Auto play has been a way for me to find new music. I stopped using it because now every listen is accompanied by a a nagging feeling that the song that is playing might be AI generated.

Now I just go and look for new albums from bands I know I like. I wish there was a pre-2023 filter for the algorithmic feed.

My favorite pasttime for the last 12 years, besides reading hacker news, is to make music on my phone, ipad or on my piano. Will I stop making music now that Suno is here? No frigging way. Because I still like to make music. I won’t stop talking either, just because some AI is better at doing conversation about research. If I make enough money on my latest, I will spend more time making music.

Some of my music is available om SoundCloud. Most of it is made on an iPhone. https://on.soundcloud.com/lHJN26CwcwtnQzc2CB

I wonder how well it would work to use AI as a front end to Band-in-a-Box?

Band-in-a-Box is a commercial program that has been around since 1990. What it did then was let you specify a chord progression, style, tempo, and instruments and it would make a generate a MIDI track. I think it might have also been able to take a melody and come up with a chord progression for it in a style/genre of your choosing.

The target market was musicians. Instrumentalists used it generate tracks to improvise or solo with for example, and songwriters found it useful to essentially have a full band at their beck and call while composing.

Over the years they added more features, and switched to sounds from recordings of real instruments played by real musicians. They have very good stretching and pitch transposition so you can use these at a range of tempos and keys and they still sound good.

It is still aimed at musicians, and can be overwhelming to others. This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.

It is not something the kind of person who just wants to describe what they want to hear and have a song produced would enjoy. But if an AI could operate it for them, maybe that would work and the result would be something with much better sounding instruments than the AI song makers (and without the risk of including unlicensed copyrighted material).

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.

This reminds of the time Data started performing with the violin…

I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human. You can make utilitarian arguments for most other uses of AI. For example, the code you're generating didn't exist before, and it would take serious time or money to write it. So, I get it, the economic argument is compelling enough.

But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing. Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood. There's nothing you gain by listening to AI music day-to-day, so what's the argument for it - other than utmost indifference to human creativity?

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.

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.

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.

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’ve listened to his three top songs on Spotify. They’re practically the same songs with different lyrics. I know approximately 0 music theory and I could tell they’re almost identical.

I can't find any of his songs on Top 100[1], is it another list?

[1]: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...

I suspect this is some trick somewhere with purchased views or something. Not that I'm against AI music. I love the various lo-fi / cyberpunk / etc. AI youtube channels. I also enjoy my own suno music. Overall, I'd say AI music dominates my listening these days.

It just seems unusual that a lot of people like the same thing. Even the channels on Youtube that I listen to are so prolific (people generate a large amount of music and just stick it in there) that I never go look for a particular track or anything. And there are so many of them that each one only gets a few thousand views.

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

I was a big fan of listening to music, long time subscriber to Spotify, would listen to music when driving, when cooking, when coding (Same playlist for 20+ years - Matrix + fat of the land).

The last 6 years has been no music. I unsubscribed from everything since I felt music was an intrusion in the moment.

I had a quick listen to the "AI singer", and it's soulless, empty, and generic - Which is modern music anyway.

Today there are zero mentions of Eddie in the top 100: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...

I'd really love to see an actual source on this claim.

A couple of weeks ago I went to an 'Italian' restaurant. To my surprise, they played a 10-second video loop of an AI-generated stereotypical 'blues' singer with obvious artefacts. The music was a mix of 'blues' with nonsensical lyrics that couldn’t be found online. It was an odd experience. I don't think it was this creation, but it was disconcerting. Felt like Blade Runner isn't too far away.

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.

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

1984 gets more real every day.

I see music as "the space of all possible 5-second clips at stereo 48kHz 24bit depth". If you think about it, that space contains the intro to Stairway to Heaven and Oops I Did It Again, and the end of either song. It contains every 5-second segment of O Fortuna, plus a previously unimagined O Fortuna Remix with MF Doom rapping the pledge of alliegance backwards. My point is, AI is getting good at searching music space for novel patterns, and that's entirely the point of music, not making a career out of being an alcoholic minstrel with a tour bus.

The audience will out the good patterns, and it's up to the musicians or AI companies to serve better patterns.

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

I just listened to the top 3 songs of this project out of curiosity, and it feels like the same song. Same rhythmic pattern, same harmonies, same instruments.

However, I also listened to several other artists on the chart[1]. They all, bar a couple, are so low effort that they may also be generated by neural networks, FWIW.

[1]: https://itopchart.com/us/en/top-songs/

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.

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

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.

Live shows are the biggest part of music anyway

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

Reminds me of music from Christone Ingram.

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

So absolutely tasteless it should be banned. I think it's fine if people want to generate music at home like this but also, isn't it questionable what is even copyrightable? Apple makes you pay for this?

oh man, I just am so bummed that around 2007 I ditched my 20 year collection of CDs and went digital whaaaaa!

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.

I don't like AI, but either music is good, or it is not. AI can generate good music, I noticed this on youtube. In my local collection I have zero AI songs and I will probably keep at this number, but AI can produce good music too, there is no doubt about this. The question will be whether humans want to rely on AI music. I'd love to say I don't, but ultimately when it comes to music the criterium that I use is whether my brain evaluates the song as good or not, rather than whether it is AI or not.

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

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

Bullshit. This does not represent what real people are listening to, there are ways to game the system.

The idea is explained by Rick Beato here: https://youtu.be/rGremoYVMPc

Alternate title: iTunes charts still easy to game.

I see many people claiming AI art has no value.

I could understand opposing it on an ethical basis. I could even understand it if they claimed that it will dull us out or it just isn't good for the brain, sort of like we can say that tiktok/instagram reels are probably not good for our brains.

But to claim that it has no value? Surely my definition of value is just different, and I'm playing semantics.

The least-funny of clowns has value if they make someone laugh.

The most mind-destroying tiktok/reels have value if they entertain someone for a little while.

I'm not saying these are necessarily good things, but they certainly hold value. And AI art, like memes, like instagram reels, like watching paint dry, has value if consumers enjoy it. It has much more value than watching paint dry because many more people clearly enjoy it (and I don't think their brains will rot because of it).

Personally, I think AI art enables such a low barrier to entry that obviously we have a big problem with mass production of slop. Things that entertain (again, like tiktok/reels), but are probably not a net-positive for society.

However, while I recognize that problem, I know several people who are creating INCREDIBLE art with AI which they would never be able to do. Things that bring tears to my eyes and that are definitely not slop. Even if they are produced in a day, it takes a special mind to conjure up the right things to produce. Faster does not always mean worse (and what even is "good" or "bad" in art??). Tale as old as time.

There is an ethical debate to be had about this art being built on the stolen assets that previous artists, using traditional tools, created. I think it's a serious debate and I don't really know how we'll solve it.

So if I:

1. Ignore the ethical debate around attribution and, as an exercise, assume that there's "fair compensation to everyone involved" (not so sure if this will happen)

2. Assume we do find a system to properly curate content (which I do actually think will happen -- we will find ways of weeding out the best)

Then I absolutely want AI art to succeed. It has enabled so many around me to produce so many incredible things, I can't wait for more chapters in this beautiful history of humanity. Where more people can create more.

"1." is a tough ask. We need to figure it out. "2." I think we'll manage, and I guess even if we don't get "1.", then cat's out of the bag and these tools are too world-changing to keep them from being used. I want to see what these amazing creative geniuses do with them.

In high school i started to hear melodies/lyrics pop in my head and it prompted to learn instruments - pursued songwriting dream in college in Nashville (just a hobbyist since). I was initially excited about using Suno -- make the songs how they're heard in my head a reality as my rough garageband demos with me singing isnt how i hear them. Also, people arent excited by singing. Though my excitement wore off as I started to feel uninspired that it now takes zero talent/zero effort to write songs.

I took a break from Suno for many months .. attacking everyones slop including my own but my bandmates like my AI songs. Now at practice (80s & 90s music band) we listen and play along to the AI versions and have thrown in two into our setlist. Thus, for me Ive finally found an inspiring human usage of AI music! No text prompter could ever enjoy playing / performing their music in a band and to an audience and receive live human feedback. That's unless they do what millions other musicians have done .. cultivate their talent/musical interest.

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

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