VOL. I · NO. 8565THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 2026
The Daily Buffoon
CULTURE ✒ EDITORIAL ABSURDITY: 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

‘I feel like I’m at war’: are we losing the battle against machine-made music?

Filed 1w ago · Via The Guardian · The Buffoon Desk
THIS STORY IS SCORED
Mining by Moonlight
Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Fenix Flexin's single 'Rubberz' climbed to No. 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 and racked up over 35 million Spotify streams before he admitted to using the AI tool Treblo to make it, after months of denials and a public dispute with DJ-producer Medasin who demonstrated the track could be replicated with AI prompts. Treblo's own classifier rates the song 'very likely' AI-generated, according to its co-founder.

Days later, major labels including Universal, Sony and Warner proposed rules to disqualify AI-generated tracks from official charts unless they are properly authorized, lawful and substantially human-made. Those same labels have simultaneously struck partnerships with AI companies including Nvidia, Spotify, Stability AI and Suno to build music-generation tools.

AI acts have already broken chart barriers this year: Breaking Rust hit No. 1 on a country digital sales chart, and Xania Monet became the first AI act on a Billboard radio airplay chart before also reaching No. 1 on an R&B digital sales chart. A Deezer and Ipsos study found 97% of listeners couldn't distinguish AI-generated music from human-made tracks, and SZA has publicly accused AI generators of training on her songs without permission.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
The industry proposing chart rules against AI slop while cutting checks with the same AI companies is not a contradiction so much as a business model: get paid coming and going. Nobody involved seems especially bothered that listeners can't tell the difference, so long as the streams keep counting.
Source: Read the original at The Guardian → Scored: Mining by Moonlight · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0
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