Music created by artificial intelligence (AKA AI-generated music) is now topping the record charts. Let that sink in for a minute.
In 2025, it’s become hard to escape the fact that AI is seemingly everywhere. I just bought a new washing machine and there's an AI setting. Why do I need AI to wash my clothes? I have no idea.
In the world of radio, as Iowa Public Radio's very own Josie Fischels reported, some stations are Frankensteining their own AI DJs — in the image and gender they wish to hear and see. So, when I heard that AI was topping certain music charts, I decided it was time to finally check it all out.
I have now listened to the top AI-generated musicians — so you don’t have to. But I've also included video references in case you really want to see for yourself.
The Velvet Sundown
This “group” got some buzz a few months back because they accumulated over a million plays on Spotify and fooled many listeners into thinking that they were a real band. The "band" released three albums in the span of a month before admitting that the music was all fully AI-generated.
Reactions online ranged from frustration to anger — from both independent artists and industry experts — especially when it came to using human artists' work as models to train AI without permission.
With The Velvet Sundown, you can imagine the prompts used to create the tracks. I'm guessing it was programmed with phrases like “'70s rock band sound,” “Led Zeppelin” and “My Morning Jacket.”
The musical feeling is just slightly off with these tracks. The crazy thing, though, is that for the untrained ear, or if you're listening to the songs in the background, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. It’s pretty alarming when the AI's sound has gotten so good that the average listener can’t tell the difference sonically.
The Velvet Sundown as a band name is corny to say the least, and the lyrics are, thankfully, (and perhaps unsurprisingly) uninspired. But then again, there are plenty of real-life bands with corny names and lazy lyrics.
Breaking Rust
Breaking Rust's "Walk my Walk" spent a week as the top song on Billboard’s “Country Digital Song Sales” last month, prompting a flurry of entertainment news reports and shocked reactions online. In my opinion, this band sounds even worse than The Velvet Sundown, yet people still seem to like it despite discovering that it's AI. Perhaps AI is better able to mimic the nuances of country vs. Velvet Sundown's '70s rock sound — at least for now.
The prompts fed to AI to create Breaking Rust's songs have to be something like “Outlaw Country,” “stomp/clap," “cowboys” and “Chris Stapleton vocals.”
Musically, this "band" is downright bad. The "instrumentation" here all sounds weirdly similar, and the vocals have a strange, inhuman flutter to them.
Breaking Rust's lyrics are also very bland and often raise more questions than answers. For example, the band's song "Whiskey Don't Talk Back" features the line, "The only thing that keeps me company is, whiskey don't talk back," which is a sentence that simply doesn't make sense no matter how you read it. And to be clear: AI can't drink anything.
Xania Monet
This example is a little different than the previous two. Xania Monet is not a real person — her music and voice are created by AI — but the lyrics in the song "How Was I supposed to Know?" are human-made, written by Telisha "Nikki" Jones. The vibe here is gospel meets R&B, with some Mariah Carey sprinkled in.
Still, the songs aren't great. Sure, the line "unpacking daddy wounds with every kiss" is sung by AI, but knowing a human wrote it was one of the weirder things I experienced while listening to all of these AI songs.
The track "Social media lies" has this specific line that became very meta very fast: "We celebrate what ain't even real."
Takeaways
Simply put, AI-generated music is representative of the bizarre reality where we currently reside. These are just some of the examples of what's happening right now. Some commentators say this is just a trend that will taper off, but with AI getting better and better, real artists are now using it to create their chart-topping hits, like Xania Monet. As Studio One favorite Teddy Swims puts it: "When used correctly, [AI] can be a beautiful tool."
Does this mean that the role of an artist is being transformed into just typing prompts into a generative software engine? When does something go from gimmick to actual concern? What quality and ethics standards do we as music listeners and fans want and need the music industry to place on AI-generated music — or do we care? The future is uncharted and certainly will be full of more surprises than we might have thought. It'll be interesting seeing what happens next.
