AI-Generated Song Tops Country Sales Chart

Breaking Rust

On Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, the No. 1 spot is currently held by Breaking Rust’s “Walk My Walk.” The song is fairly run-of-the-mill for contemporary country, with genre hallmarks like a blues moan intro, a dirt-road-shuffle pace, stomp-claps at the hook and rootsy imagery, like mud-stained jeans and kicking rocks. It feels familiar, by design, as it’s a product of generative AI.

This is quickly becoming a trend. Billboard announced earlier in November that at least six songs by AI artists, or with assistance from generative AI, have seen prominent placements on its various charts, though that number “could be higher, as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell who or what is powered by AI – and to what extent.” With the development of AI music creation platforms like Suno and Udio, these songs have grown from a novelty to a force of nature. In a September press release, Spotify noted that it had removed 75 million “spammy” tracks in the last 12 months, fighting to curb the deluge of “mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks, artificially short track abuse, and other forms of slop [that] have become easier to exploit as AI tools make it simpler for anyone to generate large volumes of music.”

There have been prior flashpoints as these uploads have gained ground with real listeners. The Velvet Sundown amassed more than one million streams in a matter of weeks in July, and claimed that real people created its weightless psych-folk before copping to being “a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction.” The most notable among the more recent successes is Xania Monet, the AI avatar of Mississippi-based songwriter Telisha “Nikki” Jones. Monet has been prominently featured on Billboard’s Hot Gospel Songs, Hot R&B Songs and Emerging Artists charts, claimed the top spot on R&B Digital Song Sales for “How Was I Supposed To Know?,” and recently made headlines with a multimillion-dollar deal with Hallwood Media, run by former Geffen president Neil Jacobson. Speaking on her process and perspective on AI music in an interview with CBS Mornings, Jones said “Xania is an extension of me, so I look at her as a real person.”

Xania Monet is an outlier in a new field of music that has been defined by its obscurity. Details about these releases are rarely available; publishing metadata attached to Breaking Rust credits songwriting to Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, whose name is also attached to a project called Defbeatsai, but that’s the end of the trail. Still, the AI country project has an Instagram account with over 39 thousand followers (watch that figure rise below) and multiple songs with more than one million streams on Spotify.

Breaking Rust’s rise in the world of country, a genre that famously prizes authenticity and resists developments that pull the music from its core human element, seems to be a meaningful shift in public perception towards AI music, and yet another sign that both the industry and listeners will soon be forced to reckon with the acceptable limits of this technology. Then again, what the world is ready for may not mean much. As the gravel-voiced synthetic composite numbingly says, if you don’t like it, you can just kick rocks.