“If you like that s**tty song that’s viral on TikTok, get out of this group right now”: Bad Bunny rants about AI track using his voiceA TikTok song which uses AI generated vocals based on Bad Bunny’s voice has gone viral, and the Puerto Rican singer and rapper is not in the least bit happy about it.
In a fiery rant posted on his WhatsApp channel, Bad Bunny – whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio – writes [translated from Spanish using Google Translate]: “If you like that shitty song that’s viral on TikTok, get out of this group right now.

READ MORE: More than half of artists would hide the use of AI in their music, per recent survey

“You don’t deserve to be my friends and that’s why I made the new album, to get rid of people like that. I don’t want them on the tour either.”
The track in question is titled Nostalgia, and also features AI-generated vocals replicating the voices of Justin Bieber and Daddy Yankee. It was first uploaded by a user named flowgptmusic, although there’s no evidence this person is linked to FlowGPT, a visual chatbot tool comparable to ChatGPT.

AI-generated songs using the vocal likenesses of famous artists are becoming a rising issue. And while some – like Grimes – have endorsed the practice, even encouraging their fans to create songs using their voice, others haven’t taken too kindly to their name being attached to projects they have no involvement in.
Back in April, Heart on My Sleeve, a track using AI-generated Drake and The Weeknd vocals, was released by TikTok user ghostwriter977.
It reached a whopping 13 million views on TikTok alone, before it was eventually banned by Universal Music Group.
Due to its success on the platform, the song was even submitted for Grammy consideration, but the Recording Academy, perhaps inevitably, deemed it ineligible, as it uses illegally obtained vocals.
The post “If you like that s**tty song that’s viral on TikTok, get out of this group right now”: Bad Bunny rants about AI track using his voice appeared first on MusicTech.

CD Baby launches CDB Boost to help independent songwriters get paidCD Baby has launched CDB Boost to help independent songwriters with royalty collection and access to sync opportunities. CDB Boost includes mechanical royalty collection via the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC),. Continue reading
The post CD Baby launches CDB Boost to help independent songwriters get paid appeared first on Hypebot.

Earthworks unveil SR5117 wireless capsule Earthworks latest release brings the capsule of their SR117 to users of Sennheiser radio mic systems. 

Free Spotify Audiobooks are now live for US Premium subscribersUS Spotify Premium subscribers now also get 15 hours of free audiobook content per month, with bestselling titles making up 70% of the 200,000+ book catalog. Spotify’s total paid audiobook. Continue reading
The post Free Spotify Audiobooks are now live for US Premium subscribers appeared first on Hypebot.

How to reach actual Spotify users with Foundee AdsFound.ee helps musicians reach more fans by setting up targeting ads for Spotify users. Here’s everything you need to know to get started… by Randi Zimmerman from the Symphonic Blog. Continue reading
The post How to reach actual Spotify users with Foundee Ads appeared first on Hypebot.

Sampha: “I don’t go in with a concept. I just know I want to go into the studio and create something, so a lot of it comes from a place of intuition”In a new interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 – in which he talks about his second full-length, Lahai – singer, songwriter and producer Sampha waxes lyrical on his music-making process.
Lahai arrived 20 October via Young, and is touted as an ”exploration of human connection and the depth of life itself”. And as Sampha explains, his intuitive approach to songwriting was at play during the record’s creation.

READ MORE: PinkPantheress lost out on a studio session with Kendrick Lamar because her phone was on silent

“It is a funny thing because the way I make music is quite… I don’t go in with a concept,” he says. “I just know I want to go into the studio and create something, so a lot of it comes from an intuitive place or a place of intuition.”
He later adds: “I feel like I need to find a sonic palette… As opposed to, I sort of got into music more so just making beats and stuff, and that’s my main thing. Aside from me, I do play piano and I write songs, but generally speaking, especially when it comes to the thought of making a record, it comes from a sonic palette first.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Sampha discusses collaborating with producer SBTRKT on Lahai.
“He didn’t have to encourage me [to sing], per se, but it was like, ‘Oh, maybe we should develop this into. Or write some more. Maybe write some more lyrics.’
“Because I would just naturally just start humming and I can’t help myself. That’s why I feature on so many things because I get into a space and I start just naturally humming.
“That was a space where I kind of honed in songwriting more so and alongside production. And obviously having him as a bit of a mentor, he would show me how this is how he is able to do this and dah, dah dah, and he was really open in that sense. And DJing and playing live. And it was the first time I had songs on the radio.”
You can watch the full interview below:

The post Sampha: “I don’t go in with a concept. I just know I want to go into the studio and create something, so a lot of it comes from a place of intuition” appeared first on MusicTech.

Universal Audio to launch Sound City Studios plug-in UA's upcoming plug-in emulates the room and signal chain at the legendary Sound City Studios.

Roland announces plans for new global headquarters in JapanRoland has announced its plans for expansion with a new global headquarters to be built in the heart of Hamamatsu, Japan.

READ MORE: Native Instruments emulates ’80s analogue mastering hardware with new digital channel strip plugin

Costing approximately 7 billion yen – almost £38 million – construction of the cutting-edge facility is set to begin in August 2024 and is expected to be completed in 2025.
According to Roland, this new headquarters will serve as the company’s epicentre for pioneering research and development, honouring products of the past and present, while driving creation of music of the future.
The new HQ will be an expansion of a building Roland acquired in early this year. The building’s two existing sections will be connected to create a larger square-shaped structure with an open area concept at its core. The perimeter of the building, known as the “Roland Circuit,” will encompass the four sides and feature well-lit, open communication areas, as well as offices designed to “foster creativity and productivity”.
At the heart of this innovative design is the central atrium aka the ‘Roland Arena’ – a spacious, open-concept area designed to maximise natural light and encourage sharing of ideas. The brand also describes it as a “versatile performance space” that will be enjoyed by “both Roland employees and the community”.
Image: Roland
This new facility will span a total of three floors and approximately 219,000 square feet (20,330 square metres). Roland also maintains that there’ll be an emphasis on sustainability from the construction to operation of the space.
Specifically, the building’s renovation project will reuse existing buildings and materials to minimise the amount of CO2 emissions generated during the construction and demolition processes. The natural light coming through the atrium and natural ventilation also contribute to ongoing savings by keeping the energy bills down.
“I am pleased to announce the groundbreaking construction of our newest headquarters in Hamamatsu, where Roland’s been able to build a strong foundation for many years,” said Roland Corporation CEO Gordon Raison. “We’re confident this new structure will help to deepen employee communication, creating an environment in which all employees can fully embrace creativity to help shape the music of the future.”
The post Roland announces plans for new global headquarters in Japan appeared first on MusicTech.

“Analogue warmth and imperfections are vital”, says producer-singer, Jessica WinterJessica Winter sways between electronic music’s many subgenres, spanning 80s dance, trap, indie, and pop. Originally from Portsmouth and now based in Brixton, she’s renowned for both her solo work and as part of the duo, PREGOBLIN. Her 2018 solo project Soundscapes Unveiled gained recognition in 2018, leading to her supporting Death Grips across Europe.

READ MORE: Joy to the world: How a community inspired Joy Anonymous to fly far from their Southbank beginnings

For her latest EP, titled All I Need, Jessica collaborated with producer Jonathon Snipes. She says that the tracks on the EP were produced in one day in Snipes’ LA studio after she’d attended a party where people had used crystal meth. This led to a studio session inspired by the necessities of life, evoking tracks exploring raw themes of addiction. In our conversation, we discuss finding sonic warmth through vintage studio equipment and Jessica tells us about a peculiar synthesizer that was once distributed with a packet of acid attached to it.
All I Need by Jessica Winter & Jonathan Snipes
You’ve just been nominated for One To Watch and Best Independent EP/ Mixtape at the AIM Awards. How does it feel?
They’re the first awards I’ve ever been nominated for, and it feels incredible. I can’t believe it. People don’t usually put me forward for things like this, so it’s encouraging, and it makes me feel like I must be doing something right.
Do you feel a sense of freedom in being a producer, singer, and handling various aspects of your sound?
It can be a bit overwhelming because when you have the capability to handle different roles, you can become a control freak and overthink things. But having these options also provides immense creative freedom. It’s essential to know when to use your strengths and when to collaborate with others.
Jessica Winter. Image: Nan Moore
Where do you usually create your music, and is it more hardware-based or plugin-centric?
I typically start creating at home, whether it’s writing songs or making demos. Then, I take those ideas to the studio because I love analogue equipment. I prefer running things through tape machines and vintage synths. Analogue warmth and imperfections add character to the sound, which I find vital.
Do you rely on hardware or use plugins for that vintage edge in your music?
Both! I recommend running sounds through old mixers and equipment like cassette decks. I recently used a reel-to-reel tape machine, which added warmth and character to the music.
Have you ever come across any strange vintage synths?
There is this one synth, the Buchla 100 – I think it was one of the first modular synths from the 70s. It originally came with an LSD pack on the back when it was first made. It’s worth about 50 grand. So, basically, when you want some inspiration, you’d put your finger on the LSD section, and you’d just lick your finger, and then you’d create a new world of space sounds, I guess.

How about plugins? Are they a significant part of your production process?
Absolutely. If you can’t access a studio with expensive equipment, plugins are a great way to achieve excellent sounds. Even if you’re technical, plugins offer versatility and unpredictability, adding an element of chance and play to your music.
Your vocals sound clean and powerful. How do you record them?
I used to think the Neumann U67 was my go-to, but now I’ve found that the Shure SM7 works well for my voice. With a good preamp like a Neve 1076, it gives the right warmth. In the box, I like to layer vocals, using techniques like a whisper track, a clean track, and distorted vocals. Post-processing, I enjoy using effects like SoundToys’ Devil-Loc and Decapitator.
With your vocals, are you using many plugins for processing?
Yes, I do. Layering vocals and experimenting with plugins allow me to create a unique sound. For example, I like to run vocals through guitar pedal reverb chains to create a distant feeling within the track.
Check out Jessica Winter’s music via Bandcamp.
The post “Analogue warmth and imperfections are vital”, says producer-singer, Jessica Winter appeared first on MusicTech.

Mixland’s Subloom plugin helps your kick drums hit harder than ever before$70, mixland.io
The initial clutch of plugins to come out of Mixland, the brainchild of Grammy Award-winning mix engineer Jesse Ray Ernster, landed very much at the quirkier end of things. This quirkiness culminated with Steamdriver, a preamp and saturator controlled via a madcap steampunk interface, but it seems Mixland may now be backing away from such visual extremities. Its two latest plugins looking, well, normal, came as quite a surprise. Thankfully, this newfound visual sobriety has not extended to the concept underlying Subloom, the plugin we’re looking at here, which is, if anything, Mixland’s most inventive creation to date.

READ MORE: Strymon Deco brings a unique guitar pedal into the DAWs for producers

Subloom is an audio processor that takes a number of existing processing tricks and techniques that are used for adding thickness, shape and colour to kick drums, and wraps them together into a single convenient plugin.
But the plugin’s talents aren’t limited to kick drums. You can feed other drum sounds through it, with its tools doing particularly interesting things to toms and snares, and it’s even able to give useful results when applied across a drum submix or even a full mix. Given the overall concept and the tools on offer though, Subloom’s particular speciality is individual drum sounds, with kicks being the main focus.
Unfortunately, we first had problems running Subloom on two of our Intel macOS testing systems. This manifested as Subloom hogging the graphics pipeline when the plugin is enabled and has its window open, reducing to a crawl of all graphic updates and mouse interactions with the DAW and other plugins. Audio performance is unaffected, and Subloom itself runs just fine. To be fair, the affected systems are both older Macs running a few versions behind the current macOS (Sonoma), but both are capable machines and are within the published system requirements. The issue isn’t being widely encountered, though, and Mixland is aware and working on a fix.
Kick it
The plugin splits its operations into two main sections, Kick and Sub. These operate in parallel, with each section sporting a fader and mute and solo buttons to control its contribution to the overall effect.
The Kick section starts with a filter stage comprising a resonant high-pass filter feeding into a non-resonant low-pass filter. This is a common arrangement for a drum synth, with the high-pass and attendant resonant frequency spike allowing a deep boom or thud to be dialled in without overpowering the frequencies below it, and the low-pass acting to gently roll off higher frequencies. That said, we’d prefer the low-pass to also have a resonance control to increase its sound-sculpting scope.
The filters are followed by a three-band (so-called) ‘British’ EQ. Low and high bands are shelving, while the middle is a peak band, and all provide up to 12dB of cut or boost at their selected frequency.
Each band has a choice of three frequencies – 30Hz, 60Hz and 120Hz for the low band, 400Hz, 800Hz and 1.2kHz for the mid band, and 3kHz, 6kHz and 12kHz for the high band. These are useful frequencies when working with kick drums, and can bring out some nice details, but this is a very broad-brushed EQ with gentle curves and some big gaps in the frequency coverage, so isn’t suitable for precision work. The frequency selection toggle switches can be a bit fiddly to use as well.
Mixland Subloom plugin
The EQ can be switched to be pre or post the Kick section’s final stage, which provides transient shaping and saturation. A simple dial is provided to soften or accentuate the attack of sound passing through, and this can be switched to be applied pre or post the saturation stage, with which it interacts in interesting ways.
Mixland offers three flavours of saturation. The first gives a warm saturation similar to tape, the second a more intense but flattering tube-style drive, and the third an aggressive and dirty distortion. Whichever you choose, the strength of the effect can be fully controlled, from subtle right through to extreme.
There’s also a Wrap dial that alters the way the transient and saturation processing interact, and though it isn’t entirely clear what it’s doing, the results are easy enough to hear. You can vary the effect from a flabbier, fuzzier distortion to a tighter, more focussed crunchiness.
Sub synth
Subloom’s second section, Sub, is an analogue-style kick drum synth similar to that of the Roland TR-808 or Arturia DrumBrute. The synth is triggered by incoming transients (the sensitivity being easily adjusted) and is ideal not only for thickening an existing kick drum, but also for replacing an acoustic sound with a synthetic one.
The synth produces a sine wave pulse with the dialled-in pitch, attack and decay characteristics. An optional super-fast pitch attack envelope – Pitch Dive – can also be enabled, and this can do a fantastic job of enhancing and/or emulating the natural pitch envelope of an acoustic drum. It’s also perfect for creating classic disco tom sounds, a prime example of where Subloom’s toolset can become useful beyond just kick drum processing.
The Sub section is rounded off with the same transient and saturation stage as the Kick section, but here it can produce a much wider variation of tones due to the nature of the synthesised source. The third saturation mode, in particular, can completely reshape the sine pulse into much more complex and harmonically rich waveforms.
Sublime Subloom
On its own, with the Kick section muted, the Sub section acts as an excellent drum replacement tool, whether the source is an acoustic drum, a sample or another electronic drum. Sub’s repertoire is somewhat limited to drum sounds that can be derived from a sine wave, but it nonetheless has vast sonic scope, and the saturator opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.
The plugin’s full power comes when combining both sections, Kick and Sub. The former lets you easily enhance and accentuate (or indeed subdue and reduce) sonic components of the source sound, and the latter gives you a tool for adding weight, depth and colour.
This adds up to the ability to completely reimagine and reconstitute any kick (or other percussive) sound, making it easy to banish clichéd and overused samples and infuse your drum parts with truly original sounds and textures. Even the most flaccid and insipid kick can be turned into a thundering, booming, explosive event. Aside from complex and unruly processing-plus-synthesis chains, there’s nothing else that can do what Subloom does, and what Subloom does is sublime!
Key features

Effect plugin for AAX, AU, and VST3 hosts
Windows 7/macOS 10.7 or higher
Apple-silicon native
Filter, EQ, transient-shaping and saturation of source sound
Transient-triggered drum synth engine

The post Mixland’s Subloom plugin helps your kick drums hit harder than ever before appeared first on MusicTech.

Roc Nation Is Actually Developing ArtistsThis week, Ari is joined by Shari Bryant and Omar Grant, co-presidents of Label at Roc Nation, the entertainment powerhouse chaired by Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter.

Nintendo confirms live-action Zelda movie is in the worksZelda fans already got a stellar new game with “Tears of the Kingdom” this year, but Nintendo just dropped another exciting nugget of news: the gaming giant is working on a live-action movie based on the Legend of Zelda franchise. Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the thirty-seven-year-old franchise, announced the news this evening. “I have been […]
© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Berklee Celebrates "BMI Day"On Monday, November 6, BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) celebrated the 25th annual "BMI Day" at Berklee College of Music with award–winning composer and producer Trevor Gureckis and BMI’s Vice President, Creative, Film, TV, and Visual Media Tracy McKnight. At the event, McKnight and chair of Screen Scoring Sean McMahon co-presented this year’s BMI Film Scoring Scholarship to student composer Melquiades Álvarez Cobos, currently in his seventh semester at Berklee.The first BMI Film Scoring Scholarship was presented in 1998 by composer Michael Kamen. It is awarded each year to a student selected by the Screen Scoring Department based on the student’s musical ability, financial need, and potential for career success."The Screen Scoring Department’s relationship with BMI is one of the most important relationships we have, and BMI Day is always a highlight for our department on campus,” said McMahon, department chair. “We are so grateful for all that BMI has done for Berklee’s screen scoring students for almost 25 years, and appreciate Tracy’s presence on campus to present the annual BMI award to Melquiades Álvarez Cobos, a promising, up-and-coming composer.”“BMI takes great pride in its longstanding relationship with Berklee College of Music and fostering the next generation of composers,” said McKnight. “We recognize the importance of access to quality education and resources in developing their careers and the BMI Film Scoring Scholarship underscores our commitment to investing in the future of student composers and to celebrate their achievements, their growth, and their contributions to the world of visual media.”“I am so incredibly grateful to be the recipient of the BMI award this year and all the opportunities that come with it,” said Álvarez Cobos. “These past couple of years have been truly stormy and difficult to overcome on a personal level, so I wanted to thank my mentors and teachers who have believed in me regardless—your support and guidance have meant the world to me. With this award, I am very excited to pursue my dream of further developing my skills in film and media scoring through production, orchestration, and composition work in Los Angeles.”Photo (L-R) Berklee’s Ron Savage and Sean McMahon, composer Trevor Gureckis, scholarship recipient Melquiades Álvarez Cobos, BMI’s Tracy McKnight, Berklee’s David Bogen and Jeffrey Sawada gather for a photo during the annual ‘BMI Day’ at Berklee College of Music on November 6, in Boston, Massachusetts. Photo credit: Kelly Davidson.

ABOUT BMI:Celebrating over 80 years of service to songwriters, composers, music publishers and businesses, Broadcast Music, Inc.® (BMI®) is a global leader in music rights management, serving as an advocate for the value of music. BMI represents the public performance rights in over 22.4 million musical works created and owned by more than 1.4 million songwriters, composers, and music publishers. The Company negotiates music license agreements and distributes the fees it generates as royalties to its affiliated writers and publishers when their songs are performed in public. In 1939, BMI created a groundbreaking open-door policy becoming the only performing rights organization to welcome and represent the creators of blues, jazz, country, and American roots music. Today, the musical compositions in BMI’s repertoire, from chart toppers to perennial favorites, span all genres of music and are consistently among the most-performed hits of the year. For additional information and the latest BMI news, visit bmi.com, follow us on X and Instagram @BMI or stay connected through Broadcast Music, Inc.‘s Facebook page. Sign up for BMI’s The Weekly and receive our e-newsletter every week to stay up to date on all things music.