What if you could write—and copyright—every melody that's ever been written and ever will be written, and what if you could do it in less than a week? With a number of caveats that they say could be overcome with the same technique and more raw computing power, technology lawyer DAMIEN RIEHL and computer programmer NOAH RUBIN, who are both also musicians, set out to do exactly that. Their point, Riehl says in this TED TALK, wasn't to corner the market on all possible melodies but to argue the futility of trying to copyright any melody at all. Because melodies are basically math. And because you can't copyright a sequence of numbers. (Which sort of overlooks what music actually is. Which is sort of, Riehl and Rubin would argue, what music copyright lawyers do, too.) It's an argument, really, the beginning of a conversation, a conversation worth having. Riehl and Rubin "brute-forced" 68.7 million melodies, each exactly 12 notes long, the same way a hacker would brute-force passwords. They're stored as MIDI files on a hard drive—affixed to a physical medium, that is, for copyright purposes—and on this website, where the programmers are also sharing their code. Among the caveats are that, to make their hack manageable, they used only one octave's worth of notes, in a diatonic scale, and they only used quarter notes. Make the scale chromatic, add an octave or two and throw in some rhythmic variation and the project becomes many magnitudes larger. Maybe inconceivable. Or maybe just in need of a faster, more powerful computer. The better to compete with ever faster, ever more powerful copyright lawyers. Or, at least, to sharpen the rhetoric in Riehl and Rubin's rhetorical argument... It came to JOSEPH SHABALALA in a dream in 1964. "It was something new, a big voice, beautiful. The language was not my language. It was not Zulu, it was not English, it was not easy even to differentiate whether they were black or white." That, Shabalala was fond of saying, was the origin of his group LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO's infectious and incredibly influential a cappella style. Or, perhaps, he was just taking the popular Zulu singing style isicathamiya a little further, making it a little more modern—bass-heavy, and colored by the feel of rhythm and blues. Either way, Shabalala, who died Tuesday in Pretoria, would go on to lead one of the most cherished groups in South Africa, a group that helped connect black and white South Africa in the Apartheid era ("white people supported us secretly... but they were not allowed to say anything," Shabalala said), and that helped connect black South African music with the rest of the world at the same time. Ladysmith Black Mambazo was one of the groups whose music inspired PAUL SIMON to travel to South Africa and begin recording what would become GRACELAND, and the group is featured on several songs. Shabalala co-wrote two of them. The story of that album, which changed the lives of so many of the people who made it and the ears of so many people who heard it, has been told countless times; suffice it to say Shabalala and Ladysmith had a flourishing recording and touring career long before "Graceland" and a different kind of flourishing career long afterward. NELSON MANDELA called the group "South Africa’s cultural ambassadors to the world." When Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa's president, Shabalala and his group were there. As a cultural force, they had already been there for many years, helping to bring not just a singing style, but an entire country, into the future... Deals, we've got deals: SIRIUSXM is investing $75 million in SOUNDCLOUD and is getting a minority ownership stake and two board seats at the free streaming giant, which, by the way, had strong revenue growth, if not profits, in 2019 and is expecting to keep growing in 2020... SPOTIFY is ponying up $250 million to buy the RINGER, according to a BLOOMBERG source. The sale was announced last week but not the price. Spotify, reports Bloomberg's LUCAS SHAW, "has now spent more than $600 million to acquire four companies that can accelerate its podcasting business"... Going where OFFSET has gone before, DRAKE has signed a multiyear deal with live-streaming upstart CAFFEINE. He's bringing the battle-rap league ULTIMATE RAP LEAGUE with him... And in the deal with the best synergy of all, JOEY KRAMER didn't want to miss a thing but unfortunately he did, but he's no longer cryin' and he and his bandmates of 49 years are letting the music do the talking again. Which is to say, Kramer and the rest of AEROSMITH appear to have kissed and made up. (And I promise I'll never do that again. I have drawn a line.)