Earlier this week, Futurism announced that Billboard’s top country song was by an AI artist named Breaking Rust:
The song, titled “Walk My Walk,” by a fictional group called Breaking Rust, tells an incredibly generic story about a man who has “been beat down” and got “mud on my jeans,” yet perseveres through it all. The song was accompanied by an AI slop video on Instagram, showing a man in a cowboy hat heroically walking into the sunset.
Despite the song’s generic and uninspired nature, Breaking Rust has accumulated over two million monthly listeners on Spotify, where it’s listed as a “verified artist,” despite having no bio. Several of its songs have been played over a million times. One single, which was released last month, has over 4.5 million listens.
While that all sounds pretty dire, YouTuber Rick Beato was quick to point out that “Walk My Walk” does not appear on the usual charts, like Billboard’s “Hot Country Songs” chart (which is currently topped by Morgan Wallen’s “I Got Better”). Rather, it sits atop the “Country Digital Song Sales” chart, a feat that only required a mere 3,000 sales to accomplish.
In other words, Breaking Rust’s current chart dominance is pretty low-hanging fruit. But Breaking Rust is far from the only fake AI country artist at work these days.
Cain Walker also has songs on the “Country Digital Song Sales” chart while Frontier Heart, Lone Star Lyric House, and Drew Meadows each have hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify. Less popular artists also exist, like Cassidy May Cole (who “pairs steel-toed grit with a warm, radio-ready glow”) and Aurora Hayes (who has released tributes to Charlie Kirk and Bitcoin, since nothing says “country music” quite like blockchain ballads.) Not all of these artists enjoy Breaking Rust’s level of success; Aurora Hayes, for example, has barely 300 listeners on Spotify. Nevertheless, there’s something uniquely strange about these artists’ very existence, not to mention the fact that they’ve achieved any measure of success.
After all, the country music genre prides itself on authenticity, sincerity, and tradition. It’s music by and for good, honest folk whose devotion to the values of faith, family, hard work, and patriotism is precisely what makes America great. It’s music that pours forth from the nation’s very heart and soul. Compared to genres like mainstream “Top 40” pop and electronic music, which are heavily reliant on studio tricks and wizardry, country music purports to a “down home” image that’s free of artifice and pretense.
It’s easy to deride “Top 40” pop et al. as generic and artificial. (How else to explain AI R&B singer Xania Monet’s $3 million record deal?) But mainstream country music can prove just as generic and artificial as any other genre. Turn on any country music radio station and you’ll likely hear one song after another employing the same tropes, clichés, and callbacks — musical and lyrical — and every single one of them buffed to a glossy studio sheen that betrays any rustic, “down home” origins. Indeed, there may even be an especial amount of artifice at work in country music given the dissonance between its claims of authenticity and its aesthetic homogeneity and overly produced sound.
One might even go so far as to suggest that this artifice is precisely what makes mainstream country music uniquely primed for AI facsimile, as the real stuff emerging from Nashville studios is already pretty close to slop, aesthetically and stylistically speaking. To be sure, it doesn’t help that country music fans don’t seem to care one way or the other, given Breaking Rust’s 2.4 million monthly listeners and the comments on their social media accounts, nor does the fact that Spotify has seen fit to label the fake artist “verified.” But country music does itself no favors by pumping out song after song that’s nigh-indistinguishable from AI-generated pablum in the first place.