
The great 'Captain Marvel' soundtrack scam - MilnerRoute
http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2019/02/25/the-great-captain-marvel-soundtrack-scam/
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Twirrim
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...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/21/18191332/spotify-block-feature-mute-
artists-music)

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danmaz74
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?

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

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danmaz74
You're right. I didn't notice this addition.

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

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danmaz74
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.

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hirundo
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.

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goldemerald
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](https://openreview.net/forum?id=H1xQVn09FX).
IMO, this tech should come out (even in app form) in the next 2-4 years.

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hirundo
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?

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aftbit
>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/](https://www.marvel.com/captainmarvel/)

The site loads Javascript from and performs XHRs to
[http://annihil.us/](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

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bredren
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.

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robterrell
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.

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

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diafygi
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.

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bredren
I think also because it failed to grow.

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benj111
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.

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ng12
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.

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bitwize
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_.

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paul7986
....

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paul7986
....

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

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paul7986
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.

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Causality1
I wonder if Google would be willing to license ContentID to Amazon.

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yjftsjthsd-h
Please no. ContentID has an obscene false positive rate.

