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The Beatles Won a Grammy for “Now And Then”—Here’s What AI Actually Did

“Now And Then” won Best Rock Performance at the 2025 Grammys. Machine learning helped isolate John Lennon’s original demo vocal; it did not generate his voice or write the song.
Opened Runtime4 min Written byDocumentaryTube Team
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The Beatles won Best Rock Performance at the 67th Grammy Awards on February 2, 2025, for “Now And Then.” Machine-assisted audio separation helped make the recording possible, but AI did not write the song or generate John Lennon’s vocal. The roughly 55-year gap refers to the time between the band’s breakup in 1970 and the award—not to a reunion of all four Beatles.

What Grammy did The Beatles win?

“Now And Then” won Best Rock Performance at the 67th Grammy Awards, held February 2, 2025. The Beatles were also nominated for Record of the Year, but Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” won that category. The Recording Academy’s official winners and nominees list identifies the category and recording, while The Beatles’ announcement confirms the Best Rock Performance win.

This was a regular competitive Grammy category, not an award for AI. The Recording Academy credits the recording to its human artists and production personnel; the technology was a tool used in making the track.

How did a Beatles recording arrive decades after the breakup?

The phrase “55 years after they broke up” is approximate. The breakup is conventionally dated to 1970, while the Grammy came in 2025; the precise interval depends on which 1970 milestone is used. More importantly, “Now And Then” was completed after the Beatles had ceased working as a band, from recordings made at different times.

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  • Late 1970s: John Lennon recorded the song as a home demo.
  • 1990s: Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr tried to complete it during the Anthology sessions, but the demo’s poor quality made it difficult to separate Lennon’s voice from the piano.
  • Later completion: Machine-assisted separation made the vocal more usable. Harrison’s guitar contribution came from the 1995 sessions; McCartney and Starr recorded new parts, and the production team completed the arrangement and recording.
  • November 2023: The finished recording was released as The Beatles’ last new song, in the band’s own presentation.
  • February 2, 2025: It won Best Rock Performance.

The Beatles’ official “Now And Then” page presents it as the group’s last song. “New” here means a newly completed and released Beatles recording, not a composition newly written in 2023.

What did AI actually do?

Lennon’s vocal and piano were recorded together on the old cassette demo. Traditional studio methods could not cleanly separate the overlapping sounds. Peter Jackson’s audio team developed machine-learning techniques for separating sound sources while working on The Beatles: Get Back; a similar approach helped isolate Lennon’s existing vocal from the demo. The result could then be mixed with the other musical parts. The Associated Press describes the process and the recording’s production history in its account of “Now And Then.”

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Machine-assisted work Human and archival contributions
Separated Lennon’s recorded voice from piano and tape noise to recover a usable vocal track. Lennon wrote and sang the original demo.
Helped make existing recorded material easier to mix. Harrison’s guitar was taken from the 1995 sessions.
Supported restoration and source separation; it did not compose or perform the song. McCartney and Starr recorded new parts, and human producers, arrangers, engineers, mixers, and mastering personnel completed the recording.

Was Lennon’s voice fake or AI-generated?

No. The available production account describes the recovery and isolation of Lennon’s original performance, not the synthesis of a new vocal. Calling it a cloned or recreated Lennon voice would suggest that a computer generated a performance, which is not what the reported process did.

The distinction is between working with a recording that already exists and generating new audio. Source separation extracts components from an existing recording; restoration improves or makes those components usable. Generative systems can produce new sounds, lyrics, or performances, while voice cloning synthesizes a performance in a particular person’s voice. “Now And Then” belongs primarily to the first two categories.

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Who is heard on the finished recording?

The track brings together contributions from different eras rather than a four-member studio reunion. Lennon is heard in his archival demo vocal, and Harrison is present through guitar recorded in 1995. McCartney and Starr added new performances during the later completion. Production and technical work by Jackson’s audio team and the credited recording professionals helped shape the final release.

That combination explains why the recording can be called a Beatles song without implying that all four members were alive or recording together when it was finished. The Grammy recognized the released performance and its credited human creators, not a newly generated Lennon performance.

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Was “Now And Then” the first AI-assisted song to win a Grammy?

Guinness World Records identifies it as the first AI-assisted composition to win a Grammy, dating the award to February 2, 2025. The label needs context: “AI-assisted” covers a wide range of uses, and in this case it refers to machine learning used to separate and recover archival audio. It does not mean AI wrote the composition, supplied the lyrics, or sang the lead vocal.

That distinction also limits what the win demonstrates. It shows that a recording made with machine-assisted restoration could win in a standard Grammy category; it is not evidence that Grammy voters endorsed generative music generally or that AI itself received an award.

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Why the distinction matters

Archival restoration can make an existing performance audible and usable, while synthetic generation can create material that was never recorded by the person it imitates. Those approaches raise different questions. For a posthumous recording, listeners may reasonably ask who authorized its release, how much new material was added, and whether the finished track is presented clearly as a collaboration across time. The facts of “Now And Then” provide a concrete answer to one part: Lennon’s vocal came from his own demo, Harrison’s guitar came from earlier sessions, and McCartney and Starr supplied new work.

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