AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

bobthepanda

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.

jmathai

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.

leviathant

I have no doubt that those numbers have been inflated by AI powered marketing tools, dead internet theory style.

HardwareLust

I just checked Spotify, it has 368k followers and at least one song has over 1M streams.

pjmlp

Thankfully I still buy proper music, what a sad state for human culture.

futureproofd

It's as if what William Gibson wrote about in Idoru has already become a reality. Soon we will see celebrity AI gossip.

adzm

Live shows are the biggest part of music anyway

bparsons

Grifters figured out several years ago that the iTunes sales chart is extremely gameable, and can be juiced for some cheap headlines.

everdrive

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.

yokoprime

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

testycool

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.

cdrnsf

This is no more art than a container of corn syrup is a proper meal.

notatoad

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.

pickleglitch

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.

daemonologist

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.

smilbandit

I dabbled with AI music for a bit with Suno. Worked out well for the most part, only way I'm ever going to hear music with themes for some of niche things I like, like Shadowrun. I threw a bunch of music genres at it and some were good enough that I added them to my normal playlist but after about 30 completed songs I had a hard time coming up with new stuff. As someone who has never tried to create music myself it was fun to play with.

scubazealous

I searched Spotify and Apple music top 100 songs and Eddie Dalton is not on either. I think the majority of users do not buy singles on iTunes anymore so this may be an easy chart to manipulate. The source mentions the name of the creator in the second line leading me to believe this is some clever advertising for Dallas Little's AI.

vor_

Who still buys from iTunes? This is likely bot-driven.

storus

I am wondering when Dr. Phoxotic makes it to the top 10...

everyone

I mean music in the charts has always been total shit anyway.