alt Hacker NewsAI Singer Now Occupies Eleven Spots on iTunes Singles Chart
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHQevuohJH8
my music tastes are pretty mainstream, and this just does absolutely nothing for me. it's exactly what i'd expect AI music to sound like - completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it.
i'd be willing to believe that this music was legitimately charting if it had at least some redeeming qualities, but i can't imagine how this could honestly get eleven spots on the iTunes chart without gaming it in some way.
I have no doubt that those numbers have been inflated by AI powered marketing tools, dead internet theory style.
The iTunes chart primarily focuses on sales velocity, not streams, and so I wonder how useful that is in 2026 and how easy it is to game.
This is no more art than a container of corn syrup is a proper meal.
We've seen a steady shift in music over the past 2 decades from full length albums, to single hits, to artificially generated.
Surely there's some gained and some lost. But coming from the era of buying an entire album, spending time reading the CD booklets and art, and listening to 10 songs which tell a larger story ---- what's being lost really hits home.
The top 40 has always been riddled with garbage, in my opinion, but at least real, human musicians were making a living from their art.
It's as if what William Gibson wrote about in Idoru has already become a reality. Soon we will see celebrity AI gossip.
I just checked Spotify, it has 368k followers and at least one song has over 1M streams.
Thankfully I still buy proper music, what a sad state for human culture.
iTunes? i wonder what kind of sales we're talking about here. people buying music is few and far between, and i wonder what percentage of that customer base buys their music on iTunes when there are great alternatives offering lossless files
It's similar pattern that we've seen previously, but exaggerated by modern trends and modern technology: the most popular cultural items will often be meaningless and base, and if you want something substantial you need other ways to find meaningful content.
Grifters figured out several years ago that the iTunes sales chart is extremely gameable, and can be juiced for some cheap headlines.
I mostly listen to AI-generated music. 8 out of 10 of my top listens in the last 180 days are AI-generated.
I gradually went from various genres -> mostly nerdcore -> mostly AI nerdcore.
https://www.last.fm/user/testycool/library/tracks?from=2025-...
EDIT: Updated link to the most listened songs in the past 180 days. The songs are not generated by me.
It's interesting to me that all AI music sounds slightly sibilant - like someone taped a sheet of paper to the speaker or covered my head in dry leaves. I know no model is perfect but I'd have thought they'd have ironed out this problem by now, given how pervasive it is and how significantly it degrades the end product.