from Hacker News

How Gorillaz could dominate a post-Covid world

by karanke on 6/7/20, 4:11 PM with 31 comments

• by robbrown451 on 6/7/20, 6:09 PM

  I think you mean "Gorillaz type bands" or something. And even that...

  Live shows will certainly be impacted, but to think that you need bands to become virtual characters is kind of extreme. The Beatles were purely a studio band for much of the time they dominated. That's nothing new.

  Multitrack recording has been around forever, so recording your part at home isn't that big a deal, especially now that home equipment has gotten so affordable. (note that the winner of the grammy for best engineer last year, Finneas, did it on a few thousand dollars worth of equipment in his bedroom). So much music now is created on a computer more than on an instrument, so that's becoming a big factor. Even if you play it onto an electronic piano, you can tweak to your heart's content after the fact. (and you can play at slow speed, you can play right and left hand parts separately, you can loop, you can play in a different key and transpose, etc).

  You sure don't have to go full Gorillaz to do any of this. They are an interesting extreme, but beyond that....

  One of the big problems, though, is that many musicians have a lot of trouble making money off their recordings, especially with so many people just listening on YouTube etc. There isn't the incentive to buy a record as there was a few decades ago.

• by vikingcaffiene on 6/7/20, 5:07 PM

  As a musician who came up with the touring model, I've been struggling with not being able to gig and connect with people. There's a real visceral phenomenon that happens when you play live. I think it's fair to say those days were waning even before COVID.

  I found the sentiment of this article comforting. It points to a way forward to make music and get some of that connection back. I don't know that there's any substitute for the real deal but that's probably because I'm old. ;)

• by sargun on 6/7/20, 7:23 PM

  I would be sad if Gorillaz never performed live again. I’ve seen their live shows and they were truly epic in size. They had 50+ people on stage, and an awesome video mix.

• by DizzyDoo on 6/7/20, 5:38 PM

  Gorillaz's recent success this year with their Song Machine project has, I think, largely been because their recent songs have been some of the best material they've ever produced. Personal opinions vary, of course, but their four main releases this year have all been excellent and are probably among my favourite tracks of theirs.

• by mindcube on 6/7/20, 6:04 PM

  My band has been doing a completely virtual tour on twitch for the past two weeks. It seems like this platform was seemingly made for bands. The fact that we could generate a modest revenue stream for performing could potentially replace the money we would make from touring in the physical world. Very excited about the future potential of live, virtual platforms for music! We will continue streaming on a weekly basis after our "virtual tour" is complete, but we're stoked with the results we've had so far!

• by hyperindexed on 6/7/20, 4:44 PM

  Virtual concerts are becoming all the rage in MMORPGs, and other digital venues... https://kotaku.com/watch-hatsune-miku-perform-live-in-phanta...

• by mhh__ on 6/7/20, 5:33 PM

  I "attended" the Fortnite Travis Scott event; I was actually quite impressed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYeFAlVC8qU (undersells it because it's a cinematic view not how you actually see it in game)

  It reminded me of demoscene programs in a way although not as intellectually stimulating. It's early days for the medium but as VR gets cheaper I can't see why it won't become a normal thing in the west to have virtual gigs (I think people around me wouldn't be surprised if they saw something like it in Asia already)

• by chrisweekly on 6/7/20, 6:01 PM

  Related tangent: what's the state-of-the-art for reasonably low-latency / time-synced, networked multi-user audio? eg for multiplayer music "games"?

• by bbarn on 6/7/20, 6:46 PM

  Maybe Dethklok will come back again too.

• by jbrooksuk on 6/7/20, 5:40 PM

  I think companies such as MelodyVR are going to be pretty big because of the effects of COVID-19.

  It’s an interesting problem-space and it’ll take a while for people to acclimatise to the changes, but I think we’ll start to see a lot of this.

• by lostgame on 6/7/20, 6:08 PM

  I used to love these guys, however, recently they seem to be headed farther and farther away from both the sound of and the innovation present in their first two records.

  I miss the trip hop, I miss the ‘edge’. It’s basically Damon Albarn’s synth pop at the moment. I feel like he should be releasing records such as ‘The Now Now’ under his own name. I’d still listen and I’d probably appreciate it more.

• by twic on 6/7/20, 8:06 PM

  I would suggest titling this article 'Planet of the Gorillaz'.

• by aforty on 6/7/20, 7:33 PM

  Is this real and not sarcasm?

• by vijaybritto on 6/7/20, 7:50 PM

  I don't think this claim will stand once the covid vaccines land in our pharmacies. The world will be back to normal though work environment might be changed for a lot of jobs

• by seesawtron on 6/7/20, 4:56 PM

  Took me longer than anticipated to figure out whether the article was about the animal Gorilla or some techn platform called with the same name.