That New Hit Song on Spotify? It Was Made by A.I.
Aspiring musicians are churning out tracks using generative artificial intelligence. Some are topping the charts.
You’re reading Infinite Scroll, Kyle Chayka’s weekly column on how technology shapes culture.
Nick Arter, a thirty-five-year-old in Washington, D.C., never quite managed to become a professional musician the old-fashioned way. He grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in a music-loving family. His father and stepfather were big into nineties hip-hop—Jay-Z, Biggie, Nas—and his uncles were working d.j.s spinning seventies R. & B. By his adolescence, he and his cousins were recording their own hip-hop tracks, first on cassette boom boxes, then on desktop computers, mimicking Lil Romeo and Lil Bow Wow, the popular kid rappers of the day. Music remained a hobby throughout Arter’s college years, at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, he briefly attempted to go pro, selling mixtapes at local shows, before settling into a job running a government call center in Harrisburg. That role eventually led to a position at Deloitte in D.C., and Arter continued rapping on nights and weekends without releasing any music. “I was getting a little bit too old to be a rapper,” he recalled recently. Then, late last year, he started using artificial intelligence to create songs, and, within months, he had hits on streaming platforms netting hundreds of thousands of plays. Maybe he had a musical career after all.
Arter’s success is emblematic of A.I.’s accelerating inroads into the music industry. No realm of culture or entertainment remains untouched by artificial intelligence: Coca-Cola just released a Christmas ad made with A.I. visuals; A.I. actors are being hyped in Hollywood. But the technology has had an especially swift impact on songwriting. A couple of years ago, a smattering of A.I. tracks went viral for using tricks like replicating the voices of pop stars, including Jay-Z and Drake. Now we’re in the midst of a full-blown A.I. music moment. This month, an A.I. country song called “Walk My Walk” (with percussive claps and forgettable lyrics such as “Kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk”) hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, and passed three million streams on Spotify; the performer behind it is a square-jawed digital avatar named Breaking Rust. In September, Xania Monet, an A.I. R. & B. singer created by a young poet in Mississippi, landed a multimillion-dollar record deal after several Billboard-charting singles. And earlier in the year a mysterious psychedelic band called the Velvet Sundown passed a million plays on Spotify before its creators admitted that the group was “synthetic.” Spotify does not mark A.I.-generated content as such, and the company has said that it is improving its A.I. filters without defining what qualifies as an A.I. song. In the past year, the platform has removed more than seventy-five million “spammy tracks” from its service, but countless unmarked A.I. tracks remain, and many listeners can’t tell the difference. In one recent study, participants could successfully discern A.I.-generated music from human-made music only fifty-three per cent of the time.
If you hear an A.I.-generated track online, chances are that it was created with one of two popular song-making apps, Suno or Udio. Arter’s process involves both. He writes his own lyrics, often on his phone. Then he drafts text prompts with the lyrics and notes about the track he’s envisioning, and plugs the prompts into the two apps to see which one produces better results. (Arter told me that “a good prompt consists of (year), (genre of music), (instrumentation), (mood) and (emotion).”) He generates dozens of versions of each track this way, iterating on the tune and the instrumentation, until he’s happy with an output. Finally, he uses Midjourney to create album art for each new single—usually closeup portraits of generic soul musicians—and uploads the songs to streaming services including YouTube and Spotify. One of his more popular hits, with nearly nine hundred thousand plays on Spotify, is “I’m Letting Go of the Bullshit,” a pastiche of a late-seventies R. & B. torch song and hip-hop-style lyrical empowerment: “This year I’m in my flow / fuck anything that don’t help me grow.” The apps allow Arter to save a dashboard of style shortcuts, making it easier to produce future tracks in a similar vein. “The algorithm kind of learns your taste,” he explained. Arter’s music, released under the name Nick Hustles, is by no means subtle (another track is “Stop Bitching”: “nobody ever got rich / acting like a little bitch”), and the instrumentals and vocals are undercut with the vacant tinniness that’s the hallmark of A.I. sound. But the melodies—and certain lyrical flourishes, such as a prominent expletive in “Dopest MotherFucker Alive”—are catchy enough to stick in your head.
This technology has “opened up a new realm of creative possibility,” Arter said. He had never been a skilled singer; now he could dabble in the old-school R. & B. he grew up with. Suddenly, he could craft ageless personae to represent his music, complete with fictional backstories, in lieu of his aging millennial self. Arter has produced about a hundred and forty songs in the past year alone, and he doesn’t hide the fact that his music is made with A.I., though the unsuspecting listener may not notice the name of his YouTube account, “AI for the Culture.” Many of his songs function as punch lines about everyday life: They’re “talking about being in traffic, Chipotle messing up my order,” Arter said. His œuvre includes “Healthy Hoes At Trader Joe’s,” “I’m About to Take My Ass to Sleeep” [sic], and both “I Got to Stop Vaping” and “I LOST MY FUCKING VAPE AGAIN,” catering to his demographic and covering all stages of addiction. He has never done marketing or promotion for his A.I. music, yet word of mouth and algorithmic recommendations, such as Spotify’s Radio function, have propelled his work to a level of popularity that he could only dream of as a rapping teen-ager. Justin Bieber has used Arter’s songs to soundtrack Instagram posts, and 50 Cent posted a video of himself singing along to a Nick Hustles track in his car. The rapper Young Thug adopted the chorus of Arter’s “all my dogs got that dog in ’em” for his hit track “Miss My Dogs” and gave Arter credit as a lyricist. Arter was able to quit his job in consulting and embark on a full-time career as a semiautomated musician. He now works with the music distributor UnitedMasters and makes money from more than fifty different streaming platforms. On the side, he generates novelty songs for clients’ birthdays or weddings at five hundred dollars a pop (half price if you supply your own lyrics). Arter has no doubt that what he’s doing is just a new way of being an artist: If your music “changes someone’s life,” he said, “does it really matter if it was A.I.?”
The popularity of A.I. music notwithstanding, A.I. is not, by most metrics, a very good songwriter. As Ahmed Kordofani, a musician and producer in London who uses A.I., told me, “There’s this element of sterileness to it, this emptiness at the bottom.” Kordofani observed the strange flatness that characterizes many A.I.-generated songs: they are monotonous and lacking structure, with no discernible hook, arc, or climax. “Sometimes A.I. can’t tell the bridge from the chorus,” Kordofani said. What’s missing for him as a listener, he added, is the feeling of being “touched by A.I. music.” Seeing an opportunity in the technology’s shortcomings, Kordofani has forged a burgeoning career helping aspiring musicians “humanize” songs that they have made using the likes of Suno and Udio. One of his clients is Ray Sabbagh, a photographer in Montreal who makes Latin-inflected rap and dance music. Sabbagh generates his songs, sometimes using A.I.-generated lyrics, then uses an A.I. model of his voice which Kordofani trained using IRL recordings that Sabbagh had made. (When friends hear the fake him, they can’t tell the difference, Sabbagh said, adding, “It can get scary sometimes.”) If there are spots where the A.I. voice fails, Kordofani patches in recordings of Sabbagh’s actual voice—an arduous process, but still faster than recording from scratch. The resulting music is pleasant and relatively more human than the songs of Arter or Breaking Rust, though it’s also much less popular.
Do Spotify listeners care if their music is “humanized”? With the mainstreaming of A.I., songs of passable quality can be generated instantly and infinitely; their frictionless mass production, combined with their distribution on algorithmic feeds, means that A.I.-generated music acts a lot like any other kind of social content online. The music’s quality or durability is secondary to its ephemeral impact; the goal is a clickability for the ears. The music might be forgettable, but that doesn’t matter if listeners never play it more than once—and they probably won’t, because it doesn’t have much weight beyond novelty—and if the songwriters can just churn out ten more songs in an instant. For aspiring musicians, this new ecosystem can feel bracingly democratic. “I think there’s a genuine opportunity with A.I. to get rid of the gatekeepers,” Arter said. Record labels didn’t care about him until his songs became streaming hits; now he says he’s fielding inquiries, but hanging back until the future of the A.I. ecosystem is clearer. He admits that the barrier to entry might be too low, given the torrent of spam songs flooding Spotify, causing confusion among users who try to pin down the musician behind, say, a generic jazz track, only to find an anonymous avatar with dozens of instrumental albums from the same year. Those music spammers don’t “take the craft seriously,” Arter said; there are no lyrics, no characters, no discernible creative intentions behind their products. He sees his own use of A.I. as above all that. “I wouldn’t do that kind of work,” he added. “I love music too much.” ♦
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Kyle Chayka is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His column, Infinite Scroll, examines the people and platforms shaping the Internet. His books include “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.”
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