AI MUSIC
An AI cowboy just topped Billboard, and fans didn’t notice
An AI-made song has hit a new milestone: it reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, twice in a row.
The track, “Walk My Walk,” is credited to a country artist called Breaking Rust, who has more than two million monthly listeners on Spotify.
But the “artist” isn’t real. The voice, the lyrics, and the persona all appear to be AI-generated, as first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
All the songs are credited to Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, a name with no clear online presence outside Breaking Rust and another AI project, Defbeatsai, which posts explicit AI-made music and videos.
Breaking Rust’s Instagram is filled with AI-generated clips of cowboy characters lifting weights, doing push-ups in the snow, or walking down highways.
The account has over 39,000 followers, and the YouTube channel has more than 22,000.
Across both platforms, fans openly say they don’t care if the music is AI, they just like the songs.
Others seem to think the singer is real, asking for tour dates in places like Australia and London.
Key points:
An AI-generated act reached No. 1 on a Billboard chart
Fans are split between embracing the AI and assuming the artist is human
Digital-only charts can be influenced by a relatively small number of paid downloads
The cowboy is coded
Even with the No. 1 spot for downloads, Breaking Rust isn’t the most popular overall.
Morgan Wallen leads Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, and Cody Johnson tops streaming.
Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart only measures paid downloads from platforms like iTunes and AmazonMP3.
And it doesn’t take much to get there: the week’s top country digital seller moved just 3,000 copies, according to Billboard’s 6 October update.
At $0.99 per download, a few thousand pounds or dollars could easily push a track to No. 1.
Tour in London??? Babe, he’s a dataset. - MG