Today, Explained - AI music is here 

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

Most of us don't even realize it, but we're increasingly hearing AI music in the wild. This episode was producer by Danielle Hewitt, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Bridger Dunnagan, and hosted by Noel King. Photo by Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We are charged. AI music is everywhere. It's slopping around your algorithm and your platforms. One of them, Dezer, says 50,000 AI-generated tracks are being uploaded every day. Spotify is declining to comment, LOL. AI music is also charting, breaking rusts, walk-my-walk, top Spotify's viral 50 songs in the U.S. Zanaya Monet debuted on the Billboard charts. And yet, many people cannot tell us.

the difference between AI music and music music. And if, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, that makes you want to die, son, do we have a show for you? Coming up on today, explained, should music lovers take AI music seriously? Every year, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world flock to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. And they spend a week trying to sell each other on the weirdest gadgets you've ever seen in your entire life. This week on the Vergecast, we're talking all about everything happening at CES, from the TVs to the AI gadgets, to the humanoid robots that everybody is hoping might someday do your laundry and wash your dishes. All that and much more on the Vergecast wherever you get podcasts.

Ian Kreitzberg is the AI correspondent for Puck. He writes a newsletter called Hidden Layer. And this year, like many of us, Ian encountered Velvet Sundown. So Velvet Sundown, they're a band that I guess they got really popular. I say they're a band. They're an AI music project. Okay. is perhaps more accurate.

They got popular a few months ago around the summertime, and they do a kind of iteration of sort of 1970s-inspired classic rock that if you're a fan of 1970s classic rock sounds pretty derivative, and they had a bunch of tracks exploded in popularity. Their number one song is called Dust on the Wind. Reminiscence on the ground. Smoke in the sky and no peace found. Reminiscent?

A little? Of a little something from who was it, Kansas? Yes. The way Spotify works, right? A lot of music discoveries through Spotify's playlist. and so they got music in the playlists. And they were one of these examples, as I was mentioning earlier, right? When there's no labels about this, they weren't talking about it.

They were kind of gradually found out by people and listeners who slowly put it together. There were a couple of red flags. For instance, they released a lot of albums out of nowhere and in very quick succession. In the span of a couple weeks, three or four records out, which is a pace that, raises eyebrows. And so people started putting it together and eventually they said, you know, hey, we are an AI music project. They got a lot of press. A lot of people were checking them out. And so they were an interesting example of, you know, the idea that you can kind of dupe people into listening to fully AI generated music. And it's not immediately apparent that this was not

produced by people. We've spoken to people for this show who really love music, and some of them, you're not going to be shocked to hear this. Some of them are really kind of appalled by the idea that people are listening to AI-generated music. It has no heart, it has no soul, there's no real connection between the quote-unquote artist and the listener because there is no real artist. It's artificial intelligence. But here's what I wonder. Your average listener is a person who is not a super music nerd. Your average listener is a person who's on a platform and stuff maybe is getting fed to them and they're like, oh, I like this, I don't like this. What has your reporting told you about how the average listener thinks about AI music? My answer is not one that will make those music nerds,

which I would include myself as one of them, very, very happy. I think the reality is that a lot of people just don't care. When, you know, in the earlier days, this AI music didn't sound good. It didn't sound right, it was difficult to produce full tracks that were convincing. When you surpass that point and on a casual listen, it sounds like a normal, you know, track, people don't care. The fascinating thing, though, is that when it's labeled as being AI generated, people do tend to care. Oh. Right? That was my reaction as well. So what? So they avoid it? They don't click on it? What do they do? So they've done studies of art, so they'll show images, right, where if you label an image as being AI generated, people tend not to like it as much as they like an image that is labeled as being created by a person.

If we talk about the major players in the AI music space, what I'm coming to learn is we are not talking about individual people making music and then generating it through AI. We're talking about platforms that let you make music using AI. Who are the major players in this space? There's really two major platforms here. It's Suno and UDio, and they both do essentially the same thing, which is exactly what you just said, platforms that allow you to generate music through text prompts. Okay, so I would write in.

I want a stirring early morning gospel song in the style, of rise and shine and give God the glory. And then it makes me one, just like that. You would get a stirring gospel song, yeah. Wow, okay. So let's talk about the reaction from major record labels. They see this thing on the horizon. I assume they know it is likely training on their artists,

and they do what exactly? Well, they did a couple things. And we're talking at an interesting time when we can kind of look back and see the whole arc of the reaction. And so the first thing they did was they sued. A legal firestorm, it's brewing today over this major clash between record companies and AI Music Services, the Recording Industry Association of America filing copyrighted infringement lawsuits today against two separate companies.

The RIA announced that major record labels are suing two of the leading AI music companies, alleging massive copyright infringement and is maybe trying to shut them down. Universal and Warner, they filed lawsuits for copyright infringement. These lawsuits were focused on two factors. The first is the inputs and the second is the outputs. And this is where the kind of idea of fair use comes in. And so in that first, the inputs factor, right, the loose argument was basically something along the lines of,

you illegally took my music, my content, my data, and you used it to create. create this model that you're generating revenue from. You didn't ask me if you could do that. You didn't pay me for it. And so we're suing you. Then there was the output side, which is, okay, regardless of the legality of what you did in training the models,

your model produces music that is often, and they cited specific cases, quite literally identical copies of music in our catalogs. That was a more convincing argument. but both of these suits were settled recently. And now you have partnerships, Universal partnered with Udio, and Warner partnered with Suno,

and Universal announced a partnership with NVIDIA to, you know, quote, transform music experience, unquote, for their fans with NVIDIA's AI. And so you see this shift where they kind of seemingly used their litigation, and these are like major companies, right, UMG and Warner, to involve themselves in these companies that were certainly, it's not hard to perceive them as threats if you're a

record label as a means of what seems to me to be, you know, hedging their business in the future. Okay, so I'm thinking about this from the perspective of the record label. I want to make money off of music and I'm aware that AI is out there and I have to live with it. So I'm starting to get used to it. But I also know, based on what you told me, that people don't like knowing that they're listening to AI music. They feel like there's something uncool about it. So if I'm a record label and I say, I want to put out AI music because I see it as a, you know, as the future, how do I sell that to people? A, they don't know. What the hedge is essentially looking like from where I sit is there's a non-zero chance that, in some manner, AI becomes the primary way in which people consume music-related content, or just all content. And if that does happen, these companies want to make sure that they're involved in that,

that they have partnerships with these companies, or that they have equity in these companies, right, that their business isn't crippled if the way people consume content changes dramatically and we never go back, right? Now, I don't know that that would happen. And the idea of, you know, can UMG sell an AI artist, for example? Can they sell straight up AI generated tracks? That would be a hard sell. There's a lot of artists on these labels that are not a fan of what's happening here.

These labels don't want to piss off their major artists because that's their current business model. And making sure you have the fandom of Taylor Swift is important to not, you know, push away. I think that kind of idea of how can we allow users or consumers, people and audience to remix something they already like, to live in it in a different way, to somehow customize it to them. I think that's what the record labels are looking at as a potential way to not alienate their current artists and not alienate and destroy their current business as, you know, a record label of people, while opening themselves up to additional opportunity in that kind of new experience, whatever that music experience looks like, while

hedging themselves, you know, in case that new experience becomes the only experience or the only major experience. That was Ian Kreitzberg of Puck, he reports on AI. Coming up, a tale as old as time. A dude experiments on himself. Support for the show comes from Quince. New Year, New You, sounds unrealistic. Why not start with New Year, New Wardrobe, instead?

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told to the explain. Noel King here with Deney Bischard. He's the senior tech reporter at Scientific American. I reached Deney a few weeks into an experiment that he's been running, in which he is only listening to AI music that he generates himself.

Why? Because he's Deney. What? The reason I did it was because I wrote an article about AI generated music. And in the article, I was trying to decide, can AI music really appeal to us? Can it be important to us?

Can it be something that is part of our lives? And I went back and looked for a song that had always been there. I had been there for a long time, which is for What It's Worth, by Buffalo Springfield. For What It's Worth is a protest song written in 1966 in response to the sunset strip curfew riots in Los Angeles. It starts when you're always afraid. Step out of line, the man come and take you away.

And it's a song I learned to play on the guitar from my stepfather when I was a teenager. And I tried to have Suno create a protest song for me to see how I would react to it, if I would have a similar emotional resonance or whatnot. I asked for a song that was folk. warm, had male lead vocals with earnest tone, steady mid-tempo groove, acoustic, and had a vintage texture with a subtle tape hiss. Shadows fall heavy on the streets tonight. And it took that and developed that and something that was quite different from what I had

actually asked for, but that still had the feeling of that time, still had lyrics that had a bit of a protest song quality. If I had heard that song, song in a coffee shop or a restaurant, I wouldn't have known it was AI. It was very well made. But what I realized was there was just no story for me. There was no attachment to that song. I found that there just wasn't that level of human connection to the AI song. And my conclusion was kind of, well, you know, this music doesn't have a story with which we connect. And then after I published that, I thought, hmm, well, maybe it's just because I haven't given it a chance.

Maybe I haven't really explored this question fully. So I thought I'm going to take a month and just listen to AI music and nothing else. And I will come up with a prompt and I'll plug it in. And each prompt makes two songs. And I'll try to be as creative as possible. And I'll usually plug it in two or three times and vary it. Add different kinds of instruments with it or different kind of vocals with it and just plug a bunch of those in. For example, I asked at one point to make a song that was a mix of rap and bluegrass.

and I made a song called My Existence. And I listened to that one a few times kind of intrigued by how it made that. One that made me laugh was a song called Organ Trafficking. I'd asked for a contemporary rap song with female vocals, playful, ironic lyrics. And it came to up with this song where organ trafficking is kind of the central metaphor.

I was a problem. He keep calling about his missing organ. I ain't got it. I just sold it to the highest bidder in a private auction. How you show up to a chess game when you ain't got no options? Everything we do is... I was thinking, okay, I didn't really expect AI to do that. But then, you know, there are also, like, moments in the evening when I kind of wind down,

and I will... I'll look at the prompts and I'll think, okay, give me a song with literary lyrics, playful metaphors, soft female vocals, and acoustic. guitar and then it will give me something like shadows of the sun. But it tore right through and drank me up. I'm chasing shadows of the sun running in circles till I come undone. I'm a flame that drowns and a wave that burns every wrong turn teaches the heart.

And I have also done to play the things where I've asked it for Bossa Nova and to mix it rap and gave me a song in Portuguese called Entre, Seo O Fogo. I think one of the things I've realized is that a lot of the music I listen to that is mainstream, that is, I would consider kind of heavily processed music, a music that's designed to have a large market, it doesn't feel very personal to me anyway. So I realized that in that particular context, it didn't feel very different a lot of the time. Do you think if someone had handed you a playlist and 10 songs, five or AI, five or not, do you think you'd be able to tell the difference?

No, I don't think so. Wow. And what does that tell you? I mean, it tells me that the AI is getting very good. It is certainly telling me that. One thing I noticed during this process was that a lot of the AI music that is popular, that people are listening to on Spotify, that has millions of listeners, it often is creating songs that are very soulful, very gritty.

You know, it's like Zania Monet or Solomon Ray or Kane Walkers, don't tread on me. Kane Walker's not a person. It's an AI avatar, right? Or breaking rests, living on borrowed time. Those songs are proof I'm alive. We're all just on borrow time. Those songs all feel just really authentic. You know, if I were to sit down in a bar somewhere

and someone picked up a guitar and sat, I would expect some gritty local musician to get up and sit on the stool and sing one of those songs and think, yeah, this is really authentic. This person really suffered through these things and felt these things. That's how they come across. And I think that AI tends to work best,

when it just leans into that authenticity because it kind of helps overcome the cognitive dissonance that we're thinking this isn't really a deeply felt song. And it moves away from mainstream human-generated music, human-made music,

which is often very heavily designed to be a summer hit or to go viral in some way. And it often doesn't have that level of authenticity, that feel of, authenticity, and I think when AI replicates that, we're more aware of it being superficial or artificial, because there's already an element of artificiality there.

Do you think when your experiment is done, you're going to keep making AI music? I think I probably will. Oh, my God. You love the power. I think, you know, what has surprised me with it is, now I'll be walking somewhere and I'll think, what if I would ask it to combine these styles? put a banjo with a hip hop track and add this kind of vocals. What would I get?

I would say now I'm at the point where I don't worry about the connection to the human. Like I did in the beginning. In the beginning, I was really like, who's this person? You know when you're reading a book and you're halfway through the book and you think, what human mind did this book come out of? And you turn the book over and you look to see who the author was and you Google them. And you're like, how in the world do they think of this, right? And I just had that impulse so often in the beginning to want to know,

you know, who felt this, who thought this? I just would have cognitive dissonance where I'd be going, this is a machine. This machine did not fall in love. This machine did not suffer these experiences. This machine did not wake up at 2 in the morning and write this song, you know, just needing to express itself. It was actually really bothering me. It was kind of a block me from being able to enjoy the song.

And I thought, well, if somebody created an AI avatar and gave it a personality, and it were a fictional character that existed in, you know, the Metaverse, and that AI avatar was a songmaker, and it was singing this song, would that make it easier? And weirdly it would. It would make it a little easier. Does doing this experiment and seeing how you're reacting to this music, does this change how you think about AI at all? I think my conclusion from this is that in 10 or 15 or 20 years, there are going to be a lot of teenagers who look at the discussions we're having right now and go, what are these people talking about?

This is totally normal. Why would anybody feel so conflicted about this? I think we're going to adapt to it pretty quickly. That is my gut feeling. You know, there are a lot of big questions around the creators and protecting artists and what it means to be an artist. There are a lot of questions that are going to come out of this, and I really hope that artists are as protected as possible

and remunerated properly. But I think this is going to fit into our lives a lot more smoothly than I think we're realizing at the moment. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewit. It was edited by Miranda Kennedy. Fact-checked by Andrea Lopez-Cruzado and engineered by Patrick Boyd and Bridger Dunnigan. Done again.

The bar team includes Haiti-Mau and Dave Miles Bryan, Peter Balloon and Rosen, Patrick Boyd, Kelly Wessinger, Ariana as Spuru, David Detachshaw, Dustin DeSoto, Asthen, and Sean Remains where, um, our supervising team includes Avichi Artsy, Amina Al-Sadi, and Jolie Myers. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. New Day. Credits there by Suno, and you can read Deney Bichard's forthcoming piece about his experiment in Scientific Americans soon.

Personal question while we're here, did you, by any chance, sign a pre-up when you got married? If so, can I talk to you about why? Call me at 844453-44-48. And leave me a message. I want to make you famous. I'm kidding. But I might, in fact, want to put you on Today Explained. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC, and the show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

For more award-winning podcast, you can visit podcasts. dot voxmedia.com. Listen, sans ads by signing up at vox.com slash members. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.