Last month, “Walk My Walk” hit number one on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. The moody stomp-clap tune, with lyrics like “Every scar’s a story that I survived, I’ve been through hell, but I’m still alive,” has been played more than 8 million times on Spotify. The song wasn’t performed by a human artist — Breaking Rust, despite having the face of a handsome, rugged man in a cowboy hat on its Spotify profile, is an AI project. But there is a real person claiming that Breaking Rust’s work is a copycat: Blanco Brown, an artist who mixes country and rap together, who claims the song’s creator used AI to emulate his style. The person behind Breaking Rust did not respond to a message I sent asking about the origin of the sound.
It’s the latest example of ways that AI-generated music, with its opaque origins, can create confusion around who really made a song just as easily as it can create a hit. AI-generated music that sounds a lot like your faves but was made with a few prompts has been going viral, spreading far and wide and more quickly than music labels can always have it removed.
When some of the first AI-generated tracks started racking up listens two years ago, music labels went to battle, threatening and filing legal action to stop AI generators from training on and using their artists’ voices and music stylings. Universal Music Group (UMG) pushed to have a YouTube video where Eminem’s voice rapped about cats taken down. Spotify removed AI slop songs that were listened to by bots to reap the streaming earning pool, and UMG also got streaming platforms to remove a viral “Drake” song that wasn’t by Drake and The Weeknd at all, but a song written by Ghostwriter, an anonymous artist that uses AI to produce music and appears publicly only when cloaked in white and dark glasses.
Now, the labels are starting to drop their fists and shake hands with AI music generators.
Warner Music Group announced last month it had settled a lawsuit against AI music generator Suno (a test of the service by plaintiffs in the suit found that Suno would churn out works similar to ABBA and Chuck Berry when prompted in their style) and entered into a partnership with the company. Robert Kyncl, CEO of WMG, called it “a victory for the creative community that benefits everyone.” The announcement came just weeks after UMG, the world’s largest record label, settled its copyright infringement lawsuit with AI music generator Udio, and said the two have partnered to create a new subscription service, slated to launch next year, run on gen AI and licensed music from the label’s artists.
Every minute that is spent listening to a generative AI track is a minute less spent listening to an artist track.Mark Mulligan, founder and senior music analyst at research firm MIDiA
AI companies face a litany of lawsuits after using copyrighted material to train their models. The battle is playing out in Hollywood, the news industry, and in visual arts — the music industry is the latest to decide it might be better to play nice with AI than continue a prickly, drawn out court battle when their rights sit in a gray area. “AI is here to stay, it’s transformative,” Chris Wares, assistant chair of the Music Business Department at Berklee College of Music. The record labels, he says, are “futureproofing themselves.”
The proliferation of AI-generated voices and music stylings has sent a flood of new songs — some good, many uncatchy slop — onto streaming platforms and social media. There are more than 100 million songs on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp, and many are rarely or never played. Deezer, a French streaming platform, said in April that people were uploading some 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks each day, comprising nearly a fifth of all new content. As more playlists and artists making gen AI music are uploaded, human artists must fight for your ears. In July, a group called The Velvet Sundown rapidly racked up 1 million listens on two albums, something that many indie bands struggle to do on streaming platforms — but the photos of the band on social media are AI generated, and the real person or people behind the project remain unknown. In November, Billboard identified at least six AI or AI-assisted songs that had climbed onto its various charts. Amid the deluge, Spotify updated its impersonation policy in September, saying it would remove songs that featured the unauthorized use of someone’s voice.
If someone makes a banger AI cover song or viral mashup, like reuniting Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham for a new Fleetwood Mac album or squashing the beef between Kendrick and Drake in a generated collaboration, the novelty factor could drive listening numbers that cut into original work from those artists. But the aim of these partnerships is to create new revenue streams for artists. The Warner deal stipulates that Suno will allow only paid accounts to download generated audio, and says artists must opt-in to having their names, voices, compositions, and likeness regenerated. In an industry where streaming has dramatically reduced royalties, that could be a boost — if fans make music of their faves, it could lead to passive income for the musicians. But that also means the artists’ original works will be competing for ears against derivatives of themselves not just for your ears, but for streaming dollars.
“The reason why no generative AI music can be artist-first is because we are in a finite attention economy. Every minute that is spent listening to a generative AI track is a minute less spent listening to an artist track,” Mark Mulligan, founder and senior music analyst at research firm MIDiA says. “We are definitely in a world now where more and more consumers are creating, and that is competing with entertainment time.”
Part of that creative process may draw us back to older roots in how people interact with music. For hundreds, if not thousands, of years, music was communal. People played it together and used it to pass down stories. With recording technology and radios, music became widely distributed, which “created this moat between artist and fan,” Mulligan says. “We got to this idea that music is a creative full stop, and that the audience doesn’t help shape what the music is apart from when you go and see the band play live.” But now, AI tools are becoming the ultimate form of fan expression. “We’re widening the funnel of creativity,” says Mulligan.
That’s if artists authorize their voices to be used by the platforms. Some forward-thinking musicians, like Grimes, have already made clones of their voices and invited listeners to experiment. It’s less clear if your typical popstar will OK the use of their voice to sing words they haven’t seen, and if the potential new revenue streams of such an experiment would prove worth the risk. On Friday, Brown released a “trailertrap” remix of “Walk My Walk,” a sort of taking back of his own style after seeing it emulated. So far, it has just 2,000 streams. “If someone is going to sing like me, it should be me,” Brown told the Associated Press last month. Going forward, it will likely take more than one listen to know if the music we hear is performed by the artists we’ve come to love.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
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