Dolly Parton dies aged 80 + Inside ARIA's war with AI music

**Chris Spyrou** (0:08)
Hey, Chris Spyrou, with you, welcome to The Briefing. This week, the ARIA charts will ban songs made mostly or entirely by AI, and the move comes as the industry and we as a society grapple with the role of content made by artificial intelligence.

**Annabelle Herd** (0:22)
We want to celebrate music that has human artistry involved, and we particularly don't want AI generated music to be taking up spots on the ARIA charts and pushing particularly Australian artists further down those charts and taking away those opportunities from them.

**Chris Spyrou** (0:37)
So, is this the right call to back Aussie artists or does it punish a new way of making music? My chat with the CEO of ARIA is coming up in the second half of this episode. Before we get into that though, it's time for the headlines with Sacha Barbour Gatt on Wednesday the 26th of August.

**Sacha Barbour Gatt** (1:08)
Iconic singer and philanthropist Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80 Her family have announced the news on her Instagram page, posting a video featuring her nephew Brian Siever early this morning our time.

**Brian Siever** (1:22)
Dolly called me and said she wants to rest in a beautiful bed of plush cotton because after a life wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable and have some rest.
Rest in peace, Aunt Dolly, Aunt Granny, Gigi. May God bless Dolly Parton, and may God bless you all. She will always love you.

**Chris Spyrou** (1:41)
Oh, in a statement, her family says she died peacefully at her home in Nashville, with a small private service to be held for close family to farewell her. Across her impressive career, she had 25 US country number one singles and 47 albums in the country top 10 She also won 11 Grammys. She made it onto the US pop charts in 1980 with nine to five and wrote two of the greatest songs of the 20th century, I Will Always Love You and Jolene in a Single Day.

**Sacha Barbour Gatt** (2:34)
You really do realize just how many incredible hits she had listening back to that. Look, along with her music, her towering bleach blonde hair, big make up and rhinestone out wardrobe cemented Dolly's icon status. Of course, she once famously quipped it takes a lot of money to look this cheap. Not going to attempt the accent. Later in her life, she became known for her charity work, founding a library program that has gifted more than 300 million books to kids around the world. She also started the Dollywood Foundation, which set out to lower high school dropout rates. And she also donated millions of dollars to a bunch of different causes, including natural disaster relief, as well as COVID and vaccine research.

**Chris Spyrou** (3:12)
As to her later years, she lost her husband, Carl Dean, last year and suffered health issues in the months that followed. Just a few months ago, she released a video to her fans saying she was working on getting better.

**Dolly Parton** (3:23)
Plastic surgeons can make you look as good as they can on the outside, but it's serious business when you're talking about internal medicine. So I have great doctors and I'm doing really well and they assure me that everything I have is treatable. So I'm going with that.

**Sacha Barbour Gatt** (3:42)
So yes, she never said what it was that she was dealing with, but that video was put on her Instagram page in May. And yeah, just a few short months later, sadly, she has passed away. Valé Dolly Parton, what an incredible woman.

**Chris Spyrou** (3:55)
Yeah, Valé indeed. I mean, this morning we were looking around for all the different news that was happening and one of the girls in the newsroom was like, Dolly Parton's dead. And we were like, Oh my gosh.

**Sacha Barbour Gatt** (4:05)
Aidy is a great innings. I just feel like it's young. I feel like it's young. Aidy feels like on the young end of old these days. But yeah, she, it sounds like she spoke herself about not looking after herself properly after her beloved husband passed away. So he was very much in the background during her career, but was a big supporter of her. And yes, you can imagine being with someone for so long and then losing them at that age, how hard it would be to go about your life and try to have some sort of normalcy. She has been working or she had been working before her death on a musical, which it looks like is going to be opening on Broadway on her birthday next year, January 19