Volume 14, No 2, OCTOBER 2025 Editorial by Peter Tschmuck, pp. 47-48 Shauna-Kaye Brown: The Democratic Financialisaton of the Music Industries: On JKBX and the Assetization of Music Rights, pp. 49-59 Alfred Patrick Addaquay: Challenging the Stigma: A Global Case for Artist Autonomy, Self-Governance and the Manager-as-Employee Model in the Music Industry, pp. 61-82 Tathagata Ganguly: Small, Informal Music Venues Creating Performance Opportunities for Artists in a Minority Lang

While Hatsune Miku‘s voice was still generated by a vocal synthesiser, the voices of today’s music avatars is produced by artificial intelligence. One particularly successful project is “ABBA Voyage”. Using sophisticated technology, avatars of the four ABBA members Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad were brought to life on stage in London,…

While the first and second generations of virtual musicians required human singers to provide the vocals and studio bands to interpret the music, Vocaloid software, developed by Japanese synthesiser manufacturer Yamaha in the late 1990s, enabled the creation of purely computer-generated voices for the first time. This resulted in the creation of the music avatar…

The rise of generative AI has made it easy to create virtual musicians. Their look can be designed using AI, and the songs they perform and videos they appear in can be created using the right AI tools. However, the concept of virtual artists dates back much further than the recent rise of generative AI…