Bands are simultaneously social groups, creative units, and economic entities. Obviously, an economic “brand” can exist for many years after others have ceased to exist. There’s also a long history of posthumous releases, including Jimi Hendrix, Elliott Smith, and Prince, even Otis Redding’s defining hit “The Dock of the Bay” (Sittin’ On). Demo recordings, unheard live performances, and radio broadcasts are all an integral part of artists’ catalogs.
However, the situation becomes more interesting when it comes to bands with deceased members whose voices can be technologically reproduced on record. A key example is the 1995 Beatles Anthology project, during which the surviving members of the band reviewed John Lennon’s demo recordings from a tape given to McCartney by Yoko Ono and added new parts to complete the songs.
This was not something unique. On Queen’s album “Made In Heaven” of the same year, the band finished the songs that Freddie Mercury was working on in the studio before his death. But it involved resurrecting fragments of home recordings to clean them up for the commercial market.
Even when The Beatles were together, many of the canonical songs were the work of only one or two of them. McCartney wrote “Yesterday” and “Blackbird” on his own, and is the only Beatle who plays on them. The Ballad of John and Yoko did not feature Harrison or Starr.
And former members of the band played on each other’s “solo” recordings as well. Harrison’s “All Those Years Ago” or Lennon’s “Instant Karma” have more Beatles than some of the band’s tracks. They all played separately on the 1973 album Ringo, recorded by Starr.
Thus, the song “Now and Then” continues a long-standing practice dating back to the heyday of The Beatles.
The way from demo to track
The song “Now and Then” was written and sung by Lennon in his home in New York’s Dakota neighborhood, where he was murdered in 1980.
Then, in 1994, Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow, sent a demo recording to Paul McCartney on a cassette labeled “For Paul”. The cassette also contained Lennon’s vocals for the tracks “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” which McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr turned into complete songs and released in 1995 as part of the multimedia archive project The Beatles Anthology.
The song features the musical contributions of all four band members, including guitar recorded by the late George Harrison in 1995 and John Lennon’s vocals taken from the original demo recording of the song in the late 70s. But Harrison’s widow, Olivia, said that George felt that the technical problems with “Now and Then” were insurmountable and concluded that it was impossible to finish the track at a high enough level. “On John’s demo, the piano was a little bit hard to hear. And in those days, of course, we didn’t have the technology to do the separation,” McCartney says in a new mini-documentary about the song, “Every time we wanted to add a little bit more of John’s voice, that piano would come in and cloud the picture”. Since then, the demo recording has been shelved until better times.
The magic of AI
The tipping point came early in the decade after 2010, when Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit director Peter Jackson was working on his comprehensive 2021 documentary Get Back for Disney Plus. His team developed a technology that allowed them to take almost any piece of music (even old demos) and “split all the different components into separate AI-based tracks.” McCartney and Starr realized that this was their opportunity to go back and make “Now and Then” the final version the song deserved. “Now we could mix the song and record it 
properly,” McCartney said. He recorded the bass line, Starr added drums, and producer Giles Martin came up with a string arrangement. Thus, this “new” Beatles song was recorded in three separate stages, over a period of more than 45 years.
Visual artist Ed Ruscha created the cover artwork for the single, and the music video for the track was directed by Peter Jackson, which can already be viewed on YouTube.
The video shows previously unseen footage of the band, given to Jackson by Olivia Harrison, Lennon’s son Sean and Pete Best, the former drummer who left the band in 1962. According to Jackson, Best provided “a few precious seconds of The Beatles performing in their leather suits-the very first known footage of The Beatles that had never been shown before.
The Beatles and the latest technologies have always gone hand in hand
Back in June 2023, when McCartney told BBC Radio 4 that the song had been saved by AI, fans were thrilled. The move was not as complicated or sketchy as using AI to create a fake Drake song, and it was an exciting yet confusing moment for both tech fans and Beatles fans alike. Although some fans are still surprised that all this was made possible by AI.
Since its release, the song has already garnered 5.5 million plays on YouTube. The music video, which intersperses old footage of The Beatles with new ones and has a unique “Road Trip” atmosphere, gained more than 1.5 million views in the first 2 hours on the site. The track is also available on Apple Music and Spotify. Do you remember those decades when The Beatles were nowhere to be found on iTunes? These are different times.
“The Beatles have always been synonymous with technology and innovation. After all, the recording and electronics company they founded was aptly named Apple, which was the subject of a 10-year legal battle.
They performed the song “All You Need is Love” in the world’s first live television broadcast; they were always going to be among the first to demonstrate the creative potential of AI. Those who doubt voice manipulation should remember how Lennon’s vocals in “Strawberry Fields Forever” were stretched and altered to achieve its unearthly and timeless effect.
For the modern world, “Now and Then” means that it is not just the “last” Beatles song (as it is advertised), but the first in a long line of works rescued or recreated with the help of AI.
And every day we are convinced that the rapid development of AI expands the boundaries of possible and established vision not only in creative fields, but also makes international and local laws that directly regulate the use of AI evolve and change.
Therefore, if you have any questions about the use of AI tools in your work, please contact us, we will help you understand and resolve urgent legal issues related to copyright and intellectual property protection.
artificial intelligence / copyright / intellectual property / Now and Then / The Beatles
