That New Hit Song on Spotify? It Was Made by A.I.

"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."

"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."

"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."

Aspiring musicians are using generative artificial intelligence to produce songs that quickly gain large streaming audiences and chart success. Nick Arter transitioned from longtime hobbyist rapper to releasing A.I.-assisted tracks that accumulated hundreds of thousands of plays within months. A.I. tools are spreading across culture and entertainment, fueling synthetic visuals, virtual actors, and particularly rapid songwriting and voice replication. Early viral tracks used mimicry of famous voices, and current releases reflect a broader A.I. music moment. The technology lowers barriers for creators, accelerates production timelines, and creates alternative routes into the music industry.

Read at The New Yorker