"An AI-generated band called Breaking Rust has just hit the top of the Billboard Country chart in the US with a song called Walk My Walk. Some questions will never be answered - could it ever release a sea shanty, and will all the albums be compilations? What this means for the future of the music industry, the AI industry, and music itself, is less funny."
"It is deeply ironic that the country genre is first to cop the slop. Country is very jealous of its authenticity, of communicating the emotions and experiences of common people. Three chords and the truth, as songwriter Harlan Howard said. Country is also deeply formulaic, it knows what buttons to push to connect with its audience. It has always been one of the easier genres to parody, and LLMs are nothing if not parody generators."
"Go back to the charts from those years of yours, though, and marvel at how much was anodyne, derivative, programmatic junk. The musicians making that were exploited by an industry skilled in keeping as much of the money as it could. That LLMs now offer it the chance to keep all the money is as unsurprising as my dog just upped and left me and the bank just took the house."
An AI-generated band called Breaking Rust reached number one on the US Billboard Country chart with the song 'Walk My Walk.' Country music values perceived authenticity but also follows formulaic patterns that LLMs replicate easily. The mainstream music industry has long produced derivative, commercialized tracks while extracting most revenue from musicians. LLMs trained on vast scraped archives now enable labels or platforms to generate songs and potentially capture more revenue. Massive model training has consumed available musical data, raising questions about future creativity once data is exhausted. The combination of genre formula, data-hungry models, and commercial incentives could reshape music production and economic distribution.
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