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Hey guys, remember a month and a half ago I pointed out that AI-Generated Music had fully crossed the uncanny valley?
I specifically claimed:
GUESS WHAT.
https://www.whiskeyriff.com/2025/11/08/an-ai-generated-country-song-is-topping-a-billboard-chart-and-that-should-infuriate-us-all/
I do think this either proves that the average country music fan has little taste, or AI music is as good or better than the average country musician.
Damning with faint praise, perhaps, but this absolutely still feels like we've officially entered a new state of play for the music industry.
Just before AI music became a thing, Ted Gioia talked about a Spotify fake artist problem he discovered. Bascially, he noticed that playlists with titles like "Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon" wouldn't include any artists that he recognized (and as a jazz critic he would recognize more than the average bear), and further investigation revealed that the "albums" the songs were from would only have one or two songs. Looking into this even further, he discovered that he couldn't find much information at all about these artists, except addresses in the Stockholm area. The conclusion he came to was that since some music styles—jazz, chillout, orchestral, etc.—are driven more by algorithms than individual artists (by virtue of people telling Alexa "Play relaxing music" or whatever), it was cheaper for Spotify to hire studio musicians to record generic slop so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to real musicians.
In the 90s, I was at a discount store with my dad during Christmas season and he bought a CD titled "Jazz for Christmas Eve" for a dollar or something. It didn't have the name of any purported artist, just song titles. The music was entirely MIDI. A few years later the mother of a family friend was going into the home, and we were helping to clean out her house. I took the records, mostly junk, but there was one that stood out. It was called "The Hits of Nat King Cole" or something similar and had a picture of Mr. Cole on the cover. Towards the bottom, in relatively small print, it said "Performed by Bob Gigliotti" or whoever. The liner notes weren't extensive but mostly talked about Nat King Cole. The only mention of the gentleman who was actually performing on the album was a brief paragraph that said that he was, in fact, a singer, and that he does a good job with the material. When I played the record, I was hit with some guy doing an uncanny Nat King Cole impression.
The point I am trying to make is that cheap, mass-produced slop has existed in the music industry for as long as production costs were cheap enough to justify it. An enterprising music historian could probably do a book-length treatment of the subject, but in the end this has only been a minor footnote in the history of music. And even in the limited instances where it has historically gotten a foothold, tides shifted away from it. Consider Muzak. I hesitate to call it slop because, up until the 1980s, it was produced with a degree of professionalism and creativity that belied its status. But this was more for the pleasure of the people making it than anything else; it was always intended to be nothing more than musical wallpaper for stores, offices, and other public places, with orchestral arrangements of popular hits almost algorithmically selected to ensure the proper pacing. In the 1960s it was ubiquitous, but these days the only national chain I can think of that still plays this kind of music is Hobby Lobby. Retail started shifting to name artists in the 1980s, starting with inoffensive "soft rock" but more recently including practically anything that's been popular since the 1960s.
The AI doomers have tried to make the argument that because this music can be generated so quickly and so inexpensively it's trivial to just completely flood the market, and cash-strapped record companies would love it if they could generate product without having to pay the artists, producers, etc. While this may seem like a compelling argument the music industry could have always done this, but they haven't even attempted it in 100 years of existence. Making music is obviously a skill, and making music that people want to listen to (and pay for) is an even greater skill, but it's not a particularly unique skill. Any city is going to have hundreds of musicians who write their own material, practice in their spare time, play in bars in the weekends, and are good enough that most of the people in attendance enjoy the performance. If the record companies wanted to, they could have always signed as many of these musicians as they could, pay for a recording session, pay the musicians a low flat fee, and completely spam the market for little cost. If they get a hot or two out of the deal, great. If not, they're only out ten grand.
In reality, major labels are highly selective about who they sign, and those they do sign usually get significant financial backing. A local band recording at a local studio can get an album out the door for about 5 grand if they're well-rehearsed. A major label will spend, on average, $250,000 to $300,000 to record the album. The label will also pay for promotion, which can run into the millions if touring is involved. And they would always prefer to spend money on a proven star rather than a nobody. In other words, the model they operate on is the exact opposite of the one where AI takes over.
And it gets even worse. In an alternate universe where record labels operated by signing cheap labor and spamming the market, that at least allows for the possibility of being able to capitalize on the hits. AI doesn't even allow that, since there's no guarantee that you'll get output that's plausibly by the same fake band. Even big stars like The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, and Taylor Swift have had occasional flops; there's no guarantee that because an artist is popular that any individual release will be successful. But at least when you got The Supremes in the studio you were guaranteed a Supremes record. With AI you just have to keep generating and hope that you eventually get a Supremes record, and even that doesn't guarantee you anything.
As much as AI doomers talk about how it's going to take things over, it's not. It's going to replace slop, but slop has always existed. The business model doesn't really allow for the kind of dystopian future they're predicting.
I would point out that the actual shocker here is that this democratizes the slop production. The labels need not be involved in this process at all.
As far as I can tell, "Breaking Rust" is just some person with a Suno subscription who used Distrokid to put the music on all the streaming services, and it ended up being used in some popular tiktok videos. Maybe they did some additional guerilla marketing or something, I dunno.
I've actually done it myself, to vastly less (read: zero) success, just to see how simple the process is.
As far as I know, it was exceedingly rare for an indie artist to make it to the big time while producing music in their garage alone, they needed the studio systems for, if nothing else, distribution/radio access.
It became semi-common in the streaming era for an artist to upload to e.g. bandcamp or soundcloud and get some traction there before they signed with a label.
This current case seems different from even that.
That's not really much of a shocker, though. We've had similar democratization with the streaming services for 15 years now, and while I'm sure somebody has had a hit by virtue of nothing other than having uploaded their music to Spotify, if you look at the Billboard charts it's almost exclusively artists signed to major labels. Even the artists you're referring to were only able to use Spotify to get enough traction to get signed with major labels. "Rich Men North of Richmond" is the only song I can think of off the top of my head that became a hit despite having absolutely no label promotion, and it's a good example to use because Oliver Anthony refused to sign with a label. Despite touring with name acts he hasn't had any real success since, and despite venting about his ex-wife on Rogan, the song he wrote about their divorce stalled in the lower reaches of the Country chart and didn't crack the Hot 100 at all. Zach Bryan is probably the epitome of the phenomenon you mention, as he was self-released until 2022, but none of his music actually charted until after he had signed with Warner the previous year. There isn't any evidence of a sustainable path to success for a self-released artist that doesn't involve eventually being picked up by a label.
And this is for artists who have at least some ability to self-promote, whether through social media, local radio, licensing to TV/movies/advertisements, or simply playing shows wherever you can. If the strategy is simply to upload as much material to streaming services as possible and hope something catches on, there's no way to engage in even this kind of low-level promotion, since it doesn't make sense to invest anything beyond the minimum that's required to get the song uploaded. It may happen occasionally, but there's no reason to believe that simply increasing the volume will turn it into a viable business model, or allow it to play a significant role in the industry.
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