The great 'Captain Marvel' soundtrack scam | Hacker News Reader

The great 'Captain Marvel' soundtrack scam

10zenmonkeys.com

27 pointsMilnerRoute28 comments

There are a number of albums and artists in Spotify that play on the fuzziness of voice based search, where the performance is little more than their own vocal track on top of an instrumental copy of the album, karaoke style. It's one reason I'm glad that spotify finally announced a block feature, https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/21/18191332/spotify-block-fe...

Well there's a feature I had no clue existed, thanks for sharing that link--it's going to come in handy because I share your exact same exasperation.

Spotify is clearly now leaving it up to users of its service to mute individual artists instead.

I appreciate their approach here too, personally.

Edit: what I asked is now possible, so please disregard my comment.

A bit OT, but I really wonder why Spotify doesn't allow to block songs which a user hates. It looks like such a simple and super useful feature, anybody has any idea why they wouldn't offer it?

What does the 'No symbol' button do other than exactly this?

You're right. I didn't notice this addition.

It used to be 'thumbs down' - the functionality has been there since early on.

I now understood why I was confused about this - this only works for the "generated for you" playlists. What I was looking for is for a way to automatically skipping specific songs on any playlist.

still OT

On some generated playlists they do offer a block song/block artist option, but once you block a song, that's it, you never again get the block artist option.

I'd love the block artist option for all random playlists as there's one artist who's work I really dislike that I recognize within the first few seconds of play.

I wonder if a deep fake app for music would be popular. Feed it anything, like the actual Captain Marvel soundtrack, and it generates something similar but distinctly different. It's at least possible that the quality of the output could be worthwhile background music.

Would the legal implications make this untenable? Could there be an objective measure of the different-ness between the fake and the original that could be used as the legal boundary?

Could generated music based on popular originals become good enough to out compete most human musicians?

If you build it send me a free copy and we'll call it even.

I can assure you there is a lot of interest in the Machine Learning field to make deep fakes for music. The problem is deep fakes are not time-series based. Right now a video is treated as a bunch of independent images, whereas you couldn't do that for music/text as there are long term dependencies between time steps.

More specifically, there is a recent paper from ICLR about audio GANs (I haven't read it) https://openreview.net/forum?id=H1xQVn09FX. IMO, this tech should come out (even in app form) in the next 2-4 years.

The coming age of infinite mashups. Bruce Springsteen's Fire sung by Elmer Fudd, to infinity. What does a cross between Elvis and John Philip Sousa sound like? Does Jimi Hendrix need a little more Abba? Such an ML generator could explore a space of musical styles with more nodes than there are quarks.

Now randomly upload a few to YouTube, let upvotes be the fitness test to select the next generation, and repeat forever. Could this algorithm top the charts or would it devolve into random crap?

>But interest really spiked when Marvel unveiled the official Captain Marvel web site -- which was done in a deliriously retro 1990s style https://www.marvel.com/captainmarvel/

The site loads Javascript from and performs XHRs to http://annihil.us/, and it doesn't load anything but a white screen without those XHRs.

Visually styled like the 90s web, maybe, but worse tech. :P

I think this is a regular thing in Apple Music also, where people will release tracks with the same name as a song—-or a song name from the lyrics.

I guessed they were just looking for the minor streaming revenue by piggy backing on store keywords.

I've noticed something similar on Apple Music -- if you search for "Russian Doll soundtrack" you'll find collections of songs made by what seem to a non-affiliated entity ("inSquamous"). At least, in this case, the songs are the real tracks in Apple Music, so the songs are getting properly monetized. I wonder if inSquamous is getting something off the top for curating the collection?

Same thing happened on Baby Driver's release day -- there was no official soundtrack for weeks, and some enterprising soul jumped into the breach with a collection of the songs.

How long until "curated by actual humans" becomes a major selling feature?

Next you’ll be wanting to peruse in person actual things for sale! That way lies madness, my friend.

There was a music chatroom a few years back (turntable.fm) that was trying to do this. You had 2+ DJ slots in each chatroom, and they would take turns picking the next song, and the participants in the room could update/downvote their picks.

It was great. The DJs would generally be good at sensing when the mood of the room needed a switch up, so you could generally stay in a single room the whole day and never feel bored with the music.

I guess they shutdown because they couldn't figure out how to license the music the DJs were playing.

I think also because it failed to grow.

So why doesn't Amazon police these things.

A reason I go to amazon is so I don't have to deal with this stuff. What's their value add over ebay, Ali express, etc at this point?

This isn't hard to do, it shouldn't cost them sales, I don't get it.

I find myself shopping at Target more and more often just for the value of knowing the box I pick off the shelf probably contains what I think it does.

A lot of eurobeat music was titled after popular songs in order to increase its visibility among Japanese listeners. Imagine going onto 90s Napster, searching for "My Heart Will Go On", downloading the first track you find and when you hit play, you hear an explosion in a Casio synthesizer factory.

And the lead vocalist is male.

....

Did you mean to comment on a different submission? Because the article here does not contain the word "kelly"?

my bad someone linked to a Verge article about Spotify adding an artist block list feature in a comment above.

Wish i could delete, but its past the deletion mark.

I wonder if Google would be willing to license ContentID to Amazon.

Content ID won't work for classical.

Please no. ContentID has an obscene false positive rate.

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