The Chart Topping Success of… Who Again?

I don’t tend to discuss music much on this website. As a critic, reviewer, comic author, and (low-rent) screenwriter I feel there are a number of topics that I can discuss with some level of credibility and music is not one of them. The couple of times I’ve addressed music on this website I’ve always felt like I did a poor job of it. Clearly I needed to take more music appreciation classes back when I was in school because I just don’t know the terminology for most of what I hear to be able to say, “this is why this is great.” I can tell when music is great, but beyond that I’m at a loss for discussion.

Still every once in a while a music-related topic crosses into the realm of what I feel like I can discuss, and when that happens I have to report on it here. And the topic for today is Breaking Rust, the recording act that just reached Number One on the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart. Normally I wouldn’t discuss Country music even if I were interested in chatting about music at all, largely because I don’t listen to Country music and I think it sucks, but in this particular moment I will be chatting about Breaking Rust for one key reason: the band doesn’t exist.

Breaking Rust is actually an A.I. generated band. All of its music is credited to Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, a person who, from all reports, has no presence online. The creator is a ghost, and the band they supposedly operate doesn’t exist at all, except as digital files uploaded online, purchased by users, and then loaded up onto Billboard’s chart. And you might think, “oh, it’s just the digital sales chart for Country music. That’s not really important,” except digital music is where most music play and sales go now, and many “big” Country acts (reportedly, because I wouldn’t know this) have never reached the top of the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart.

To make that clear: an A.I. band, which is effectively generating music based on the works of actual Country music acts, managed to do what many of the real bands have never done. If you are a Country artist, I can understand why you might be just a little upset by this, and if you’re a Country fan you should really think twice about your appreciation for Breaking Rust, if you have any at all. I’m not even a Country music fan and I find this troubling. Here’s why:

Let’s say that you were a music producer back in the late 1980s and very early 1990s. At that time Hair Metal (aka Glam Metal) was all the rage. If you said you listened to “rock” music, what you really meant was Hair Metal because that was what got all the plays on radio and MTV (for those that are younger, there was a time where people listened to music via radio waves broadcast to their car, and there was also a time where MTV actually played music). The biggest acts of the Hair Metal genre were Mötley Crüe, Hanoi Rocks, Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister, and Bon Jovi, and they led to further acts like Poison, Skid Row, Cinderella, Warrant, Ratt, and more coming into the scene.

Now, in this era of Hair Metal, let’s say that A.I. was somehow good enough to take that music and make copies of it. That’s how generative A.I. works now: it takes the works of existing music artists, repurposes the tracks, analyzing them and finding what makes them tick, and then it spits out facsimiles to that music without any humans involved. An “A.I. artist” (i.e., someone that typed into a computer, “make me a rock music power ballad that sounds like Twisted Sister”) might say, “well, this is how I write my music,” but they didn’t actually write anything. They simply fed an idea into a computer and let the computer take its database of already existing works from other, real artists, to create something “new” based on those works. There was no creativity involved, just a repurposement of already existing ideas to make another work of the genre.

That is how Breaking Rust exists. Someone typed into the prompts what they wanted and then let the computer crank out the tracks for the album. That’s not to say that there wasn’t someone around to massage the output or tweak things, but what matters is that there is no actual band in Breaking Rust. Whatever members might appear in promotional materials, or on the covers for albums and tracks, they don’t actually exist. One producer reworking generated tracks is not a band.

But let’s point out that Breaking Rust is now a chart topper. They’re selling well enough, and getting enough plays on the likes of Spotify and other digital storefronts, that they are now (in effect) the Number One Country Music act in the U.S. To upper management, what this shows is that they don’t really need all those live bands that have pesky wants like the desire to get paid. If you’re a music executive, your first thought has to be, “why are we paying for bands when we can cut them out of the process and keep all the profits for ourselves?”

So that’s the first issue. The second issue is a matter of creativity. In this hypothetical situation I raised above, where A.I. is introduced into Hair Metal, what comes next? Well, as a music exec your thought is to come up with a bunch of other Hair Metal acts with fake names, no band members, and multiple umlauts in their names. Bands with names like Viral Lode, Uber and Under, and whatever else they could think of. Hair Metal sells, and you want all that money for yourself, bands be damned. So you make a bunch of Hair Metal acts on your computer and flood the market. Not all of them will be successful, sure, but that doesn’t matter since none of them require money to exist. You can spam them out all you like and if some don’t catch on, who cares?

Beyond that, though, the genre will stagnate. A.I. can’t create anything new, it only takes what already exists and repurposes it. If you asked a computer, “create me a Hair Metal album,” it could do that. But if you said, “make me an album that defies the Hair Metal genre and shows where music is going next,” well, its output is going to be spotty. It might create something, sure, but would it actually be the future of the genre? Unlikely. In this example, what came after Hair Metal was Grunge, and there is no way a computer trained on Hair Metal would have been able to create Grunge from its databases.

So, okay, sure. The music industry gets flooded with copycat Hair Metal and eventually some new sound comes along, written by real people, and everyone flocks to that instead. That’s what happened in real life, so that’s likely what would happen in this hypothetical. The equivalent of Nirvana here creates their ground-breaking album and takes the world by storm. New, live grunge acts pop up left and right and A.I. Hair Metal is left in the dust (after destroying the genre it was based on). What’s to stop the music execs that just ruined Hair Metal from taking all those new grunge tracks and feeding them into a database so that they can make more Grunge music without all those pesky bands? Nothing at all.

Not only is this bad for the genre as it evolves, it also spells doom eventually for the future of music. If every band sees their stardom fade as their music gets stolen and repurposed as A.I. tracks, cutting them out of the industry, what incentive is there for them to keep making music? Your sound is no longer yours, and the only people profiting off what you made are the music producers and the streaming giants. You and your plucky garage band members get cut out and sent home. Eventually you’d stop making music because you couldn’t afford to live otherwise. And then no new music comes along.

This is a doom and gloom scenario, but it’s what we could be facing now. Country acts will see Breaking Rust topping the chart, effectively ripping them off and not paying them for the music that was used to train this A.I. band. What recourse do they have? The industry isn’t paying them for their songs that were used in this process, and now the streamers and the producers are reaping all the money. There is no incentive to keep making new music if their stuff is just going to get swiped and repurposed, cutting off their cash flow in the process.

A.I. art smothers the artistic industry. This discussion started with music but you can push it in any artistic direction you want. Video game companies are forcing their people to use A.I. tools more and more. Illustrators are seeing their works get stolen and reused in A.I. generated art. At every turn, artists are getting cut out of their own industries so that A.I. tools can do their jobs, but the A.I. only knows how to recreate what it’s seen before, and to get that they had to steal the work of the very artists they’re now cutting out of the industry. A.I. disincentivizes making anything new because soon after you make it the computers are doing it everywhere and you no longer get credit (and payment) for it.

What is needed is better regulation of the A.I. industry. Companies training databases on artistic works should be forced to license those works and pay the actual artists for their time and effort. Nothing should be free. Otherwise you end up with a stifled, stagnant industry without new ideas, new forms, or new expression. Breaking Rust isn’t going to ruin Country Music on its own but it is a harbinger of what is to come if we don’t all take a step back and realize what comes next.