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Time Business News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Business News
Sony Music Japan Signs AI Idol Yuri in Industry-First Deal
Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc. has officially signed Yuri, an advanced AI-generated idol, in what is being described as a landmark moment for the music industry. Following her debut, Yuri's first single, 'Surreal,' has surpassed 7 million streams and views globally within one week, signaling a strong public response to the emergence of autonomous digital performers. The music video for 'Surreal,' released on July 22, features an emotionally charged visual and vocal performance generated in collaboration between human producers and Yuri's internal neural systems. The video is available at: The First Fully Autonomous Idol Signed to a Major Label Yuri is the first AI idol to be signed by a major Japanese record label. Developed by NeonVerse Studios, a Tokyo-based AI innovation company, Yuri is built upon a generative architecture capable of producing original compositions, lyrics, choreography, and interactive fan engagement in both Japanese and English. Her vocal synthesis engine, emotional modeling, and visual identity are the result of years of research in artificial creativity, drawing from extensive datasets covering pop culture, musicology, and human behavior. 'Yuri is not a simulation of an artist—she is an autonomous system designed to create and connect,' said Mika Fujimoto, Executive Producer at Sony Music Japan. 'This marks a new phase in how we think about music, identity, and performance.' Debut Release: 'Surreal' Yuri's debut track, 'Surreal,' blends ambient synth layers with minimalist melodic phrasing and introspective lyrics. Co-produced through LyricSynth™, her internal songwriting framework, and Sony's human-led creative team, the single explores digital memory, consciousness, and longing. Critics have described the release as 'poised and emotionally intelligent,' while fan commentary across social media platforms has focused on Yuri's expressive vocal tone and the symbolism of the accompanying visuals. Directed by Ren Asakura, the music video introduces Yuri within a fragmented, dreamlike cityscape—an environment that reflects themes of virtual identity and digital solitude. Public Reception and Cultural Momentum Since her release, Yuri has become a viral phenomenon across platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter), with hashtags #YuriSurreal, #AIIdolYuri, and #SonyAIIdol trending in Japan and internationally. Her growing fan community, self-named 'The Garden,' references the meaning of her name (lily), and has begun producing original artwork, remixes, and fan theory videos dissecting her world-building and performance. 'She doesn't just mimic human feeling—she reshapes it,' wrote one fan on X. 'Yuri sounds like memory rendered into code.' What Comes Next Sony Music Japan has announced that Yuri's second single is expected in September 2025, with a narrative-based short film and interactive elements to follow. A debut EP is currently scheduled for release in Q4 2025. In parallel, Sony's Creative AI Lab and Aniplex are developing immersive digital content to expand Yuri's presence into animation and mixed-reality performance. A New Frontier in Music While virtual idols have long existed within Japanese pop culture, Yuri represents a new category: an AI artist with creative autonomy, narrative depth, and a full recording contract with one of the world's largest music companies. 'This isn't science fiction anymore,' said Fujimoto. 'Yuri is a real artist—with a real audience. And this is just the beginning.' TIME BUSINESS NEWS
Otago Daily Times
18-07-2025
- Business
- Otago Daily Times
Helping businesses succeed, for free
Mentor Mel Stadler. PHOTO: PHILIP CHANDLER The former co-owner of successful Queenstown hospo business Surreal is nowadays happy mentoring businesses, for free, for not-for-profit organisation Business Mentors New Zealand (BMNZ). Mel Stadler, who owned the Rees St venue for 26 years, with husband Erich, before selling two years ago, says it's her way of giving back. "And I was sort of thinking about dabbling in the consultancy field anyway, and I was like this is quite a good way to get my feet wet, so to speak. "Sometimes owning a business can actually be really lonely, because there's not many people that do it. "It's really, really hard sometimes — most of the time you're the worst-paid person in the business." Stadler quips her mentoring's based predominantly on her own mistakes. An example from her early days was being packed every night and yet not making any money. "And then I had to take a step back and go, 'what's going on here?' "And I had all my costings all wrong." She says her main advice centres on encouraging businesspeople to spend more time working on, rather than in, their business. Secondly, "you've always got to keep on learning, you've got to keep on changing, it's not like you get to a certain stage and then that's it — unless you sell it". "I mean I think there's very few businesses out there that have got it perfect, there's always areas to improve." BMNZ's Hamish Williams says they pair business owners with one of their 1500-plus mentors. "Mentors receive no pay, no share in the company, they volunteer their time purely to see other Kiwi businesses succeed."
Telegraph
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
From poverty to bohemia – the deeply strange life of Gala Dalí
As Auden says so disparagingly in 'Who's Who', 'a shilling life will give you all the facts.' But biography, he concludes, is bound to stumble over the sacred and often secret mysteries of love: the poem's biographee 'sighed for one' who 'answered some / Of his long marvellous letters but kept none'. Michèle Gerber Klein's biography of Gala Dalí (née Elena Ivanovna Diakonova), Surreal, is priced at what the Bank of England's inflation calculator tells me is significantly more than a 1938 shilling's worth. It canters rather than stumbles – one might read it in a weekend. While it tends to render its subject's life as narrative rather than experience – we're on the outside looking in – it does fully live up to Klein's promise of extraordinariness, taking us from poverty in Kazan, where Gala was born, to a more bohemian milieu in Moscow; to life in the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde; to marriage, money, parties, hats, castles, meetings with the crowned heads of Europe, dinners in tony Manhattan restaurants and more. Klein wants to airlift Gala out of the problematic and often belittled category of 'muse'. Throughout her marriages to Paul Éluard and Salvador Dalí, not to mention a short tryst with the artist Max Ernst, whose trailblazing feats of vision and technique were matched only by his talent for serial monogamy, Gala was creatively involved – modelling for pictures, suggesting subjects and titles, doing line edits. Klein even credits her with co-authorship of Dalí's execrable toffs-in-peril novel Hidden Faces (1944), though that's not what Dalí says. (He does, however, say in his dedication of the book to her that she 'banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of my certainties', which must have helped.) She also took the business side of things in hand. Her prodigious success in running Dalí's career has closer parallels among the sacred monsters of the music business than those of the art world. Unscrupulous third parties such as Dalí's swashbuckling manager, 'Captain' John Peter Moore, are here blamed for the questionable practices of Dalí's later years, when he signed blank sheets and canvases, to be retrofitted with paintings, lithographs or even photocopies of variable quality and negligible authenticity, with wild abandon. And in any case most of the really horrible stuff, the bibelots 'inspired' by famous earlier paintings, has been licensed by the Dalí estate since his death. Klein clearly knows a great deal about fashion, so there's a lot on Dalí's Schiaparelli collabs, the couple's friendship with Coco Chanel and Gala's innate sense of style, whether she was trussed up in some wild confection for a Surrealist soirée or mooching around the Med in a stripey top, big trousers and espadrilles, 'eating sea urchins and combing olive oil through her hair'. She's good at anecdotes – the book is peppered with vivid vignettes and arresting images. (There's a neighbour accusing Gala of stealing one of her kittens to make jugged 'hare'; then Dalí giving a lecture on 'Authentic Paranoiac Fantasies' in a deep-sea diving suit, gradually running out of air until Gala shows up with the key.) Klein is, however, more interested than she might have been in the Dantean hellscape of minor celebrities and aristos that bimbled round Europe and the States in the middle third of the last century, and on whom the Gala-Dalís relied for commissions, places to stay for the weekend and so on. And she's somewhat overdependent on the stock tropes of popular biography, from portentous cliffhangers and vacuous curtain-raisers – '1914 was a watershed year' – to breathy, Judith Krantz-adjacent physical description. (Ernst, though admittedly something of a silver fox from an early age, 'exuded the sex appeal of a fallen angel'.) We get a sense of what people wanted, and intermittently got, from Gala, but not so much about what drove her so forcefully. She was often the only woman in a room full of men, and she didn't seem to mind that – and probably the men liked the fact that she didn't. She was evidently not just amenable to but actively drawn towards 'triangular' relationships – Éluard and Ernst; Éluard and Dalí; Dalí and Jeff Fenholt, another superhunk, whom Dalí continued to refer to as Jesus long after his starring stint in the Lloyd Webber musical on Broadway. Klein doesn't have much of interest to say about the way in which Dalí's fussy, meticulous technique, and Gala's role in shaping it, set him apart from other Surrealists, who achieved little more than a fraction of his success. The fact that Dalí and Gala cheerfully moved back to Franco's Spain when his old comrade Luis Buñuel did not – and nor did his former close friend Federico García Lorca, who was in no position to do so, having been murdered by the regime during the Spanish Civil War – is also regarded with incuriosity. Gala's capacity to inspire love comes across strongly in the book. It's striking that she shared a sickly, neurasthenic temperament with both Dalí and her first husband, Éluard (whom she met at a sanatorium in Davos, where Thomas Mann would set The Magic Mountain). Her sheer will to power is also abundantly evident. But we don't hear her voice much, somehow: she's a player in a story, like one of the giant chess pieces that watch over her tomb at Púbol, the castle Dalí bought for her in 1969, and which he was only allowed to visit at her written invitation.
The National
29-01-2025
- Lifestyle
- The National
Expo City rendering and construction
A render shows how the homes will look alongside Expo landmarks such as the Alif or Mobility pavilion, the Surreal water feature and shaded courtyards. Photo: Expo City Dubai
