“Panty dropping sexxxy,” one Instagram fan wrote under Breaking Rust’s new country hit “Walk My Walk”. There’s just one problem: though the song climbed to the top of Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart last week, there’s literally no one to drop panties to. The singer — a gravel-voiced cowboy who vaguely resembles Rip Wheeler from Yellowstone — isn’t a man at all but a synthetic being whose smoky baritone was born of generative AI.

Breaking Rust’s breakout track “Livin’ on Borrowed Time” has 4.5 million streams and lyrics straight from the Nashville cliché generator: “I don’t give a damn who don’t like me, this world spins fast and time ain’t free. Pour that whiskey, let it burn fine, laugh at the scars that prove I’m alive.” The irony writes itself — a machine bragging about feeling alive, programmed to sound human while singing the oldest cliché in country music: drink today, die tomorrow.

Indeed, this story should be ringing alarm bells about AI colonisation — not just of our jobs and decision-making but of art itself, the thing that’s supposed to express our very humanity. But this isn’t just a story about machines suddenly invading art or finally overcoming the uncanny valley; it’s the story of an industry that mechanised itself long before the robots arrived. Breaking Rust’s songs sound competent, polished, and utterly generic — just like much of what Nashville has been producing for the past decade.

In his revealing book, You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music, a former Spotify “data alchemist” describes how the sound of new music evolved to align with the economic logic of the 2010s. As streaming overtook radio, pop and country began bending to the invisible incentives of algorithmic distribution. Songs were reverse-engineered to fit the whims of Spotify and Apple Music: choruses front-loaded, intros shortened, hooks hit within seconds to avoid a “skip”. Tracks shrank to under three minutes, so each listen could be counted twice. Beats and melodies became looped and hypnotic, optimised for playlist inclusion and passive listening. The goal was less emotional payoff than engagement retention.

The modern recording studio soon came to resemble an assembly line. Teams of writers and producers operated like factory shifts, each specialising in a piece of the product: melody, top line, rhythm, vocal texture. Every song was tested, tweaked, and A/B-tested until it hit the metrics. The creative process became indistinguishable from data analytics. What had once been a messy collision of inspiration and accident now looked like a Fordist workflow diagram.

This was the first wave of music’s automation — the era when platform capitalism colonised the space of art. There’s a reason no one popular in the 2020s sounds remotely like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, or John Coltrane. Record labels, streaming platforms, and analytics dashboards together built a culture where the safest song was the best song, and the best song was the one that sounded most like the last hit. Have you listened to the soundtrack of a Netflix dating show lately? It’s so insipid it sounds as if generative AI dreamed it up — but it’s almost worse than that. It’s made by humans, operating under the influence of tech.

Seen in that light, Breaking Rust is less a technological revolution than an economic inevitability. AI didn’t crash the gates of the creative world; it simply removed the last unnecessary component: the human. Its competence is the final proof of how well the system already works without us. There’s something darkly comic about this development. For years, critics called certain kinds of overproduced pop and country hits “soulless”. Now, for the first time, that insult is literal.

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Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, based in Pennsylvania.

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