A.I. Music Is Taking Over The Charts
Who Is Breaking Rust? And What Happens When a Song That Isn’t Human Tops the Charts?
The No. 1 country song in America this week isn’t sung by a man at all, it’s A.I. music.
Not a gravel-voiced cowboy, not a Nashville newcomer, not a late-night studio discovery.
It’s an AI.
“Walk My Walk,” the track currently sitting at the top of Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, was “performed” by an artist known as Breaking Rust — a persona built from code, not a childhood of dusty backroads or heartbreak ballads. The voice sounds convincingly rough, the attitude gritty, the lyrics written from the perspective of a hard-edged man who “ain’t selling my soul for a seat at your table.”
Except there is no man. There is no soul. There is only a creator named Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, prompting an AI engine to build a country singer from scratch.
And listeners? They don’t seem to mind — or maybe they don’t know.
A Hit Made of Ones and Zeroes
“Walk My Walk” isn’t just a novelty. It’s charting everywhere.
- No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales
- Top 10 on the iTunes overall chart
- Breaking Rust’s EP Resilient sitting in the iTunes albums top 10
- Over 2.3 million monthly listeners on Spotify
- More than 3.6 million streams for the song alone
All from an artist who does not exist.
Taylor — a relatively anonymous figure online — is also behind the AI-generated country act Defbeatsai, known for songs that lean intentionally absurd, even raunchy. Yet both AI artists are marked as “verified” on Spotify, even as the platform claims it has removed over 75 million spam tracks and tightened AI transparency rules.
Reality, fiction, authenticity — the lines are blurring faster than the music can play.
This Isn’t an Outlier Anymore
Breaking Rust isn’t even the only AI name climbing the charts.
Xania Monet, another AI singer, recently became the first known artificial vocalist to land on a Billboard radio airplay chart. Her creator, Telisha Nikki Jones, writes the lyrics herself and feeds descriptive prompts — “female voice,” “soulful,” “slow tempo,” “light guitar” — into the AI program Suno.
To Jones, Monet feels real. “She’s an extension of me,” she says.
Gayle King pushed back in their interview: But you can’t sing. Isn’t this a shortcut?
And maybe that’s the real cultural tension: what happens when the technology advances faster than our definitions of talent, creativity, or even personhood?
The Era of Synthetic Stardom
We are now living in a moment where a song can top the country charts without a human throat ever opening. A persona can build millions of monthly listeners without a body, without a past, without breath.
It raises the uncomfortable question:
If the performance moves us, do we care if the performer isn’t real?
Today it’s a country singer. Tomorrow?
Maybe an AI poet will win a literary prize.
Maybe a digital filmmaker will debut a Sundance favorite.
Maybe virtual artists will outnumber human ones on streaming platforms.
Maybe the next global superstar will never age, never tour, never exist outside of a server room.
Or maybe — in the sea of fabricated perfection — human imperfection will become the new luxury. A trembling voice. A cracked note. A real story behind the song.
Whatever comes next, we’ve crossed a line:
we’re consuming art made by systems that don’t feel, for audiences who do.
And that is the cultural moment we now find ourselves in — one chart-topping country song at a time.
For more on tech in our day and age check out this post.