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.
I think there is a bigger subset for "virtual idols" in Japan that have already existed. They have also automated the singing part (see the Vocaloid Hatsune Miku). And they already have had concerts where people attend. Also they have started making "virtual YouTuber" (Kizuna_AI). This would all go to the point of just starting to make an AR/VR type of experience rather quickly.
Yeah, Kizuna AI-like Vtubers are flourishing in Japan and several other countries now. I'm only familiar with Hololive, but their streams reach 100k live viewers periodically with all the world's languages presented in their chats. There are also international chapters in China and Indonesia, and also a worldwide English audition just finished up recently. 'Independent' vtubers and 'Networked' (Hololive, Nijisanji) are also performing ads in radios and promoting themselves in Akihabara. It's dizzling.
Great comment, just wanted to point out that musicians also get (tiny) royalty from their music on YouTube (when it’s uploaded officially or marked with the algorithm).
Yeah, tiny is the key word. Really, really tiny. Very small on Spotify as well.
It's just so different from when I was young, and people would call into a radio station, getting busy signals over and over, just on the chance they'd pick up and the further chance they'd actually play the song you requested. You had a real incentive to buy the record.
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.