An AI music track titled Celebrate Me has topped the iTunes charts in five countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and New Zealand. The track’s success comes without the involvement of a traditional recording studio, signaling a shift in the music industry as virtual artists begin to compete with major-label stars.
AI Music: Virtual Singer IngaRose Goes Viral on TikTok
The song was released by an AI persona named IngaRose. The algorithm has proven to be an effective content creator as well as a singer, amassing more than 220,000 followers on TikTok.
The track went viral through social media algorithms, with users creating nearly 300,000 videos featuring the song and praising its “inspiring lyrics.” The project’s creators clarified that while the music and vocals were generated using the popular AI tool Suno, the lyrics were written by a human based on “real-life stories.” Currently, five different songs by IngaRose are positioned in the US iTunes Top 100 chart.
Major Labels Launch Legal Action Against AI Startups
As reported by Forbes, the success of artificial intelligence in the music charts coincides with a major legal crackdown. The music industry‘s largest record labels have recognized the technology as a threat and are pursuing litigation.
Suno is currently facing collective lawsuits from the world’s leading record labels. Corporations accuse the developers of training their neural networks on millions of copyrighted tracks without compensation, subsequently displacing rights holders from the top of the music charts.
Meta-Piracy: Kanye West and Laskoviy May
In another development, an AI-generated English cover of Yuri Shatunov’s “Silver Night” (Sedaya Noch) recently reached the top of the global Shazam chart. The track features a synthesized voice of Kanye West.
The cover was created by a user under the pseudonym August Septemberov. However, the commercial benefits were claimed by Andrey Razin, the former producer of the Soviet-era group Laskoviy May. According to the AI track’s creator, Razin downloaded the song and officially uploaded it to streaming platforms under the names Tender May and Bad Style. The original creator of the AI cover received no royalties or credit. The situation illustrates a complex cycle of appropriation: a producer took a track from a digital creator who had used a neural network to mimic the voice of an American rapper.
