Axl S

4 minutes ago, Blackstar said:

It seems some of the former members are getting their songs back...

You referring to the ASCAP entries for Tommy's songs?

2 minutes ago, darkside259 said:

i think is going to be true all this spotify thing but this tread is already a collective psicotic break 

That's what following this band does. We're a dedicated fanbase that's had little new music over the past 30 years.

If they acted like an artist that was upfront that they aren't working on new music and were just a touring act that'd be fine. But they aren't. This band dripfed information about upcoming music from 95-08 when they finally released a record and then from 08-16 & 18-Present, they've done the same. Axl was doing forum chats after the album released in 08 talking about a track none of us had heard about called Soul Monster... 14 years later we're still waiting. The General is first mentioned in I think 2007 and has been talked about occasionally since by ex members like Brain... we're still waiting to hear it.

That situation is what's made this dedicated part of the fanbase a little crazy. It's why so many of us hope there is something to this Spotify thing because it might mean actually getting to hear some of these tracks finally.

10 minutes ago, sofine11 said:

It’s not a rumor, Beta said it outright. 

We also have the leaked demo where Axl is on backing vocals.

2 hours ago, Sweersa said:

Based on the Village instrumental, and from what I've heard from those who have later mixes with vocals, it's an A list song. Bucket added guitar parts later on. One hoarder said he would kill babies (or something to that effect, jokingly of course) if Bumble re-recorded over Bucket's work on that track. Sadly, they are no longer with us. I'm sure they wouldn't be thrilled with how the band handled Jackie Chan. They summarized that CD was basically two albums, and the disc we got in 2008 was a good mix of material that represented the type and quality of material that was on CD2 at the time, but perhaps a bit darker. He said people would be surprised if they knew how much material from that era was completed by then. Not including the 2008 album, I do believe they have at least 1.5-2 albums more of material. (Probably more now)

That tracks with Axl's comments in 06. Was rereading Chinese whispers just now to see if there were any titles mentioned worth throwing at the Spotify search for fun and found these quotes. My guess as to why we've heard less about what else there is, is the bands camp became less leaky after the early 00s, both in terms of actual music and just mentioning song titles.

Especially after the 08 forum chats, everything GN'R land has been very tightlipped.
 

"There's two records that the majority of the music's done, and the majority of the vocals are done. And there's another half of a record that's being worked on.

[...] There's songs we're still shuffling around, I mean we recorded about two and a half, three albums worth of material. So, there's still stuff that's gonna bounce between one and two." (Axl, Eddie Trunk show, 05/05/06)

Perhaps in UK now and full "soul monster".

UYI III Starts now 

Just now, AxlRoseCDII said:

With Perhaps showing up in Norway I am thinking it’s the algorithm. Too many coincidences now. Would like to be wrong or hear arguments against the algorithm theory.

I still haven't seen an explanation as why Perhaps appearing makes it likelier it's the algorithm...

Just now, FabioRoses said:

Not asking for it, but did it ever leak?

Maybe? I thought it always referred to a properly recorded track, but then we got that Knockin/Jungle disc in the village leaks that had what sounds like a recorded rehearsal version with Axl on vocals.

That said for that 01/02 tour they really reworked how the performed the song so maybe there was a plan (or even just an idea) to release a new version at one point

12 minutes ago, Sweersa said:

I initially thought 4 Heavens was a song, but now believe it refers to four different mixes of re-recorded KOHD.

There was an MSL document that talked about what to do with different KOHD mixes, and of course the Village leaks backs this up.

I have heard that 4 Heavens is rerecorded versions of KOHD also.

Possibly

• in a controlled environment like a recording studio
• where he can do a short burst of voice work (like 5-30 minutes) with long breaks
• with the help of studio magic and some computer adjustment of his vocal takes
   

If he still has it at all, he can probably risk trying to go all out in that environment.

Live during a 3 hour show, where he's playing a show ever 2-3 days on a 3 month long tour. No chance. Even if he could pull it off for one show, he risks damaging what's left of his voice if he tries and possibly jeopardises the rest of the tour. 

It's understandable to try and protect his voice, it's just a shame that his current style sounds so poor.

Why does Perhaps appearing make things less likely?

So in the UK now

"soul mo" shows me the new YCBM single as a top result
"soul mon" shows me that + moves GN'R the artist further up
"soul mons" puts both the new YCBM single and GN'R as the top results.

Ultimately we don't know what this means. All we know is Spotify's search has some association between GN'R and these search terms for some reason. 

It could be user search sessions affecting their model - it is technically possible for them to have that setup, but if so that seems really weird - we are few in number and if they had that kind of system automated, you'd expect it to result in messed up search results for lots of their users across every possible search term.

54 minutes ago, Stay.Of.Execution said:

That "joke" is getting kinda boring

Since 2006 it's a tradition.

In 24 hours we'll know. Will see what goes live in New Zealand at midnight Friday.

Found an interesting article on Spotify's engineering blog. https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/03/introducing-natural-language-search-for-podcast-episodes/

It's specifically about their search functionality for podcast episodes which due to the nature of those might require a search functionality that's a lot more open ended i.e. needs to understand searches for topics, questions and themes. Hence there's a lot more NLP work involved.

However one tidbit does probably apply to what we've been looking at.
 

Quote

• From our past search logs, we take successful podcast searches and create (query, episode) pairs. Those successes mostly come from previous queries and their returned results through Elasticsearch.
• Also from our past search logs, we examined user sessions to find successful attempts at search queries after an initial search came up unsuccessful. We used those query reformulations to create (query_prior_to_successful_reformulation, episode) pairs.
  With this data source, we hope to capture in our training set more “semantic” (query, episode) pairs with no exact word matching between the query and the episode metadata.

They do train the model's that power their search functionality by looking at successful search attempts for user sessions.

Example

I search "The General"
I get no results
I next type in "Guns N' Roses"
I click through to the artist page for GN'R.

I've created a pair between an unsuccessful search query and a successful search query.

The catch to all of this is...  A LOT of users would need to be having user sessions like that over a long period of time to steer these results to be at the top for these search terms.
 

1 minute ago, Blackstar said:

There are a couple of versions of SCOM that associate it with the movie, so maybe that's what causes it (although if you search "state of grace guns n' roses" these versions don't appear).

It's also an alternate title for SCOM on ASCAP (along with a bunch of other titles). To be fair, that is a service Spotify potentially would connect to as a source of data for their search.

Thing is... why is it spotlighting GN'R for this track ahead of artists like Taylor Swift who actually has multiple tracks on their platform with this title. Like why on earth is the Chinese Democracy album the "Top Result" in the UK when I search "state of grace" now?

Even if there is this tenuous connection to SCOM... a company like Spotify surely isn't going to have a search that's this bad and broken to prioriitise that over all the artists named "State of Grace", all the songs already on the platform called "State of Grace" and all the albums and EPs on the platform titled "State of Grace".

 

3 hours ago, metalavenger99 said:

LOL... Were these always registered here?

Is it possible to find out when these were registered?

It's all academic until they release (or don't release) material anyways. It's only fun to speculate because we're fans of this band and we're starved for news and material. Even then... is it really fun?

What benefit would Spotify have in scraping web chatter from message boards about artists to then feed into their model for their search functionality?

To do that in a large automated system for all artists could lead to them ruining the user experience for their search functionality by it returning garbage results. 

is it technically possible? Sure. Is there a good reason to do it? Fuck no.

Tracks being in their database but not yet made live makes more sense.

4 minutes ago, Blackstar said:

I guess it's possible, especially on phone apps. Since, for example, many people log in on Spotify through Google, the algorithm may pick up stuff from google which picks up all our searching and browsing history, like frequently visiting GN'R forums.

Yeah pick up that the current user likes GN'R. Not going to start building unrelated connections between artists and song titles that then pollutes their search resulsts than can then be obvserved by ALL users when browsing the Spotify catalog when not signed in.

1 minute ago, RussTCB said:

It's been said several times, but Universal put out a press release for it. You can find it with a quick Google search. 

At this point it is interesting that only UMG have done a press release about this and the only other official place this is mentioned is the website for band's online shop - a separate website from their official one.

Not a peep from the band, their twitter admin even woke up today but instead did a post about the Australia tour dates. And the news section on the band website has absolutely nothing about this release. In fact if you go on gunsnroses.com, you'd have no idea this exists until you go to the store.

Contrast that with the releases of Absurd and Hard Skool - the band has social media posts out straight away as soon as the songs went live in the USA.

4 minutes ago, Coma16 said:

That doesn't ring a bell. "Liars" does, but it was pure speculation that OMG was rebranded as "Liars".

Lies They Tell was a rumoured song title. May have been Scraped though, has that "Lies that they tell you" lyric.

52 minutes ago, SoulMonster said:

I have been searching for PRL on Spotify, but no success. What could the abbreviation stand for? 

It clearly stands for Panda Red Legend

1 minute ago, jamillos said:

Couldn't that guy tell us what exactly it was that he was helping them with? 

To be fair to him in this instance, if he's been invited to work on this by the label he probably has to sign NDAs saying he won't talk about the release and it's contents until it's publicly announced.

1 minute ago, Jw224 said:

If they have a master tape they could make a pretty decent remaster. Won't be HD but it'll look pretty good. Obviously film and HD would be the ideal, but shouldn't rule out them releasing some footage in my opinion.

Universal fire. They lost so so so so so much.

There's a lot they just don't have anymore.

13 minutes ago, Coma16 said:

My source confirmed that the double-EP (CD leftovers and cover songs from 2016-present) isn't a part of UYI release but will be announced around the same time. Axl pushed for it and it was a concession the lable had to make in order to cash in on the past.

 

Edit: but this is gnr, so who the hell knows....

Care to elaborate?

13 hours ago, Gnrcane said:

Funny how different things are from different people's perspectives. Half of these threads are complaints that they keep playing the same songs. But, there are people like you who want to hear some of those same songs and are disappointed if they aren't played.

We want different things in the setlist because deep down we want new songs or some signs of life for a UYI box.

But I'm seeing them in Glasgow too and if those things aren't happening AND they aren't pulling out other deep cuts then yeah there is stuff in the current set I want to see such as Reckless, Shadow, HS, YC because I've never seen them before and by the next time I see them they might not be in rotation anymore.

If I was at that show as a hardcore fan, I'd be really upset that I didn't get to hear the new single that has been the only thing they promoted recently.