Several of the most-streamed country artists right now are AI-generated. For a genre that values authenticity and storytelling, this is becoming an alarming trend. There’s fear within the industry that country music has become too predictable and formulaic, which could explain why the genre has been so easily replicated by AI.
Breaking Rust, Cain Walker, Aventhis, and Outlaw Gospel are just a sample of the AI-generated country artists streaming today. These “artists” boast stereotypical country aesthetics. Cowboy hats and boots in their visuals, as well as predictable imagery in their lyrics. Everything is AI-generated here, from the music to the words to the people.
And yet, they’re becoming wildly popular. It could be that listeners don’t realize it’s AI until after they’ve listened for a while. Or, it could be that real country music has become so commercially sanitized that it’s too easy for AI to replicate. Either way, legitimate songwriters are fearing for their jobs.
“That’s a phenomenon I didn’t see coming,” Jennie Hayes Kurtz of the band Brother and the Hayes told AFP, via ABC News KTEN. “I thought AI was going to be curing cancer or something.”
“It’s scary as songwriters,” said Kassie Jordan of the duo Blue Honey. “We are starting to see a lot of people just putting words into these chatbots and it is writing songs for them. As a songwriter, it’s kind of like, is anyone going to even think I really wrote this?”
Songwriters Fearful as Listeners Embrace More AI-Generated Country music
The proliferation of generative AI and ChatGPT has caused a knee-jerk response in the general public. Seeing art or hearing music we’re unfamiliar with, or that seems to come out of nowhere, often triggers a sense of doubt. Possibly even dread. “Is this AI?” we’re forced to think. Then we must go through the mental checklist we’ve developed to decide whether something is AI. Remember when we could experience art without an entire ethical dilemma involved?
One of the main reasons that country has been so susceptible to AI is because “the lyrics aren’t as deep as they used to be,” said Jordan. She added, “A big portion of popular country music has become kind of shallow, so that is pretty easy to duplicate.”
For these two songwriters, Jordan and Hayes Kurtz, this isn’t the end of the world. They remain optimistic about the future of country music. A lot of “active listeners,” those diehard fans, do actually care about the authenticity of country music, they said.
The large portion of country fans that are “passive” listeners, they said, often don’t care or don’t know about the genre’s history. “Three chords and the truth,” as the saying goes, which fans and artists know AI cannot replicate.
“There’s another wave of country artists that are coming that is really into doing it the old school way and showing emotion,” Jordan added. “That will be harder for AI to duplicate. That might save the genre.”
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