alt Hacker NewsAI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart
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Auto play has been a way for me to find new music. I stopped using it because now every listen is accompanied by a a nagging feeling that the song that is playing might be AI generated.
Now I just go and look for new albums from bands I know I like. I wish there was a pre-2023 filter for the algorithmic feed.
My favorite pasttime for the last 12 years, besides reading hacker news, is to make music on my phone, ipad or on my piano. Will I stop making music now that Suno is here? No frigging way. Because I still like to make music. I won’t stop talking either, just because some AI is better at doing conversation about research. If I make enough money on my latest, I will spend more time making music.
Some of my music is available om SoundCloud. Most of it is made on an iPhone. https://on.soundcloud.com/lHJN26CwcwtnQzc2CB
I wonder how well it would work to use AI as a front end to Band-in-a-Box?
Band-in-a-Box is a commercial program that has been around since 1990. What it did then was let you specify a chord progression, style, tempo, and instruments and it would make a generate a MIDI track. I think it might have also been able to take a melody and come up with a chord progression for it in a style/genre of your choosing.
The target market was musicians. Instrumentalists used it generate tracks to improvise or solo with for example, and songwriters found it useful to essentially have a full band at their beck and call while composing.
Over the years they added more features, and switched to sounds from recordings of real instruments played by real musicians. They have very good stretching and pitch transposition so you can use these at a range of tempos and keys and they still sound good.
It is still aimed at musicians, and can be overwhelming to others. This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.
It is not something the kind of person who just wants to describe what they want to hear and have a song produced would enjoy. But if an AI could operate it for them, maybe that would work and the result would be something with much better sounding instruments than the AI song makers (and without the risk of including unlicensed copyrighted material).
I dabbled with AI music for a bit with Suno. Worked out well for the most part, only way I'm ever going to hear music with themes for some of niche things I like, like Shadowrun. I threw a bunch of music genres at it and some were good enough that I added them to my normal playlist but after about 30 completed songs I had a hard time coming up with new stuff. As someone who has never tried to create music myself it was fun to play with.
It's interesting to me that all AI music sounds slightly sibilant - like someone taped a sheet of paper to the speaker or covered my head in dry leaves. I know no model is perfect but I'd have thought they'd have ironed out this problem by now, given how pervasive it is and how significantly it degrades the end product.
I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human. You can make utilitarian arguments for most other uses of AI. For example, the code you're generating didn't exist before, and it would take serious time or money to write it. So, I get it, the economic argument is compelling enough.
But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing. Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood. There's nothing you gain by listening to AI music day-to-day, so what's the argument for it - other than utmost indifference to human creativity?
You can stop this in its tracks.
Go on KEXP, find a new band you like, share it with your friends, buy a physical copy, buy a t-shirt, book tickets, like their stuff on socials. Watch the record companies flock to real bands.
For the second time on this thread, start with Angine de Poitrine. Live music is the antidote.
The iTunes chart primarily focuses on sales velocity, not streams, and so I wonder how useful that is in 2026 and how easy it is to game.
I mostly listen to AI-generated music. 8 out of 10 of my top listens in the last 180 days are AI-generated.
I gradually went from various genres -> mostly nerdcore -> mostly AI nerdcore.
https://www.last.fm/user/testycool/library/tracks?from=2025-...
EDIT: Updated link to the most listened songs in the past 180 days. The songs are not generated by me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHQevuohJH8
my music tastes are pretty mainstream, and this just does absolutely nothing for me. it's exactly what i'd expect AI music to sound like - completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it.
i'd be willing to believe that this music was legitimately charting if it had at least some redeeming qualities, but i can't imagine how this could honestly get eleven spots on the iTunes chart without gaming it in some way.
You could say I'm a music snob, big time. I can't stand any of the streaming services, because they only have a small fraction of my favorites (which is variations of discord jazz, often in other genres. I like when music decomposes into noise and then restructures again.) Due to my interest there, I've done a deep hole with AI music generation, not the services, but developing the models and exploring the open weight models being released.
There will be quality real art music created by these systems, but not by those that prompt alone. This is a whole new level of instrument, and the levels of control beneath are there to seriously transform one's thoughts to music, and melody, and that composed symphony of separate elements into a symphony of intended meaning.
Perhaps traditional music and this form of music should be treated separate. The distinction between AI music that is prompt-only and what can be created from a deeper set of controls is immense, and is not distinguished at this time, and may never be with how surface level this entire public assessment of AI music happens to be.
It appears Apple/iTunes has already responded. He's no longer on the Top 100: USA list:
https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...
This is no more art than a container of corn syrup is a proper meal.
Today there are zero mentions of Eddie in the top 100: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...
I'd really love to see an actual source on this claim.
I suspect this is some trick somewhere with purchased views or something. Not that I'm against AI music. I love the various lo-fi / cyberpunk / etc. AI youtube channels. I also enjoy my own suno music. Overall, I'd say AI music dominates my listening these days.
It just seems unusual that a lot of people like the same thing. Even the channels on Youtube that I listen to are so prolific (people generate a large amount of music and just stick it in there) that I never go look for a particular track or anything. And there are so many of them that each one only gets a few thousand views.
A couple of weeks ago I went to an 'Italian' restaurant. To my surprise, they played a 10-second video loop of an AI-generated stereotypical 'blues' singer with obvious artefacts. The music was a mix of 'blues' with nonsensical lyrics that couldn’t be found online. It was an odd experience. I don't think it was this creation, but it was disconcerting. Felt like Blade Runner isn't too far away.
We've seen a steady shift in music over the past 2 decades from full length albums, to single hits, to artificially generated.
Surely there's some gained and some lost. But coming from the era of buying an entire album, spending time reading the CD booklets and art, and listening to 10 songs which tell a larger story ---- what's being lost really hits home.
Who still buys from iTunes? This is likely bot-driven.
I’ve listened to his three top songs on Spotify. They’re practically the same songs with different lyrics. I know approximately 0 music theory and I could tell they’re almost identical.
I really don't get it. Mundus vult decipi.
Since the Monkeys we all know, there won't be another Elvis Presley - I advise you to look him up, it is massively impressive, what this guy achieved and what records he holds.
Or put another way: what is music? What ain't artificial in music? Is a drum already artificial? Or an e guitar? Playback? Studio music?
The divide between a band and a song writer?
People trashed techno music in Germany during the early 90th as being "machine music without a soul, totally artificial, a computer is doing everything". Kraftwerk on the other hand, was quite the opposite. It is mind blowing, that they had to construct the hardware they were getting their sound of.
But no matter what, techno of the 90th appear to be true craftsmanship in comparison to todays music. Like the 30th Big Bands vs 60th Rock music. I don't imply to say "Everything used to be better." Nothing could be further from the truth. The thing is, some things actually never change except for the medium.
I stopped caring. We are all victim and perpetrator at the same time. You use AI - oh well, cheater I would say.
Women painting their faces - well...
Ever since people went un-natural to be civilized to paraphrase Karl Popper.
I made a cut off regarding literature. I mainly read the classics where no AI was available - but only an editor.
It is tougher than ever but I stopped being judgmental. I try to do, what is expressed with "The bait must appeal to the fish, not the angler." Mundus vult decipi.
We called out WWF for being scripted entertainment while going to the cinema expecting that the hero would actually really die during the first dramatic 5 minutes in the movie - oh well...
Enjoy! If it sounds good, who cares? If someones earns a buck, so what? We pay for Naked Canon etc. just to let lose. :)
Chart rank is mostly distribution and playlist economics—treating it like a referendum on whether people prefer AI vocals is the real industry coup.
I have no doubt that those numbers have been inflated by AI powered marketing tools, dead internet theory style.
I love it! I find it so funny when people come out and say AI music has no soul and no feelingsj. Meanwhile 99% of music is about genetals, pimping, whoring or shaking their asses LOL
I've heard vinyl and CD's are making a comeback. Hopefully this is one of the reasons for this.
I was a big fan of listening to music, long time subscriber to Spotify, would listen to music when driving, when cooking, when coding (Same playlist for 20+ years - Matrix + fat of the land).
The last 6 years has been no music. I unsubscribed from everything since I felt music was an intrusion in the moment.
I had a quick listen to the "AI singer", and it's soulless, empty, and generic - Which is modern music anyway.
It’s really odd to listen to - the vocals seem like they’ve been recorded at a really low nitrate.
I can't find any of his songs on Top 100[1], is it another list?
[1]: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...
It's similar pattern that we've seen previously, but exaggerated by modern trends and modern technology: the most popular cultural items will often be meaningless and base, and if you want something substantial you need other ways to find meaningful content.
I actually can relate to AI music better than to music made by humans.
I always feel some jealousy when listening to rockstars. Because they get all the action and I get so little. They see the world, are desired by all the beautiful women, earn a ton of money and don't have to work a boring job.
With AI music, I know it is just some lonely GPU in a cold, dark datacenter somewhere. Crunching numbers. Just like I do.
I see music as "the space of all possible 5-second clips at stereo 48kHz 24bit depth". If you think about it, that space contains the intro to Stairway to Heaven and Oops I Did It Again, and the end of either song. It contains every 5-second segment of O Fortuna, plus a previously unimagined O Fortuna Remix with MF Doom rapping the pledge of alliegance backwards. My point is, AI is getting good at searching music space for novel patterns, and that's entirely the point of music, not making a career out of being an alcoholic minstrel with a tour bus.
The audience will out the good patterns, and it's up to the musicians or AI companies to serve better patterns.
Thankfully I still buy proper music, what a sad state for human culture.
I like AI Music, there is some great all instrumental stuff out there.
I searched Spotify and Apple music top 100 songs and Eddie Dalton is not on either. I think the majority of users do not buy singles on iTunes anymore so this may be an easy chart to manipulate. The source mentions the name of the creator in the second line leading me to believe this is some clever advertising for Dallas Little's AI.
Isn't it too early in this timeline to have a Rei Toei?
This reminds of the time Data started performing with the violin…
It's as if what William Gibson wrote about in Idoru has already become a reality. Soon we will see celebrity AI gossip.
1984 gets more real every day.
I just checked Spotify, it has 368k followers and at least one song has over 1M streams.
A decade or two from now your children will be dropping thousands of dollars to go to a concert to hear AI generated music from an AI generated artist.
The top 40 has always been riddled with garbage, in my opinion, but at least real, human musicians were making a living from their art.
So absolutely tasteless it should be banned. I think it's fine if people want to generate music at home like this but also, isn't it questionable what is even copyrightable? Apple makes you pay for this?
oh man, I just am so bummed that around 2007 I ditched my 20 year collection of CDs and went digital whaaaaa!
Reminds me of music from Christone Ingram.
iTunes? i wonder what kind of sales we're talking about here. people buying music is few and far between, and i wonder what percentage of that customer base buys their music on iTunes when there are great alternatives offering lossless files
I am wondering when Dr. Phoxotic makes it to the top 10...
Mainstream music was created for a good 20 years using the following process:
1. Do the survey/focus groups to figure out a hot topic for a song. For instance your exploration shows that 300K girls between 13 and 17 years old were left by their boyfriend, so there is a 300K market for a song about that.
2. Find someone or group who will sing the song. Something your target audience will identify. E.g. "rebellious teenager" (take Britney Spears), "we need a group that will attack larger target" - take Spice Girls - we take one black, one white, one Latino looking (doesn't have to be real Latino, obviously), one polite and nice, one impolite. You get the point.
3. Note: singer/group does not need to know how to sing, they need to move reasonably on the scene, the rest autotune and computers will handle easily.
So, given the process, AI singer is just a little bit different "music" production process, not so much different from the one used up to date except that you don't need autotune anymore.
Luckily there are still people who do music for the sake of doing music and it really stands out as compared to 80% of fodder for listeners that is on YT, radio, Spotify.
This looks like a great way to launder money.
Write some generic AI music, have have your small accounts using stolen giftcards bought with dirty money pump the track and watch it climb the charts as other jump on the band wagon.
Et voilà instant layering with no connections.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly how all the music I don't like gets into the charts. :P