Electronic music artist and tech creator Look Mum No Computer has been chosen to represent the UK at this year's Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, the BBC has announced. Look Mum No Computer is a solo artist, songwriter and YouTuber, who is also described as an inventor of unique musical machines. The singer first arrived on the music scene back in 2014 as Sam Battle, frontman of indie rock band Zibra. The group performed at Glastonbury in 2015 for BBC Introducing. Since then, he has been performing and recording under his solo name.

Brian Wilson, the musical savant who scripted a defining Southern California soundtrack with a run of hit songs with the Beach Boys before being pulled down a rabbit hole of despair and depression when his highly anticipated masterwork was shelved unfinished, has died. Wilson's family announced his death Wednesday morning on Facebook. "We are at a loss for words right now," the post said. "Please respect our privacy at this time as our family is grieving. We realize we are sharing our grief with the world," said the statement, also shared on Instagram and the musician's website. The statement didn't reveal a cause of death. Wilson died more than a year after it was revealed he was diagnosed with dementia and placed under a conservatorship in May 2024.

We present Hookpad Aria, a generative AI system designed to assist musicians in writing Western pop songs. Our system is seamlessly integrated into Hookpad, a web-based editor designed for the composition of lead sheets: symbolic music scores that describe melody and harmony. Hookpad Aria has numerous generation capabilities designed to assist users in non-sequential composition workflows, including: (1) generating left-to-right continuations of existing material, (2) filling in missing spans in the middle of existing material, and (3) generating harmony from melody and vice versa. Hookpad Aria is also a scalable data flywheel for music co-creation -- since its release in March 2024, Aria has generated 318k suggestions for 3k users who have accepted 74k into their songs. More information about Hookpad Aria is available at https://www.hooktheory.com/hookpad/aria

If you ask their shareholders, Spotify is in a great place right now. Ask anyone else, and it's a mess of scams, tone-deaf CEO messaging, and lawsuits. One of the weirdest scams that recently came to light involves (what else) A.I.-generated content. Here's the gist: Covers of popular songs were being inserted into large, publicly available playlists, hidden among dozens of other covers by real artists while racking up millions of listens and getting paid. The artists "performing" the covers--the Highway Outlaws, Waterfront Wranglers, Saltwater Saddles--all fit a certain pattern, with monthly listeners in the hundreds of thousands, zero social media footprint, and some very ChatGPT-sounding bios.

Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry are among 200 high-profile artists calling for the'predatory' use of AI in the music industry to be stopped. In an open letter, several of the world's biggest stars have warned the tech'will set in motion a race to the bottom' if left unchecked. The use of AI to steal artists' voices, likeness, and sound is an'assault on human creativity', they said, and would'destroy the music ecosystem'. Issued by the Artists Rights Alliance (ARA), the letter calls for a ban on AI tools that undermine or replace human songwriters or their work. The move is part of an industry-wide push for better regulation of generative AI, the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT and image generators like Midjourney.

John Rich shared his unfiltered opinions on the state of country music today and if AI would make it better or worse. John Rich is less concerned with the advancements in artificial intelligence than he is with the expansion of country music, questioning if the technology could produce better quality music than what country artists are releasing now. "Could AI do any worse than some of the country singers that are out there right now?" Rich wondered during an interview with Fox News Digital, without naming names. One thing's for sure, according to Rich: AI has nothing on the legends. "Listen, you can't replicate the great songwriters. I mean, you're talking about Albert Einstein honky-tonk songwriters."

This week marks the release, at long last, of De La Soul's 1989 debut album 3 Feet High and Rising on music streaming services, along with most of their vital early catalog. It is, for fans of a certain generation, a bittersweet moment, coming as it does on a wave of grief over last month's sudden death of member Dave "Trugoy" Jolicoeur. It's hard to overstate the importance of 3 Feet High and Rising as an inflection point in the growth of hip-hop. The group's eccentric, bohemian aesthetic was a big reason that the genre's cultural tent expanded over the years, allowing more people to find their place within it. Crucially, the album's sound, sculpted largely by their producer Prince Paul, changed our expectations about what music itself could be: 24 riotous tracks--well-crafted songs interspersed with anarchic skits--made from hundreds of digital samples of sound from existing records.

The artificial intelligence bot which Nick Cave accused of making a'grotesque mockery' of his work has hit back at the musician by insisting it'tries its best to generate text that is coherent, creative and conveys a message'. Cave left a scathing review of ChatGPT's rendition of his work, describing the lyrics after fans asked it to replicate his style of music. He's one of many musicians fans are asking the bot to mimic, to see if it can capture the magic of songs legitimately produced by the artist. ChatGPT collates huge swathes of data which allows it to predict phrases and words that are likely to be used in an artist's repertoire. When provided a prompt, such as asking it to create song lyrics for a certain artist, it sweeps the database for all known previous works by the artist and collates sentences using phrases, terms and themes frequently used in association with the musician.

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."

I (Peter Ranieri) created the "These Lyrics Do Not Exist" website to show you how Artificial Intelligence can be creative by generating original song lyrics. You will never be low on inspiration again, remove writers' block today. Increase your songwriting creativity and productivity.