• puppinstuff@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      C’mon, be fair. Country writers are toiling in their Victorian libraries to come up with such literary marvels as rhyming “suds” and “buds.”

      There are only so many words in the English language to describe one’s ideal pickup truck going down a long dirt road.

  • MimicJar@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I think it’s worth clarifying that it’s #1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales. That’s a specific category.

    According to https://tasteofcountry.com/breaking-rust-explained-ai-country-song in order to reach number one would only take ~3,000 purchases.

    That’s a shockingly low number, so if anyone can confirm that or has better numbers, I’d love to know.

    But last time I brought a digital song, they cost $1. So for a couple thousand dollars any song could be number one in this category.

    If I were an AI company swimming in money, that’s a drop in the bucket for some free publicity.

    • tal@lemmy.todayOP
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      4 months ago

      The Billboard chart in question is behind a paywall.

      Someone on a Reddit discussion on the same song pointed out that it could be bypassed with:

      https://open.bolha.tools/ and plugging in the Billboard URL https://www.billboard.com/charts/country-digital-song-sales/

      That being said, while I can see the chart, I don’t see any numbers, so I’m assuming that they must be coming from somewhere else, though I don’t have any reason to doubt them; it sounds like tasteofcountry.com is reputable.

      That article does point out that there are a substantial number of Spotify users listening to the song, though if I remember, there was some past discussion about how various people had tried trying to game Spotify’s recommendation system to try to get more people listening to their songs, so maybe someone could just be leveraging that hard?

      kagis

      https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/05/spotify-hit-with-class-action-lawsuit-alleging-discovery-mode-is-a-pay-for-play-scheme/

      I’m not sure if this is what I’m remembering. I wasn’t super-interested at the time, but I thought that it was talking about how some artists had been gaming the system to be more-frequently-recommended, whereas this is talking about Spotify apparently taking money to increase recommendations.

      EDIT: I can’t find any news story that seems to fit what I thought I remember reading. I do see a LinkedIn page talking about tactics to attack Spotify’s recommendation algorithm:

      https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/advanced-techniques-legally-hacking-spotifys-algorithm-nicolas-rabaud-eawve

      So I imagine that there are probably people out there working hard to game it, though I suppose that that’s probably something of a given.

      • MimicJar@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        The little info (i) box on Billboards website actually cites their data, “The week’s most popular downloaded songs, ranked by sales data as compiled by Luminate.” Which I assume refers to luminatedata.com

        Sadly their data (the numbers specifically) aren’t publicly available.

    • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Country music lovers should feel stupid by letting this become a hit. I mean is AI going play the Grand Ole Opry?

      • tal@lemmy.todayOP
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        4 months ago

        is AI going play the Grand Ole Opry?

        Virtual bands playing human-composed and -recorded music predate present music from generative AI, and they’ve done performances.

        I imagine at some point, probably someone will pair virtual bands with AI-generated music, and do performances of it, if they haven’t already.

      • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        This is exactly it.

        The lyrics are basically just the “I’m a piece of shit and won’t change” genre, and apparently that resonates with a lot of people somehow.

        The only time I’ve had an enemy in my life I was 6 years old, I don’t get these songs man.

        side note: I’m heterosexual but I did not know that Bo Burnham is low key fuckable.

  • HailSeitan@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    But it’s not copyrighted if it’s AI-generated, right? Or are there human co-writers and/or performers?