A digital cowboy named Breaking Rust in a 10-gallon hat has taken the top spot on the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart — and not a single human vocal credit is listed.
In fact, nobody is sure whether the cowboy comes with a gang or is a lone troubadour. The song Walk My Walk (from the EP Resilient) raises questions about the future of music and highlights how omnipresent algorithmically generated music is becoming.
On the same chart, following Breaking Rust, is Ella Langley, 26, with a raw, authentic sound, and at number seven is the late Gordon Lightfoot, a music legend who has re-entered the charts with The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
On Apple Music, Breaking Rust is described as “one of the first AI-generated music projects to break through in country music in a real way”. The only name listed alongside the brooding, gravel-voiced cowboy is that of “songwriter” Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, about whom there is no information online.
The news comes close on the heels of Billboard announcing that in the past few months, “at least six AI or AI-assisted artistes have debuted on various Billboard rankings”, a streak “suggesting this trend is quickly accelerating”.
A prominent example of AI music enjoying widespread appeal is Xania Monet, an artiste with an animated avatar created by Mississippi-based songwriter Telisha “Nikki” Jones, who writes the lyrics and has used Suno — a generative artificial intelligence music creation platform — to create the songs. In September, Monet made her debut on the Hot Gospel Songs chart with Let Go, Let Go (which climbed to number three) and on the Hot R&B Songs chart with How Was I Supposed to Know? (peaking at number 20).
In September, music streaming service Spotify said there would be stronger AI protections for artistes, songwriters and producers. The company said: “In the past 12 months alone, a period marked by the explosion of generative AI tools, we’ve removed over 75 million spammy tracks from Spotify.”
To get an understanding of Breaking Rust’s ranking amongst “his” human peers, the AI effort placed at number 228 (for the week that ended November 6) among country artistes in terms of equivalent album units (EAUs, which combine streams and sales into a single metric).
A study published in early November by French music streaming app Deezer estimates that around 50,000 fully AI-generated tracks are now uploaded every day to the platform, accounting for 34 per cent of “all daily deliveries”.
In a year that delivered several big releases — Hurry Up Tomorrow from The Weeknd, So Close to What from Tate McRae and The Life of a Showgirl from Taylor Swift — AI-generated music has managed to steal the spotlight, especially in summer. AI-generated songs from a group going by the name Velvet Sundown collected over a million streams on Spotify. The people behind the AI outfit even managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the reputed magazine Rolling Stone.