Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.
my music tastes are pretty mainstream, and this just does absolutely nothing for me. it's exactly what i'd expect AI music to sound like - completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it.
i'd be willing to believe that this music was legitimately charting if it had at least some redeeming qualities, but i can't imagine how this could honestly get eleven spots on the iTunes chart without gaming it in some way.
I listen to a lot of music of all different genres depending on mood, and I can honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion, but so are a lot of real artists. That wouldn't even be so obvious if they just added some background something, anything, like Wall of Sound style. If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI", I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
I’ve heard lots of music like this over the years. It’s catchy, the lyrics are very relatable to the audience of people who like this music. It might not be your thing, but it is certainly enjoyed by many, and there are albums written around this subject. Folk/blues are made of this subject.
Is it over all flat and boring? Somewhat. You can only hear the same thing so many times before it gets tiring.
It's interesting to me that all AI music sounds slightly sibilant - like someone taped a sheet of paper to the speaker or covered my head in dry leaves. I know no model is perfect but I'd have thought they'd have ironed out this problem by now, given how pervasive it is and how significantly it degrades the end product.
Agreed. I find that particularly annoying, and I also seem to find that the spatial arrangement or stereo effect is muted for most instruments (or the model simply doesn't use that feature as well as a good human musician).
We've seen a steady shift in music over the past 2 decades from full length albums, to single hits, to artificially generated.
Surely there's some gained and some lost. But coming from the era of buying an entire album, spending time reading the CD booklets and art, and listening to 10 songs which tell a larger story ---- what's being lost really hits home.
I really don't think we have. When I was growing up in the 90s it was the heyday of the pop single but there were still plenty of albums being produced and I think it's the same today.
No, the game has changed. Back then, the singles were typically accompanied by an album, even if it was just filler. It's better to release singles now due to the way the Spotify and iTunes algos work. Best practice is now to release your songs one at a time rather than a full album (at least if you aren't an established player).
On one hand this pretty much destroys thematic albums (like classical music, prog rock, Tool or for example, something like Alice in Chains' Dirt), but on the other few could pull it off and those who can are still doing it (ex: the latest Opeth album). So maybe discovering new music is hurt, because itunes and spotify look like crowded ERs, but there's just as much good music out there - regardless of your tastes.
ah, the standard trite, reductive anti-pop cudgel.
no, these days, pop albums are more frequently meant to be consumed in their entirety, often with full length visuals for each song that blend into each other in order.
* the death of radio has really meant that singles are declining in utility, especially in our social media era where the songs that pop off an album are not necessarily the record-designated singles
* the more parasocial development of pop encourages fans to invest more in merch and the concept of the album
* like everything else in the economy trending towards more expensive but meaningful experiences, tours are becoming larger productions to experience an album intensely
* in the AI era, we are now seeing artists pivot towards doubling down on experiences that AI cannot curate and provide meaning for
Rosalia this year is touring with a full orchestra and RAYE with a full big band, because these are intentional choices that the pop music industry has been trending towards for a while. There's always going to be trite drugstore music as long as there are drugstores, but what is charting is not really that at the moment.
I feel like in those days I really didn’t appreciate albums. Storage was a premium so I would focus on bands greatest hits songs vs discographies. Both in terms of my burned cd collections and early mp3. I didn’t start getting into albums until terabyte hard drives were cheaper. Then I started pirating discographies and listening to the back catalog for the first time.
One can still buy artisan albums created by independent singers/bands. But they tend to get lost in the marketing/influencer noise and thus do not get worldwide success. As a result you have to search harder for them.
I dabbled with AI music for a bit with Suno. Worked out well for the most part, only way I'm ever going to hear music with themes for some of niche things I like, like Shadowrun. I threw a bunch of music genres at it and some were good enough that I added them to my normal playlist but after about 30 completed songs I had a hard time coming up with new stuff. As someone who has never tried to create music myself it was fun to play with.
There are two arguments about AI art, one of them is trivially reducible to the “is sampling/collage art”. If you are spending time expressing something using AI produced components then you are producing art, and probably the amount of time you spend working on it (either developing your skills or creating the work) roughly will correlate to how much value others see in it. It’s no different than building a hip hop track out of drum loops.
The second question is more interesting, which is “does raw AI produced artwork have any artistic value” and I am going to punt on the “artistic” part of that equation and answer the “value” part with no, and not because people might not enjoy it, but it falls victim to the classic “my five year old could so that” critique of modern art, except in this case it is true. Anybody can go to an AI and produce some mediocre media.
Where this gets interesting again is _volume_. What AI unlocks is exactly that anybody can create songs, videos and images for _themselves_. The value of it is probably the pennies worth of time ajd expense they put into it, but it might he worth it for them to make something, be mildly amused by it and immediately dispose of it.
You wanted some shadowrun themed music, you got it and enjoyed it. You made something of value only to yourself, but that seems okay? Multiply that times billions of people probably eventually people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
The top 40 has rarely been about "art", though. The music there is highly formulaic and derivative, whose creators know well how to produce music that appeals to the masses.
The effect of this "AI" trend is that now humans with no musical background or experience can flood the medium, making it much more difficult for anyone to make a living from it, whether they're an artist or not.
This speaks more about how easy it is to buy botted vanity metrics on Spotify than anything.
The most obvious way you can tell this is inorganic is how all of the "Discovered On" are artist-specific playlists: "Eddie Dalton music", "Best of Eddie Dalton", "Eddie Dalton Hits", etc. A real artist may have some artist-specific playlists but generally their Discovered On will be more general genre playlists, like "Pop Hits" or "Hype" or "Gym Music" or whatever.
Maybe I'm just old (definitely I'm just old) but the live music experience has been completely destroyed for me, between bat-shit-crazy high ticket prices and the absolute collapse of concert-goer decorum. Who would have thought that a bunch of high, adolescent punks in the 80s or 90s would be more appropriately behaved than the 35-yr-old mom pushing past only to stand directly in front to film the entire show over her head on her iPhone, with a few breaks to live-tweet her awesome experience on social media?
I'll perform these songs by AI in concerts if the price is right. And that's how AI starts to leak out into the physical world. AI also hires human workers to do tasks in the real world using Task Rabbit and similar apps.
AI music is generally not going to be copyrightable unless they can show genuine human creativity was involved. So if a song is 100% AI, you could just go around performing it or straight up selling copies yourself and there's nothing* they could do about it. Though I do wonder if a human writes the lyrics, but AI generates all the music parts, if it becomes sufficiently human for copyright. Because the lyrics at that point would be actual creativity.
* I am not a lawyer, and this won't stop them from possibly trying to sue you or even winning depending on the situation. Or trying to prove there is human ingenuity involved. Do at your own peril.
iTunes? i wonder what kind of sales we're talking about here. people buying music is few and far between, and i wonder what percentage of that customer base buys their music on iTunes when there are great alternatives offering lossless files
It's similar pattern that we've seen previously, but exaggerated by modern trends and modern technology: the most popular cultural items will often be meaningless and base, and if you want something substantial you need other ways to find meaningful content.
Agreed. It's far worse now, specifically due to changes in technology. I didn't mean to say that "we've seen this all before," but instead meant something more like "given how human nature works, this technology will take us to a worse place."
If you think that AI generated beige music is nerdcore, you don't know what you're talking about. The best is far more sophisticated and deeply - sarcastically - self-referential that I think it would be a real challenge for AI to come up with something both compelling and meaningful.
I think you touched on the point: people who don't actually care about music think musical pablum is 'good', because it slides in their ear and out without challenging them with actual 'listening'. This guy even assigns a genre to his slop while clearly knowing (and, really, caring) nothing about what he claims to like listening to.
I have no doubt that those numbers have been inflated by AI powered marketing tools, dead internet theory style.
Yes it should be easy to find people in one’s immediate social circle who are listening to these tracks if they are that popular. I’ll wait…
Time for a cross, like the New York Times bestsellers.
The iTunes chart primarily focuses on sales velocity, not streams, and so I wonder how useful that is in 2026 and how easy it is to game.
Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.
I saw a video of guy who became an Amazon bestseller in a book category pretty easily by buying his own book.
Through my professional / personal network, I know someone who advertises himself as being a “Best Selling Amazon Author in XYZ category.”
It is semi niche, but I did some ballpark math, and about 72 sales rapidly would put him in the top spot for that niche.
That number sounds about right when he’s mentioned the gross $ sales of his book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHQevuohJH8
my music tastes are pretty mainstream, and this just does absolutely nothing for me. it's exactly what i'd expect AI music to sound like - completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it.
i'd be willing to believe that this music was legitimately charting if it had at least some redeeming qualities, but i can't imagine how this could honestly get eleven spots on the iTunes chart without gaming it in some way.
I listen to a lot of music of all different genres depending on mood, and I can honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion, but so are a lot of real artists. That wouldn't even be so obvious if they just added some background something, anything, like Wall of Sound style. If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI", I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
I'd say the same thing about two thirds of the iTunes top 100. Different people love different songs I guess.
The lyrics of the one you linked are fairly strong compared to other songs on the top 100 list.
I’ve heard lots of music like this over the years. It’s catchy, the lyrics are very relatable to the audience of people who like this music. It might not be your thing, but it is certainly enjoyed by many, and there are albums written around this subject. Folk/blues are made of this subject.
Is it over all flat and boring? Somewhat. You can only hear the same thing so many times before it gets tiring.
I've been making all my own music lately with suno 5.5. It's pretty sweet, it allows me to explore concepts in a different way. This sucks though. Here's hyperpop version of https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646 -> https://suno.com/song/516c7e52-a03e-490d-ba26-8d9a332eeea7
It feels... commercial. I feel like I have to read a EULA and hit I Agree before I can listen to that.
the comments are very suspicious and very scary
If the comments are from humans, that's tragic and frightening.
frightening either way, probably part of an operation that makes this AI chart so high
[dead]
It's interesting to me that all AI music sounds slightly sibilant - like someone taped a sheet of paper to the speaker or covered my head in dry leaves. I know no model is perfect but I'd have thought they'd have ironed out this problem by now, given how pervasive it is and how significantly it degrades the end product.
Agreed. I find that particularly annoying, and I also seem to find that the spatial arrangement or stereo effect is muted for most instruments (or the model simply doesn't use that feature as well as a good human musician).
This is no more art than a container of corn syrup is a proper meal.
So it’s perfect for the times. :(
We've seen a steady shift in music over the past 2 decades from full length albums, to single hits, to artificially generated.
Surely there's some gained and some lost. But coming from the era of buying an entire album, spending time reading the CD booklets and art, and listening to 10 songs which tell a larger story ---- what's being lost really hits home.
I really don't think we have. When I was growing up in the 90s it was the heyday of the pop single but there were still plenty of albums being produced and I think it's the same today.
No, the game has changed. Back then, the singles were typically accompanied by an album, even if it was just filler. It's better to release singles now due to the way the Spotify and iTunes algos work. Best practice is now to release your songs one at a time rather than a full album (at least if you aren't an established player).
On one hand this pretty much destroys thematic albums (like classical music, prog rock, Tool or for example, something like Alice in Chains' Dirt), but on the other few could pull it off and those who can are still doing it (ex: the latest Opeth album). So maybe discovering new music is hurt, because itunes and spotify look like crowded ERs, but there's just as much good music out there - regardless of your tastes.
I think it's an AI-generated response.
Artists have actually been moving back to the full album with goodies, even in mainstream pop with Beyoncé, Rosalia, RAYE, Charli XCX to name a few.
Does it really matter since pop albums were/are (almost?) always "collections of singles + fillers"?
ah, the standard trite, reductive anti-pop cudgel.
no, these days, pop albums are more frequently meant to be consumed in their entirety, often with full length visuals for each song that blend into each other in order.
* the death of radio has really meant that singles are declining in utility, especially in our social media era where the songs that pop off an album are not necessarily the record-designated singles
* the more parasocial development of pop encourages fans to invest more in merch and the concept of the album
* like everything else in the economy trending towards more expensive but meaningful experiences, tours are becoming larger productions to experience an album intensely
* in the AI era, we are now seeing artists pivot towards doubling down on experiences that AI cannot curate and provide meaning for
Rosalia this year is touring with a full orchestra and RAYE with a full big band, because these are intentional choices that the pop music industry has been trending towards for a while. There's always going to be trite drugstore music as long as there are drugstores, but what is charting is not really that at the moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htQBS2Ikz6c&list=RDhtQBS2Ikz...
charts will become totally meaningless.
Event data will be what matters most. That's how artists actually make their revenue these days anyways.
I feel like in those days I really didn’t appreciate albums. Storage was a premium so I would focus on bands greatest hits songs vs discographies. Both in terms of my burned cd collections and early mp3. I didn’t start getting into albums until terabyte hard drives were cheaper. Then I started pirating discographies and listening to the back catalog for the first time.
One can still buy artisan albums created by independent singers/bands. But they tend to get lost in the marketing/influencer noise and thus do not get worldwide success. As a result you have to search harder for them.
the main article is about marketing/influencer noise completely replacing the artists, enacted by companies close to the search process
I dabbled with AI music for a bit with Suno. Worked out well for the most part, only way I'm ever going to hear music with themes for some of niche things I like, like Shadowrun. I threw a bunch of music genres at it and some were good enough that I added them to my normal playlist but after about 30 completed songs I had a hard time coming up with new stuff. As someone who has never tried to create music myself it was fun to play with.
There are two arguments about AI art, one of them is trivially reducible to the “is sampling/collage art”. If you are spending time expressing something using AI produced components then you are producing art, and probably the amount of time you spend working on it (either developing your skills or creating the work) roughly will correlate to how much value others see in it. It’s no different than building a hip hop track out of drum loops.
The second question is more interesting, which is “does raw AI produced artwork have any artistic value” and I am going to punt on the “artistic” part of that equation and answer the “value” part with no, and not because people might not enjoy it, but it falls victim to the classic “my five year old could so that” critique of modern art, except in this case it is true. Anybody can go to an AI and produce some mediocre media.
Where this gets interesting again is _volume_. What AI unlocks is exactly that anybody can create songs, videos and images for _themselves_. The value of it is probably the pennies worth of time ajd expense they put into it, but it might he worth it for them to make something, be mildly amused by it and immediately dispose of it.
You wanted some shadowrun themed music, you got it and enjoyed it. You made something of value only to yourself, but that seems okay? Multiply that times billions of people probably eventually people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
It's as if what William Gibson wrote about in Idoru has already become a reality. Soon we will see celebrity AI gossip.
“Soon” we will see celebrity AI gossip?
Someone clearly missed the first season of Fruit Love Island[0].
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/ai-fruit-love-isla...
baby gronk got rizzed up by livvy?
The top 40 has always been riddled with garbage, in my opinion, but at least real, human musicians were making a living from their art.
The top 40 has rarely been about "art", though. The music there is highly formulaic and derivative, whose creators know well how to produce music that appeals to the masses.
The effect of this "AI" trend is that now humans with no musical background or experience can flood the medium, making it much more difficult for anyone to make a living from it, whether they're an artist or not.
I just checked Spotify, it has 368k followers and at least one song has over 1M streams.
This speaks more about how easy it is to buy botted vanity metrics on Spotify than anything.
The most obvious way you can tell this is inorganic is how all of the "Discovered On" are artist-specific playlists: "Eddie Dalton music", "Best of Eddie Dalton", "Eddie Dalton Hits", etc. A real artist may have some artist-specific playlists but generally their Discovered On will be more general genre playlists, like "Pop Hits" or "Hype" or "Gym Music" or whatever.
Wasn't there already some scandal with swedish criminals using this to launder money?
Thankfully I still buy proper music, what a sad state for human culture.
Live shows are the biggest part of music anyway
Maybe I'm just old (definitely I'm just old) but the live music experience has been completely destroyed for me, between bat-shit-crazy high ticket prices and the absolute collapse of concert-goer decorum. Who would have thought that a bunch of high, adolescent punks in the 80s or 90s would be more appropriately behaved than the 35-yr-old mom pushing past only to stand directly in front to film the entire show over her head on her iPhone, with a few breaks to live-tweet her awesome experience on social media?
I'll perform these songs by AI in concerts if the price is right. And that's how AI starts to leak out into the physical world. AI also hires human workers to do tasks in the real world using Task Rabbit and similar apps.
AI music is generally not going to be copyrightable unless they can show genuine human creativity was involved. So if a song is 100% AI, you could just go around performing it or straight up selling copies yourself and there's nothing* they could do about it. Though I do wonder if a human writes the lyrics, but AI generates all the music parts, if it becomes sufficiently human for copyright. Because the lyrics at that point would be actual creativity.
* I am not a lawyer, and this won't stop them from possibly trying to sue you or even winning depending on the situation. Or trying to prove there is human ingenuity involved. Do at your own peril.
iTunes? i wonder what kind of sales we're talking about here. people buying music is few and far between, and i wonder what percentage of that customer base buys their music on iTunes when there are great alternatives offering lossless files
It's similar pattern that we've seen previously, but exaggerated by modern trends and modern technology: the most popular cultural items will often be meaningless and base, and if you want something substantial you need other ways to find meaningful content.
right, but at least human hands used to touch the process. even in 2000s copy-paste boy band era it was at least human
Agreed. It's far worse now, specifically due to changes in technology. I didn't mean to say that "we've seen this all before," but instead meant something more like "given how human nature works, this technology will take us to a worse place."
Grifters figured out several years ago that the iTunes sales chart is extremely gameable, and can be juiced for some cheap headlines.
I mostly listen to AI-generated music. 8 out of 10 of my top listens in the last 180 days are AI-generated.
I gradually went from various genres -> mostly nerdcore -> mostly AI nerdcore.
https://www.last.fm/user/testycool/library/tracks?from=2025-...
EDIT: Updated link to the most listened songs in the past 180 days. The songs are not generated by me.
Why?
It sounds great to me. AI-generated music is pretty popular with Warhammer 40k lore as well.
Also I tend to listen to songs for a few days, during which time I feel they're the best thing ever, which also helps with momentum during work.
After a few days I have to find other songs. Since AI music started getting more traction it's been way easier to find great songs.
I understand the criticisms of AI music, but that doesn't take away from the fact that for me and a growing number of people it sounds good.
The grift requires full commitment
If you think that AI generated beige music is nerdcore, you don't know what you're talking about. The best is far more sophisticated and deeply - sarcastically - self-referential that I think it would be a real challenge for AI to come up with something both compelling and meaningful.
I don't have strong opinions on whether the AI music I listen to is nerdcore or something else. Maybe I didn't use the correct term.
I think you touched on the point: people who don't actually care about music think musical pablum is 'good', because it slides in their ear and out without challenging them with actual 'listening'. This guy even assigns a genre to his slop while clearly knowing (and, really, caring) nothing about what he claims to like listening to.
I do care a lot what I listen to. It takes me while to find songs that I like.
Also I am not listening to AI generated music that I generate myself.
These are some channels whose music I like: