The intersection of music and artificial intelligence continues to amaze audiences, and we are only witnessing the beginning of this emerging phenomenon.
Users can now transform their favorite songs with a computer and a few prompts, altering the artist’s voice or even giving a hit track an entirely different musical genre.
A striking example is a rap song by 50 Cent, Many Men, which was transformed into a 2000s-style rock tune with the help of AI.
An alternative version of 50 Cent’s Many Men has become a hit more than 20 years after the original release
Image credits: Getty/Elsa
Image credits: Getty/Julia Beverly
The modified track was posted on the YouTube channel Almost real, which specializes in turning popular hits into completely different-sounding songs.
The channel also gives the artists a visual makeover to match the genre of their transformed song.
In the case of rapper 50 Cent (real name Curtis James Jackson), the creators illustrated the rock sound with an AI-generated image of Curtis wearing a red leather jacket and sporting long, blonde hair.
The hard rock “cover” was uploaded to the YouTube channel Almost Real
Image credits: almost real.
Since its upload on Thursday (October 9), the reworked song has garnered nearly 250,000 views, with fans praising its realistic sound and successful transformation into a hard rock track.
“If this song actually dropped in 1980 and it actually sounded like this with these lyrics, it would’ve shook the whole world up,” one person wrote.
“This sounds like a Fall Out Boy cover,” another said, while a third exclaimed, “This is amazing, my goodness.”
“This unironically sounds so good that it’s scary. A future where artists don’t even record or even write their own songs anymore in favor of AI is not too far off,” a separate user theorized.
The original Many Men (Wish Death) song is included on the rapper’s 2003 debut studio album Get Rich or Die Tryin’. It was produced by Eminem, Darrell “Digga” Branch, and Luis Resto.
While the track was a commercial success, 50 Cent revealed two decades after its release that it was his least favorite from the album, largely because it was the slowest song on the Grammy-nominated project.
“Many Men was my least favorite at that point because, musically we was in the boom-bap phase,” the In Da Club rapper told Billboard.
“We was in that hard-hitting intensity, the energy on the records, and it’s the slowest song on Get Rich or Die Tryin’. And it’s now the tempo that the artists are rapping to. So the fast tempo, hard-hitting beats, that was that era, that time period. And the whole album had it.”
50 Cent recently revealed that Many Men was his least favorite song from his Grammy-nominated debut album
Image credits: Getty/Gareth Cattermole
On the Almost real channel, people can listen to a 1950s soul version of the same song. In the thumbnail for that version, 50 Cent appears wearing a light-colored suit with his short hair pulled back.
There are also soul versions of Eminem’s Without Me and Justin Bieber’s Baby, as well as a pop-rock version of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl.
It’s still early days for AI, but the technology is here to stay, and musicians around the world are already embracing it as a creative tool.
Image credits: Shady Records/Aftermath Records/Interscope Records
@biggtv508 50 cent performs “Many Men” A cappella at a Philly concert in 2002 and gets a little emotional before taking off it seems. Classic 🔥🤌🏼 #viralvideo #oldschool #classic #explore #fyp #hiphop #goat #legend #explorepage #50cent #backintheday #fypシ゚viral #rap #backthen #gunit #2002 #performance #foryoupage ♬ original sound – Big G TV
Two years ago, Paul McCartney used AI to restore a John Lennon track and create “the last Beatles song,” Now and Then.
“We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI, so then we could mix the record as you would normally do,” the 83-year-old musician explained. The song originated as a ballad that John wrote and recorded around 1977 as a solo home demo, but he left it unfinished.
Speaking with the BBC interview, Paul called AI “a very interesting thing,” adding, “It’s something we’re all sort of tackling at the moment and trying to deal with.” He described the tool as “scary” because it can deceive people, but also “exciting because it’s the future.”
Similarly, rapper and producer Timbaland used AI to fulfill his desire to collaborate with the late hip-hop legend Biggie Smalls.
Almost Real also created other AI covers, including 1950s soul versions of Many Men, Eminem’s Without Me, and Justin Bieber’s Baby
Artificial intelligence is also being used to expand an artist’s market and give them international reach. K-Pop’s biggest label, HYBE, used the technology to release a track by artist MidNatt in six languages simultaneously, Forbes reported.
Grammy-winning producer Jordan “DJ Swivel” Young, who has worked with Beyoncé and Dua Lipa, developed an AI voice model to translate pop star Lauv’s single Love U Like That into Korean.
In July, CNBC reported on a psychedelic rock band called The Velvet Sundown, noting it had more than 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify. The “band” was later confirmed to be primarily the work of generative artificial intelligence.
Image credits: Instagram/thisis50
The Velvet Sundown reportedly made about $34,235 over a 30-day period across all audio streaming platforms, according to ChartMasters’ streaming royalties calculator.
While the quality and originality of AI-generated music have often been criticized, experts say that as the technology becomes more sophisticated, it is increasingly difficult for the average listener to distinguish between human and machine.
Among its detractors are musicians and creatives themselves. Last year, more than 11,000 artists, including Oscar-winning star Julianne Moore and Radiohead’s musician Thom Yorke, signed an open letter calling for a prohibition on using human art to train AI without permission.
One fan asked Almost Real to release “an entire AI album of all the classics generated”
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