keep the majority of their hard-earned money". But Bandcamp users reacted with shock and disappointment to the sale of the indie juggernaut, lamenting the loss of "our" store, as drummer and Spotify critic Damon Krukowski tweeted. "We all just got sold," lamented media theorist McKenzie Wark.

Understanding how Google's search works is a key to figuring out why so many companies find it nearly impossible to compete and, in fact, go out of their way to cater to its needs. Every search request provides Google with more data to make its search algorithm smarter. Google has performed so many more searches than any other search engine that it has established a huge advantage over rivals in understanding what consumers are looking for. That lead only continues to widen, since Google has a market share of about 90 percent. Google directs billions of users to locations across the internet, and websites, hungry for that traffic, create a different set of rules for the company.

Artificial intelligence has reached a new frontier: creating black metal music without the need for actual musicians. Two musical technologists named Zack Zukowski and CJ Carr have created an algorithm that can learn bits of existing music and then duplicate it to create a completely new song, the Outline writes. To prove it, Zukowski and Carr, under the name Dadabots, created a heavy metal album called Coditany of Timeness that sounds like a real metal album. That's because it is a real metal album--just one created by AI. Zukowski and Carr took small pieces of a 2011 album called Diotima by the death metal band Krallice, and, as the Outline explains, "Then they fed each segment through a neural network--a type of artificial intelligence modeled loosely on a biological brain--and asked it to guess what the waveform of the next individual sample of audio would be. If the guess was right, the network would strengthen the paths of the neural network that led to the correct answer, similar to the way electrical connections between neurons in our brain strengthen as we learn new skills."

Coditany of Timeness seems like an average entry in the black metal genre, until you consider its source. It was created by a neural network algorithm without a single guitar, without any drums, without even a vocalist. Instead, it's a product of machine learning, the result of a project by Zack Zukowski and CJ Carr called "Dadabots." As their inspiration, the duo used the New York death metal band Kralice and their 2011 album Diotima to teach their algorithm how to create its own music. After breaking the audio into small pieces, they fed it all into the algorithm to let the artificial intelligence learn what death metal was and how to create it.