AI slop has reached a new level of ascendancy, as a country song by an AI artist has hit number one on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart.
Breaking Rust, an AI “band” that appeared on the internet in the middle of October based on its presence on Instagram, topped the chart last week with a song called Walk My Walk. Look at Breaking Rust’s social media pages and you’ll find nothing to indicate there’s an actual human involved in the music-making portion of the band’s songs – just a chiseled-jawed, clearly AI-generated cowboy, and video clips featuring folksy people doing folksy things or slow-walking away from the camera. To say the various songs are similar would be an understatement: They’re practically identical down to their bland, hollow lyrics.
Breaking Rust’s position on the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart – Click to enlarge
Hang on a second, you may be wondering: Doesn’t Breaking Rust sound like every other so-called “bro country” band that’s come to dominate the genre over the past decade by singing soulless, cookie-cutter songs about trucks, beer, American flags, and scantily-clad women? Absolutely.
If so, why should we assume Breaking Rust is an AI band? Well, because Billboard said it is in a story about AI artists just last week.
“Breaking Rust, an AI-powered country act, debuted at No. 9 on the Emerging Artists chart (dated Nov. 1),” the music publication said. “The project, credited to songwriter Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, has generated 1.6 million official U.S. streams.”
Taylor has almost no internet presence, appearing only in association with Breaking Rust and a decidedly dirtier act called Defbeatsai. It’s not clear whether he’s even a real person.
Billboard mentioned a number of additional AI “artists” in the story, noting that their numbers keep growing, and “as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell who or what is powered by AI — and to what extent.”
Breaking Rust has been doing surprisingly well for itself, or for Taylor, since appearing on the scene. Walk My Walk has been streamed on Spotify more than three million times as of writing. An even more popular tune (on Spotify at least), Livin’ On Borrowed Time, has logged more than 4.1 million streams. Spotify logs the “band” as having more than 2 million monthly listeners, and many appear to be completely fooled by who – or what – they’re listening to.
“Are you guys out touring anywhere right now,” asked one commenter on the Instagram post for Livin’ On Borrowed Time. “This sings to my soul,” a comment on the song The One’s [sic] You Trust.
“Just discovered this guy,” said another poster on the song Time Don’t Stop. “I’ve already downloaded everything I could find.” Multiple people commented on how amazing the singer’s voice is, apparently unaware that everything to do with Breaking Rust is generated by a computer.
It’s a bit surprising given every Breaking Rust song sounds identical – same beat, same tempo, same instrumentation: They’re the sort of hyper-generic songs one could only get by feeding a prompt into an AI trained on every bro country song ever recorded and asking it to spit out something that would appeal to the lowest common denominator of music fan, something it appears to have done with success.
Whether or not you appreciate American country music, this is a prime exhibit as to why music labels and recording industry groups have sued AI startups for training their algorithms on actual music and spitting out songs that sound practically identical to those painstakingly written, rehearsed, and recorded by actual humans with talent.
Major record labels, through the Recording Industry Association of America, sued two AI music startups last year over just that, arguing that their tools can generate songs eerily similar to copyrighted recordings and unfairly exploit musicians’ work.
A group of music publishers also sued Anthropic in 2023 for training its AI on copyrighted song lyrics. As part of the lawsuit, the publishers alleged that Claude reproduced the lyrics to Don McLean’s “American Pie” when asked to write a song about the death of Buddy Holly, introducing them as if they were its own original work.
There’s good reason artists, be they working in visual, audio, or written mediums, are so concerned that AI is destroying art: When an AI band can make it to number one on a Billboard chart, even one as small as the CDSS chart (which one country music outlet noted takes only about 3,000 sales to reach the top), it’s an insult to the human artists who rank lower.
We reached out to the RIAA to get its take on this, the first instance of an AI musician reaching number one on a chart, but didn’t hear back. ®
