The Beatles are back in the spotlight with a groundbreaking nomination. For the 2025 Grammy Awards, the iconic band has been nominated for Record of the Year for “Now and Then,” their final song, created with the help of AI technology. Surprisingly, despite their monumental influence on music, this is the first time The Beatles have been nominated in this category.
The Beatles 2025 Grammy Nomination
Competing against current chart-toppers like Taylor Swift, Post Malone, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, Kendrick Lamar, and Sabrina Carpenter, The Beatles stand as a unique entry. Not only is their return unexpected, but it’s also powered by the use of artificial intelligence, breathing new life into an era-defining sound.
This new release wasn’t heralded by a traditional announcement. Instead, The Beatles used social media to drop a cryptic message: a blurry image of a cassette labeled “A” side with unreadable letters, which stirred fans into a frenzy of speculation. When fans clicked on a link in the post, it took them to an animated image of the same cassette on the official Beatles website, where the only option was to subscribe to the band’s newsletter for updates.
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The mystery was finally revealed as the announcement of their final song, “Now and Then,” a project Paul McCartney hinted at months earlier. McCartney had explained that this song was originally recorded by John Lennon in the late 1970s in his New York home and was brought to life through the same AI technology used in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary.
“We have made what will be the last recording of The Beatles. It was a demo by John that we worked on,” McCartney shared. “We just finished it, and it will come out this year.” He added that AI was instrumental in capturing and purifying Lennon’s voice to integrate it seamlessly into the recording.
How AI Was Used in The Beatles’ Song “Now and Then”
By using artificial intelligence, sound engineers were able to revive John Lennon’s voice from an old cassette recording, despite the challenges of ambient noise and the sound of a piano accompanying his vocals. AI made it possible to separate Lennon’s voice cleanly from these elements, allowing fans to hear his vocals clearly for the first time in decades.
AI played an even greater role in reconstructing this “new” Beatles song by blending Lennon’s voice with 1995 recordings of George Harrison and fresh contributions from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. The result? Fans will get to experience an entirely new Beatles track—the first in 27 years since The Beatles Anthology.
To achieve this, the team used a machine-learning algorithm trained on various sounds, which learned to distinguish between different audio elements, such as vocals, guitars, bass, drums, and ambient noise. This process, explained by audio engineer Loughridge, involved training the algorithm with thousands of sound samples, teaching it to recognize these components in isolation and accurately separate them.
“By training a system on a bunch of examples where it learns what it sounds like separated, then you can give it new examples and have it separate and extract the audio you’re looking for,” Loughridge explained.
The original demo of “Now and Then” was given to McCartney by Yoko Ono on a cassette labeled “For Paul” back in the 1990s, when the surviving members were working on the Anthology albums. Although two other songs from the cassette, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” were completed and released, “Now and Then” was set aside. McCartney later revealed that Harrison wasn’t particularly keen on the song, saying, “The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
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Yet, with the advancements in AI technology, McCartney and Starr were able to revisit the track with renewed potential. Reflecting on the experience, McCartney said, “There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear. It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it—it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023, to still be working on Beatles music and about to release a new song the public hasn’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.”
