- Three AI-generated songs have recently topped both Spotify and Billboard charts, signaling a massive shift in the music industry.
- The tracks, including two country songs and a controversial Dutch anthem, were created without any human composition.
- Experts warn that with 50,000 AI songs uploaded daily, human musicians face a new “hyperscalable competitor built by exploitation.”
- A recent study revealed that 97% of listeners cannot distinguish between the best AI-generated music and songs written by humans.
The Synthetic Sound Dominating The Charts
The future of music has arrived, and it’s not what anyone expected. This week, three entirely AI-generated songs surged to the top of major music charts, leaving human artists in the dust. On Spotify’s influential “Viral 50” list in the US, two country tracks by an outfit named Breaking Rust, “Walk My Walk” and “Livin’ on Borrowed Time,” claimed the top spots. Simultaneously, a controversial anti-migrant Dutch anthem, “We Say No, No, No to an Asylum Center,” secured the number one position on Spotify’s global viral chart.
Breaking Rust’s success wasn’t limited to streaming. For three consecutive weeks, “Walk My Walk” has led Billboard’s “Country Digital Song Sales” chart, a significant milestone proving that AI-generated content can achieve commercial success through digital purchases. One of its lyrics, “You can kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk,” seems to be a direct challenge to critics of the synthetic music wave.
Watch: Breaking Rust’s Chart-Topping AI Hit ‘Walk My Walk’
A Flood of Code and Controversy
This is not an isolated incident but part of a massive, unstoppable trend. A study published Wednesday by the streaming service Deezer estimates that a staggering 50,000 AI-generated songs are uploaded to its platform every single day, accounting for 34% of all new music submissions. The quality has improved so dramatically that in the same study, 97% of 9,000 people surveyed could not tell the difference between AI music and human-composed tracks.
Ed Newton-Rex, a musician and AI ethics advocate, warns of the danger this poses. “What you have here is 50,000 tracks a day that are competing with human musicians,” he said. “You have a new, hyperscalable competitor and, moreover, this competitor that was built by exploitation.”
How is This Happening?
The explosion of AI music is being facilitated by a new ecosystem of distribution platforms. Services like DistroKid allow anyone to upload tracks to major platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok with ease, collecting royalties from streams. This has enabled a wave of what music data analyst Chris Dalla Riva calls music “made by a person in their bedroom and uploaded to these distribution sites,” bypassing traditional record labels entirely.
The controversial Dutch song has since been removed from Spotify and YouTube, not by the platforms, but by the rights holders. The creator, who uses the name “Broken Veteran,” claims AI has “democratized music creation” for those without formal training, illustrating the complex debate surrounding this new technology.
Image Referance: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/13/ai-music-spotify-billboard-charts