As of October 2025, Suno and Udio are two text-to-music AI platforms that let users create full songs—including lyrics, vocals, and artwork—simply by entering text prompts. Some of this music is unappealing, even to its creators (protagonists?), but music scene insiders have assured me that some of the music emanating from these platforms is good enough to provoke a wistful, “I wish I had written that.”
AI music is also becoming more popular. A recent article in The Economist (of all places) recounts the viral success of “Country Girls Make Do,” a raunchy parody country song generated by artificial intelligence under the pseudonym Beats By AI. The song apparently features on TikTok where users prank the unsuspecting by playing it under false pretenses.
This is more than a one off. Acts such as Aventhis and The Velvet Sundown, also AI-based, have attracted hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify. These tools allow for rapid and prolific production: Beats By AI reportedly releases a new song every day. This is not simply a case of streaming fraud where AI slop steals music plays from real artists by adopting confusing names—Spotify recently removed 75 million such tracks, citing “bad actors” flooding the platform with low-quality content. Some people at least, like some AI music. The Economist reports a Luminate survey finding that, one-third of Americans accept AI-written instrumentals, nearly 30% are fine with AI lyrics, and over a quarter do not mind AI vocals.
No music stands alone, but AI music arguably even less so
The appeal of these tracks lies partly in their echos of established genres and tropes, with a dash of irony and experimentation thrown in. It’s to be seen whether this portends a consumer-driven revolution in content creation where listeners generate their own entertainment rather than relying on record labels.
What does this mean for copyright law?
Although the Copyright Office would not regard works of The Velvet Sundown or Beats By AI as copyrightable, Spotify seems happy to royalties for AI music, provided the works themselves (as opposed to the copying that fed the AI process that created the works) don’t infringe on other artists songs.
AI music may destabilize entrenched business models at the fringes, but it might also foster broader participation and new forms of cultural expression. Does AI pose the same threat to the economic and cultural standing of musicians as it does to stock photography and digital art? Or will AI-generated music remain a hybrid layer within popular culture that feeds off and refers back to mainstream music without replacing the central role of human creation? If so, perhaps at least some country girls will make do.