TikTok's tools for adding music to short videos helped turn short-form video into a phenomenon. Now Google is giving some YouTube Shorts creators an AI feature called Dream Track that can generate songs, including lyrics, melody, and accompaniment, in the styles of seven different artists including Charlie Puth, Demi Lovato, Sia, and T-Pain with a tool called Dream Track. To whip up a 30-second clip with Dream Track a creator just has to enter a prompt, such as "a ballad about how opposites attract, upbeat acoustic," then select which artist the song should be styled on. The new AI capabilities might help Google lure users from TikTok, where AI tools for adding visual or audio effects are hugely popular. YouTube says it is looking into how artists whose work helped train its music-generating algorithms will receive a cut of future ad revenue generated by videos featuring AI-generated audio.

Being with all of you, if only virtually, is always a happy place to be. One of the albums I can't stop listening to this year is Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album. Recorded in 1963 by sublime saxophonist John Coltrane during his "classic quartet" period, the original master tapes were lost or destroyed by the Impulse! This year, the 55-year-old project was unearthed from his family's surviving reference copy. Both Directions at Once occasionally veers into the superlative--it provides a glimpse into the tension between rehearsal process and commercial artifact that informed Coltrane's music in the aftermath of his 1961 juggernaut My Favorite Things--but it's hardly the jazz musician's most transcendent work.