It takes a village to raise an AI singer. And the efforts are paying off for Xania Monet, “the first known AI artist to earn enough radio airplay to debut on a Billboard radio chart.” She has already appeared on multiple Billboard charts, including Hot Gospel Songs for Let Go, Let God, and Hot R&B Songs for How Was I Supposed to Know, which has also landed in the thirtieth spot on this week’s Adult R&B Airplay chart.
Xania (pronounced “zuh-Ni-ah,” rhyming with Shania, as in Shania Twain) sings, “How was I supposed to know what love looked like?/ When daddy never showed me what felt right/ How was I supposed to set the bar?/ When I ain’t never seen no man fight for my heart,” with effortless conviction — enough to have secured a multimillion-dollar record deal with Hallwood Media after what Billboard described as “a bidding war.”
Except for her team, few are celebrating the development. Singer Kehlani has made her feelings clear: “Nothing and no one on Earth will ever be able to justify AI to me. Especially not AI in the creative arts, in which people have worked hard for, trained for, slept on the floor for, f**king got injuries for, worked for their entire lives. I’m sorry, I don’t respect it.”
According to Billboard, Monet’s five songs have picked up 17 million streams in the US, generating an estimated $52,000 over two months. Independent labels have distanced themselves from AI artists, arguing that such acts are the product of a few keystrokes. Others, however, are eager to cash in, provided that international copyright law isn’t upended and that they comply with the policies of streaming services such as Spotify — which recently updated its rules to curb “AI slop” — and Deezer, which in June announced plans to flag AI-generated content with a clear message to users.
Behind Monet
The face behind Xania Monet is that of Telisha “Nikki” Jones, a poet from Mississippi who writes the lyrics for the AI artist with help from Suno, “a generative artificial intelligence music creation programme.”
“Xania is an extension of me, so I look at her as a real person,” Jones told CBS Mornings.
Jones created Monet while teaching herself AI tools just four months ago. Though Monet’s music emerges from generative systems, the lyrics are “100 per cent” Jones — drawn from poems inspired by her own life.
Monet released a full-length album, Unfolded, in August, featuring 24 songs. A month later came a seven-track EP, Pieces Left Behind.
“Whether it was stuff I went through, a close family member, or a close friend, I wrote about it,” Jones said, adding that losing her father at just eight years old inspired her hit How Was I Supposed to Know?
As she told CBS Mornings, she “scrolls” through her poems to decide which might become songs. The lyrics are then fed into an AI music generator. She adds prompts such as “female soulful vocals” or “heavy drums” to shape the sound. Soon, the music materialises.
The copyright question
US laws remain murky when it comes to copyright and AI-generated works. One thing, however, is clear: A creation cannot be copyrighted if it is entirely AI-generated. There must be a human-made expressive element — in Xania’s case, the lyrics.
Yet questions linger. What exactly is Hallwood Media buying, and what can it license?
Jones used the AI music generator Suno — one of two popular tools currently being sued by major record labels for alleged “en masse” copyright violations. In response to the 2024 lawsuit, Suno admitted, according to 404 Media, that it trained its model using music scraped from across the Internet.
Nora Scheland, public affairs specialist at the US Copyright Office, told The Verge that only human authorship can receive copyright protection. For AI-assisted works, only the human-created elements can be registered.
According to Xania’s profile on Apple Music, she is an AI figure “presented as a contemporary R&B vocalist in the highly expressive, church-bred, down-to-earth vein of Keyshia Cole, K. Michelle, and Muni Long.” Monet is credited with vocals, engineering and production, while Jones is credited as lyricist.
If the music stems directly from an AI system, it cannot be copyrighted. But the lyrics, being original human work, can. Record labels commonly sign songwriters on that basis.
With more than 150,000 followers on Instagram, Xania Monet exemplifies how listeners are warming to AI-generated music. Unlike the AI group Velvet Sundown, which flared and faded earlier this year, Xania’s streaming figures are still holding steady.
If an AI artiste can top the charts, should we rethink what makes music ‘human’? Tell t2@abp.in