I am not usually interested in alternate histories or fan fictions, but I have a weakness for the mp3 blogs that offer Albums That Never Were or Albums That Should Exist or Albums I Wish Existed. These blogs offer reconstructions of records, often complete with period-appropriate mock covers, that artists had announced but never released, or develop alternative track listings for albums that were released, or posit albums that could have been released if a band weren’t dropped from its label, and so on. Often they combine officially released tracks with bootleg material to create something like a deepfake. Listeners are invited to use it as an imaginative crutch; they can suspend disbelief and indulge a fantasy about what could have been while also possessing an actual, rare-seeming artifact that only fans of a certain intensity would think to pursue.
We can already see this occurring over decades as the automation of sounds accelerated the ebbing of the “band” concept in favor of control freak solo artists, producers, etc.
In "The prospects if recording" Glenn Gould predicted that this sort of editing power would become part of music consumption. In the 1960s.
We can already see this occurring over decades as the automation of sounds accelerated the ebbing of the “band” concept in favor of control freak solo artists, producers, etc.