A sign of the times: Xania Monet has become the first AI ‘artist’ to reach the US Billboard charts.
Several of them, in fact as, aside from the main Billboard Hot 100 (the main chart), there are a small legion of genre and specialist Billboard charts. Monet debuted on the Adult R&B Airplay chart last week and has already topped the R&B Digital Song Sales and on Emerging Artists, with How Was I Supposed To Know.
Of course, there may already have been some AI or AI-assisted artists on the various Billboard charts. It’s increasingly difficult to tell.
Monet hit the headlines back in September when ‘they’ signed to Hallwood Media in a multi-million dollar deal. Well, the person who actually signed her name on the dotted line was Telisha ‘Nikki’ Jones, a Mississippi poet who sets her poems to AI-generated music that has clearly been trained on ’90s R&B.
As you can tell, it’s all very tasteful, sounds exquisitely-crafted and is clearly in a different league from the cheap AI ‘slop’ that’s increasingly clogging up platforms like Spotify.
So far, Monet has racked up over 44 million streams in the US in the past few months and earned $52,000 for its creator.
It will be interesting to see how the Monet project develops from here. Modern pop, after all, depends on a degree of engagement with fans. But Monet will not be able to share photos of ‘herself’ on Instagram, will never react to world news on Twitter/X and, unless Hallwood is able to cook up something truly extraordinary and groundbreaking, there will be no Monet live shows. So far, all we have are the songs – neatly-appointed ersatz R&B – and Monet’s blemish-free simulacrum, a Mona Lisa for the AI age.
That may be enough for many punters, as the Billboard charts show. But whether it can sustain a career for Monet/Jones over a number of years, or even decades, is more doubtful. Guess we’re about to find out…