Basic music generated for basic people.
I think it’s worth clarifying that it’s #1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales. That’s a specific category.
According to https://tasteofcountry.com/breaking-rust-explained-ai-country-song in order to reach number one would only take ~3,000 purchases.
That’s a shockingly low number, so if anyone can confirm that or has better numbers, I’d love to know.
But last time I brought a digital song, they cost $1. So for a couple thousand dollars any song could be number one in this category.
If I were an AI company swimming in money, that’s a drop in the bucket for some free publicity.
The Billboard chart in question is behind a paywall.
Someone on a Reddit discussion on the same song pointed out that it could be bypassed with:
https://open.bolha.tools/ and plugging in the Billboard URL https://www.billboard.com/charts/country-digital-song-sales/
That being said, while I can see the chart, I don’t see any numbers, so I’m assuming that they must be coming from somewhere else, though I don’t have any reason to doubt them; it sounds like tasteofcountry.com is reputable.
That article does point out that there are a substantial number of Spotify users listening to the song, though if I remember, there was some past discussion about how various people had tried trying to game Spotify’s recommendation system to try to get more people listening to their songs, so maybe someone could just be leveraging that hard?
kagis
I’m not sure if this is what I’m remembering. I wasn’t super-interested at the time, but I thought that it was talking about how some artists had been gaming the system to be more-frequently-recommended, whereas this is talking about Spotify apparently taking money to increase recommendations.
EDIT: I can’t find any news story that seems to fit what I thought I remember reading. I do see a LinkedIn page talking about tactics to attack Spotify’s recommendation algorithm:
So I imagine that there are probably people out there working hard to game it, though I suppose that that’s probably something of a given.
The little info (i) box on Billboards website actually cites their data, “The week’s most popular downloaded songs, ranked by sales data as compiled by Luminate.” Which I assume refers to luminatedata.com
Sadly their data (the numbers specifically) aren’t publicly available.
Country music is so low talent and meaningless this is to be expected I guess
Any time I hear people say county music is bad, I’m reminded about Bo Burnham’s pandering bit. There is good country music out there, you unfortunately just gotta wade through the slop to find it.
C’mon, be fair. Country writers are toiling in their Victorian libraries to come up with such literary marvels as rhyming “suds” and “buds.”
There are only so many words in the English language to describe one’s ideal pickup truck going down a long dirt road.
Such a foolish take. I’m no fan of country music writ large, but there are plenty of good tunes out there in just about every genre.
Here’s the track for the curious.
It’s pretty basic with lyrics that are pretty pandering. Not exactly a good song, but here we are.
Country music lovers should feel stupid by letting this become a hit. I mean is AI going play the Grand Ole Opry?
is AI going play the Grand Ole Opry?
Virtual bands playing human-composed and -recorded music predate present music from generative AI, and they’ve done performances.
I imagine at some point, probably someone will pair virtual bands with AI-generated music, and do performances of it, if they haven’t already.
But like…that requires work. The whole point of an AI band is to not do any work.
This is a spray and pray approach. Generate 200 songs. Hope one gets popular, make money off that from Spotify. Move on. Switch genres.
Are you talking about taking Chuck E. Cheese on the road?
Isn’t hatsuni miku also ai though and people seem to like that.
Nah, Vocaloids like Hatsune Miku aren’t AI. Vocaloid music uses voice synthesizers, with each character being a unique voicebank with a mascot. But the final result of a Vocaloid song is completely man-made. They’re closer to instruments than they are to AI.
Miku more like digital voice synthesizer.
“I could sing in Mandarin, you’d still know I’m panderin’” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7im5LT09a0
This is exactly it.
The lyrics are basically just the “I’m a piece of shit and won’t change” genre, and apparently that resonates with a lot of people somehow.
The only time I’ve had an enemy in my life I was 6 years old, I don’t get these songs man.
side note: I’m heterosexual but I did not know that Bo Burnham is low key fuckable.
That fucking scarecrow again
sounds like one of those free use songs that youtube provides when you upload a video so you don’t get copy striked. people actually LIKE this drivel? wow.
I’m pretty sure the lofi music streams on YouTube are majority ai-generated. But I just put it on for background music, I don’t actually listen to it.
I feel like “ai generated” music when it’s not lyrical isn’t such an awful thing - ambient sound and the like. I mean, music may not be mathematically solved yet, but we’ve certainly had music-generation algorithms for decades, and there’s no real harm in that. There’s a time and a place for a human to create art, and times for artificially created pleasant sound.
I like to split it into the art and the craft. AI can execute the craft of drawing or creating music or lyrics, but only a human can exercise and elevate a medium to something that really speaks to people on anything more than a superficial level.
Isn’t hatsuni miku also ai though and people seem to like that.
It’s perfectly fine to like something that isn’t art. Hell, it’s perfectly fine to have a definition of art that can include AI, that’s just a framing for talking about the things AI does well vs. the things it doesn’t. I find that where a human can mix different things together in a way that enriches the whole, AI mixes things together in contradictory ways because it lacks human experience. It’s why, AI pictures usually come out flat and lifeless or includes nonsense details that don’t fit or includes requested details in incongruous ways.
That said, I only know about Hatsuni Miku through my kids. I don’t really know anything about that specifically.
They already have concerts and shit like that hologram 2pac so I reckon AI concert will become more common.
It’s always interesting seeing the line people will draw between what they see as art vs product. I would be disappointed by anyone who tricked me into listening to theft-generated music, whether people consider it legitimate art or not
art vs product
product vs process
How something is made may become the new curiosity, especially when novel approaches and instruments are used.
Obligatory fuck Spotify!
I’m not really familiar with Spotify, but at least for me — I don’t have a Spotify account — it only plays the first bit.
I think that this is the same song, but on YouTube Music.
Well at least he’s memory safe
He is breaking Rust, so i would not be that sure…
So just gross on all counts then.
Here before this becomes the backing track for a million conservative TikToks.
We’re so cooked.
It’s the same guy who’s behind https://www.youtube.com/@defbeatsai which is just…the best
more proof that country music peaked in the 90s
9/11 ruined country music.
But it’s not copyrighted if it’s AI-generated, right? Or are there human co-writers and/or performers?
Perhaps, if anything, i think the prompts for creating the song MAY be copyrightable.
I mean, the song is not BAD, but somewhat… generic, “beige” i would call it. Something that can play in the background in a shopping centre.
