Thursday, April 27, 2023

retrotalk 2023 - the commemorative churn / retromAInia

From a little while ago, a piece at the Guardian by Shaad D'Souza that notes the shrinking of the turnaround time for commemoration - a trend for 5 year anniversary reissues and repackagings. 

"Keen to make the most of a seemingly steady revenue stream, labels have begun increasing production on limited and deluxe repressings of popular albums. Anniversary reissues – once only common to recently remastered records, or albums several decades old – are now becoming popular for releases that are just five years old, such as Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy, Phoebe Bridgers’ Stranger in the Alps, Lucy Dacus’ Historian and Idles’ Brutalism. They’ve all been repressed in coloured formats or with alternate sleeves in the past two years, often at a slightly increased price point to standard black discs.

It’s in keeping with a frantically shortening nostalgia cycle that’s seen frenzied media coverage of supposed emo and “indie sleaze” revivals and music publications churning out cheap anniversary content – although these repressings seemingly offer little to the consumer other than a coloured disc. But Hannah Carlen and Ali Murphy – marketing directors for heavy-hitting indie conglomerate Secretly Group, which released Bridgers’ album – insist that fifth anniversary pressings allow artists to “give new fans something, and say ‘you’re welcome here too – you don’t have to be a day one fan’,” says Carlen.".... 

"The timeline of a record has changed so drastically,” says Ali Murphy. “Twenty years used to be the span of time in which people were celebrating a record, and now it’s got so much shorter, not only due to the quickness of everything coming out.”

C.f. my earlier post that detected an intensification of the commemorative churn with odd-number anniversaries of significant releases or events, and the odd habit of wishing dead icons or cult figures a happy birthday.


Another Guardian piece from a little while back (by Rich Pelley) looks at how a band of wannabes got AI to concoct a simulacrum of Liam Gallagher's vocals to front their own Fauxasis tuneage. "We got bored waiting for Oasis to reform" the culprits say - so they created something even more boring and redundant than Oasis actually reforming. 

“We’ve brought a band back from the dead!” says one of the band. “And I think that’s something we’ll see a lot more of.”

This is the future - mind-blowing technology being used to do mundane / inane  things.



Another AI phenom - AI-assisted upmixing - a 2023 clarification of "Sister Ray"





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