AI music has reached the charts, and the artists using it have stopped hiding it

Skip to content

-->

News

News<br>News<br>News

Latest

Deep tech

Sustainability

Ecosystems

Data and security

Fintech and ecommerce

Future of work

More

Startups and technology

Investors and funding

Government and policy

Corporates and innovation

Credit: Andrea Raffin / Shutterstock.com

The american rapper Tyga has admitted that artificial intelligence generated the retro synths on his new album, Timbaland has signed an entirely AI-created pop star, and a machine-assisted summer hit has already reached the Billboard Hot 100. Generative music has arrived in the mainstream, and the artists using it have largely stopped pretending otherwise.

Tyga’s ninth album, the eighties-styled “$tarface”, leaned on AI to conjure its period synths, although the rapper says he wrote the lyrics and sang the vocals himself.

He framed it as just another studio tool, telling interviewers it was “no different than when Auto-Tune came out,” a technology once denounced and now everywhere. Not everyone is persuaded by the comparison.

He is in expanding company, though, as Timbaland has launched an “A-Pop” venture called Stage Zero and signed its first act, TaTa, which he describes as “a living, learning, autonomous music artist built with AI.”

Grimes has for years let fans make songs with a licensed clone of her voice in return for a royalty split, and even a Backstreet Boy, Nick Carter, has used AI for videos. The AI pop star Tilly Norwood, meanwhile, has racked up hundreds of thousands of views without ever having existed.

The critics have been merciless in reply. Pitchfork handed “$tarface” a 0.0, its lowest score in years, its reviewer noting acidly that so little effort had gone into the record that “the margins on this thing must be amazing.”

Doja Cat publicly savaged Tyga for releasing it, and the wider social-media reaction to his admission was swift and hostile, yet the optimists see a tool; the critics see a con.

Beneath the name-calling sits a real fight over work. The music being generated has to be trained on something, and that something is usually the recorded output of human artists who were never asked, as a hack of the AI generator Suno laid bare when it revealed millions of scraped songs.

The same anxiety drove Hollywood’s writers and actors to strike, and it runs through every argument about whether a synth patch conjured by software is a shortcut or a theft.

The law is only starting to catch up as a German court recently found that Suno had broken copyright, a first for Europe, and similar lawsuits are piling up on both sides of the Atlantic. Until those cases resolve, artists like Tyga are effectively running a live experiment on what listeners, and courts, will ultimately tolerate.

Then there is the small matter of disclosure. A viral band on Spotify turned out to be AI with nothing on the platform to say so, and several acts have owned up to using the technology only after first denying it.

The industry still has no agreed way to label machine-made music, which leaves listeners guessing and makes the frank admissions from the likes of Tyga the exception rather than the rule.

The scale of what is coming may matter more than any single album. Streaming platforms are already being flooded with AI-generated tracks uploaded at a pace no human catalogue could match, and each one competes for the same finite pool of listening time and royalties.

For working musicians, that is the quieter threat behind the celebrity experiments: not that a star dabbles in AI, but that an endless supply of cheap, passable songs slowly erodes what their own work is worth.

AI music has gone from novelty to the charts in barely two years, championed by established names and loathed by a loud share of the audience, with the money, the law and the culture all still unsettled. The Auto-Tune comparison may yet prove apt. It is worth remembering, though, that Auto-Tune did not train itself on other singers without asking first.

Story by

Ana-Maria Stanciuc

Editor-in-Chief

I am the Editor in Chief for TNW, covering technology not as a parade of launches and valuations, but as a system of influence, persuasion, (show all)

I am the Editor in Chief for TNW, covering technology not as a parade of launches and valuations, but as a system of influence, persuasion, and change. I write about startups, venture capital, digital policy, and Europe ecosystem, with an eye on the larger story beneath them: who gets to build the future, who profits from it, and how Europe is learning to speak in a louder voice of its own. Before moving into senior editorial leadership, I've built my career for over +10 years across journalism, storytelling, content strategy, SEO, and digital publishing, with experience in SaaS, hospitality, art, and culture.

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Story by<br>Ana-Maria...