[mjr00]

> The more appropriate question is why they published a AI artist at all.

Because they allow anyone to upload to Spotify. There's nothing stopping me, you, or anyone from generating AI tracks with Suno & friends, downloading them, and using a service like LANDR or Amuse to distribute them to Spotify, all for free.

> Like Spotify owns distribution, their largest investor Tencent Music Entertainment Group publishes AI-generated music = almost infinite profit.

This assumes that real people are listening to AI-generated music which does not seem to be the case. According to Deezer, 85% of streams on AI-generated music are fraudulent.[0] It's largely a vanity ouroboros where someone with more money than sense generates a song, pays bots to get fraudulent streams, and uses those streams to generate vanity metrics. Consumers are by and large not listening to AI generated music.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/20/deezer-says-44-of-songs-up...

[twoodfin]

hn consumers by and large weren’t upvoting AI-written technology articles 12 months ago. The models got better, and now multiple such articles appear on the front page daily—with glowing comments.

Humanity’s aesthetics are not (apparently) all that sophisticated on average.

[andersonpico]

HN is the most concentrated accelerationist audience in the whole world and its very particular type of crowd. I don't think this translates at all to general public (well, maybe I would agree with you that the aesthetic sense of people on here is really less sophisticated than average).

[twoodfin]

My point is that most of these “vibe articles” are pretty bad. They’re muddled in their ideas and full of gaps in logic or fact.

But the aesthetics are tuned enough to get upvotes from this same audience that thinks AI music is going nowhere.

[_kulang]

It’s also hard to develop taste in an environment flooded with content. I am not sure how much of that is AI writing getting better, and how much of that is just a lack of taste from the newest members

[ciupicri]

Could you give some examples of such articles?

[twoodfin]

Here’s a sample of my “flagged” list from just the past few days:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47972367

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952807

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47949585

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913650

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911524

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897140

[cryzinger]

Not the person you're replying to, but here's one that was at the top of the homepage this morning (and that I immediately clicked out of because it had that AI stink). I would bet my next paycheck that this was heavily edited by an LLM, if not outright written by one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47973376

[card_zero]

OK, but to qualify it also needs glowing comments about the writing, not just interaction with the concept (or title) of the article. Only one person did that ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47973724

... then got contradicted and downvoted.

[twoodfin]

Gotta go back two weeks, but this is the kind of comment I had in mind:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47808139

[cryzinger]

Fair, lol. I will admit I didn't read the comments :P

[overfeed]

> This assumes that real people are listening to AI-generated music which does not seem to be the case.

Spotify will still profit from fraudulent streams at the expense of advertisers.

[trelbutate]

Who will then stop advertising on there real quickly once they find out what's going on

[overfeed]

That's a long-term challenge for the next CEO to figure out.

Unlike CTC or CTC, radio and streaming ad campaigns are notoriously hard to track and attribute, and hence trend to brand-awareness. Advertisers won't see the effect of rising fraudulent streams immediately.

[shimman]

Don't stop Facebook from completely making up video numbers. Seems like it's a good way to rug pull a bunch of workers and force them to accept lower rates.

[mathgladiator]

I basically only listen to AI music now...

https://www.youtube.com/@EndlessTaverns

[hacker161]

You couldn’t waterboard this sort of confession out of me. Imagine proclaiming publicly that you have zero-taste and only consume AI slop

[layman51]

I think it can sort of make sense for some people who sort of listen to music as a background noise. But for me, when I am listening to a new song, I get curious about who the artist(s) is/are. Do they sound better in a live performance? What other music or artists inspired them? What other artists sound like them?

I don’t think it would be easy for a “AI” artist to not be suspicious to me unless they were like some kind of character that is made up by a record label or another artist.

[pixel_popping]

I'm the opposite (I know, it's probably bad) but I often do everything I can to not know who's behind because I often try to dream and make my own mind about a specific song/artist, and of course my wife then suddenly show me who the person is and then the whole perception of the artist changes and sometimes ruin it for me.

I listen to music from night to morning (practically non-stop actually) and probably 100+ different artists within a day, I'm not genuinely interested in them, I'm just interested in their work.

[hacker161]

> I think it can sort of make sense for some people who sort of listen to music as a background noise

This is a whole genre of music in of itself that real people created which AIs were trained on stolen copies of to produce slop that doesn’t have to compensate the origins.

So it only makes sense in that case if you think slop derived from real art is awesome and that actual human beings can get fucked.

[mathgladiator]

I've also waterboarded myself... it was... awful

[parineum]

> It's largely a vanity ouroboros where someone with more money than sense generates a song, pays bots to get fraudulent streams, and uses those streams to generate vanity metrics.

It's actually money laundering. I generate ai music and then pay hackers illicit money to listen thousands of times and then I get clean money from Spotify.

[stuaxo]

Spotify themselves generate AI music, they prefer that to paying artists.

[techno303]

6 tracks have made the Billboard charts. That's a pretty definitive signal that people are listening to AI music.

Where to draw the line on what is/isn't AI is a rabbit hole in and of itself. You'd have a hard time convincing me that people aren't using AI to build the most powerful DSP plugins. I've been very pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to make very music-useful tools with Faust and Codex.

https://www.billboard.com/lists/ai-artists-on-billboard-char...

[mjr00]

You'll notice in the article they mention that these AI artists got into the charts thanks to 1,000 downloads sold. 1,000 is a comically easy number to game; that's US$1,000, tops, and far less if you pay for false downloads from SEA and such where prices are lower.

As a concrete example of how gamed these are, look at one of the examples from the article, Enlly Blue[0]. The video for the song mentioned in the article, Through My Soul, has 10 million views. All four of her (its?) most recent videos over the past 1 month: 2.2k views, 3.3k views, 2.1k views, 2.1k views. The views stop coming when the creator stops spending.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@EnllyBlueOfficial/videos

[xingped]

One of the problems is that it's hard to tell at first that it's AI music. Probably still hard to figure it out by ear after you've been told. But I think not nearly as many people would choose to listen to AI songs if they knew they were AI.

There's a reason it can succeed as it is now. Making music that is catchy to our ears is fairly formulaic. It's easy fot AI to do the same. But if they start labeling which music is AI and which isn't, it probably won't succeed as well.

I was pretty pissed and considered canceling my Spotify Premium after the first time I'd realized I'd been duped by AI songs. I just report them any time I see them now. If they gave me a settings option to block all AI music I'd be fine.

[roenxi]

I'm put in mind of the Merchandise Marks Act 1887 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany#History - which ultimately did the opposite of what it was expected to do. There is a real chance here that people just want to listen to something that sounds nice and aren't that fussed about whether a human is involved.

Besides, people seem to go in pretty strongly with computers to tune the sound already. It wouldn't be that shocking if people were already listening to works that can only be made with the aid of a computer.

[upmind]

why does it matter to you if it's AI or not? if you enjoy a song you shouldn't resent it just because it's AI generated. Me personally there's many AI songs that I like and enjoy listening to.

[xingped]

Because I care about art being a human endeavor. AI doesn't create art, it regurgitates an unidentifiable goop churned together in its stomach by all the crap its eaten. There is no thought. There is no feeling. There is no meaning. If you only care about the sound, that's cool, enjoy it, but I don't.

[arcfour]

It is debatable what thoughts and feelings went into the music of Wesley Willis, of "Whip The Llama's Ass" fame, despite him being human.

[scragz]

rock over london rock on chicago! pontiac we build driving excitement

[hexasquid]

When a human makes a I IV V it's art

When a machine does it, soulless

[srveale]

How many tracks didn't make it to the Billboard charts?

[vanjajaja1]

we're measuring if people are listening to AI music, not what percentage of AI music is slop

[Kye]

LANDR and Amuse dropped their free options.

[uncircle]

> Consumers are by and large not listening to AI generated music

Consumers are sadly too ignorant to tell. YouTube is brimming with AI music slop and people praising it in the comments because they are unable to tell the difference (and it is actually pretty easy once you know what to look out for)

[neonstatic]

Realistically speaking, why is that a problem? What is the point of music if not enjoyment? If these people enjoy it, what's wrong with it?

[lifeformed]

It takes away from real human artists who do their part to slowly advance human culture. Music will not develop without human artists. Maybe for this moment in time AI can fulfill some people's musical desires, but it's not going to keep up with the times. The point of art, in a general sense, is humanity. Automating away your artistic needs is like automating away your social needs. It's a one way "relationship" that is superficial and self-indulgent. It's a step towards an empty world.

[pixel_popping]

Why would music not develop without human artists? This isn't true at all, "AI" isn't necessary LLM as well, there is plenty of ways for AI to innovate, and let's be real, most musics from humans are a bit of copy-cat nowadays, ton of AI music actually made me vibe personally and stuff I haven't heard before.

Have you tried a day of listening solely to AI music? I feel you might change your mind, sure sometimes there is some serious off-tune (feels like an hallucination from the model) but we know this is temporary.

PS: I'm conscious of what it does to humanity, but there is also facts that AI does produce great songs, that's 2 different discussions.

[neonstatic]

That's the creator's perspective. From a listener's perspective, it's "do I enjoy it" or "do I not enjoy it". Everything else is intellectualization.

[card_zero]

But that means nothing. There's no raw "enjoy", except maybe drugs, and I have my doubts about that.

[neonstatic]

> There's no raw "enjoy"

What do you mean?

[Ferret7446]

Painters said the same thing about cameras

[Zopieux]

And turns out there is still room to enjoy both photography and paintings as their own art forms.

[RiverCrochet]

You hear a song with vocals that strongly emotionally resonate with you, reminding you of your mother who passed away recently after a long terrible illness. You want to know more about the singer that almost brought you to tears, only to find there is none and that the song was AI generated.

[slyall]

But if you did the exercise 10 years ago you'd find the lyrics were originally about the songwriter's daughter and the band tweaked it to be able the the band manager's hypochondriac ex boyfriend.

Then they hired a session singer to sing it and mixed in several takes and then adjusted the sound with various tools to produce just the right sound. Plus the Chorus was actually from some country song from 1972 that had been completely changed

and the actual "band" is actually just two guys who hire session players to do most of the music while they handle the keyboard and mixing

[userbinator]

Behind every AI-generated song is a human who wanted you to listen to its message.

[neonstatic]

So it does something good for you, then you decide to put a label on it due to how it was made. You are letting your mind overwrite a genuine response you had based on an opinion that "it should not feel good because it's AI made". As I said in another comment - intelectualization.

[Dylan16807]

> you decide to put a label on it due to how it was made

That is not what they said. This reads like you're replying to a previous post and ignoring the actual explanation they gave.

[neonstatic]

It's my interpretation of "only to find there is none and that the song was AI generated" in this context

[card_zero]

It does something good for you emotionally, via cognition. Further cognition ruins this. Never meet your heroes, sort of thing.

[RiverCrochet]

Realistically speaking, why is that a problem? What is the point of money if not enjoyment? If these people enjoy it, what's wrong with it?

Mark finds $100,000 (something good for Mark), then finds out it's the inheritance of a family who's about to get kicked out of their house (label due to how it was made). Mark decides he should not keep the money because it belongs to the family (intellectualizing).

You're saying Mark should have kept the money because doing otherwise is intellectualizing.

[Lammy]

How can you trust that the commenters aren't AI too?

[agmater]

Could you elaborate? I can't tell with music and voice

[uncircle]

You won't tell from the music. It's obviously an AI generated mix when:

- the channel posts multiple mixes per week

- the thumbnail is clearly AI generated

- most importantly, the tracklist never includes any author, because there are none

If you search for "<genre> mix" on YouTube right now, 9/10 results fail these criteria.

[julianlam]

Lo-fi channels used to show the artist and song names. These newer ones don't bother with credits, or have made up song titles.

E.g. "funky chicken jam"

[threepts]

If AI music sells like you proclaim, it would be bad for spotify to NOT ban it, since it is printing money.

[petre]

It's like the MBS during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Today it prints money, tomorrow it blows up in your face.

Yeah they put a blue check on it like Elon did. Until they get paid to put the check on slop. Rotten fish is still rotten even if you mix it with fresh fish and label it accordingly.