AI is finding chart success in Christian, gospel and country music

In the wake of the US Screen Actors Guild strike over AI protections and UK musicians’ silent album to protest proposed changes to copyright law, more than a dozen AI-produced tracks have emerged on the Billboard charts since 2022. While AI music has gone viral across social media platforms like TikTok through novelty covers that use AI to change songs from one genre to another, achieving chart presence introduces a level of industry and cultural legitimacy that aligns with longstanding markers of music industry success. What’s surprising, though, is where these tracks are succeeding. My research into YouTube discussions of AI music, explored in a chapter of a new book called Media Imaginaries, found a recurring view that AI was seen as acceptable in “generic” Top 40 pop because this music was already perceived as formulaic and lacking in human creativity. Yet Christian, gospel and country music are where AI-generated tracks have achieved some of their greatest chart successes. This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too. These songs are not created through AI technologies as tools in the collaborative production process; they are generated through text-to-music platforms such as Suno and Udio, where users input prompts to output complete musical tracks, including vocals and lyrics. Besides Xania Monet – currently the most successful AI gospel and R&B artist – the people behind these prompts often remain purposely unknown, with avatars taking on the role of creator. AI creation Xania Monet sings a ballad about the absence of fatherly love. How storytelling music succeeds The success of these AI artists is closely connected to what these genres ask music to do. Christian, gospel and country music often tell stories that connect listeners’ everyday experiences to shared beliefs and values, through expressions of faith, accounts of struggle, or ideas of family, community and belonging. The charting AI artists reproduce these familiar conventions. AI Christian artist Solomon Ray, for example, presents songs centred around worship, interpretations of the Bible and Christian theology. His persona is constructed around a familiar form of Christian masculinity that demonstrates vulnerability through yielding to a Godly presence. Similarly, AI country artists appearing in the charts draw on recognisable forms of rural masculinity, positioning a “lone wolf” ruggedness in natural and farmland environments, as seen in Walk My Walk by Breaking Rust. The human brains behind Xania Monet is Telisha “Nikki” Jones, who writes the lyrics and uses generative tools to create the singer’s voice and appearance. Jones describes Monet as “an extension of me”: the experiences expressed in the lyrics are her own, even though the performer is an AI creation. Monet’s image is aligned with industry expectations of beauty, showing how AI can be used to present personal stories through an idealised celebrity persona. These AI performers are not disrupting the conventions of their genres, which may be why audiences have been more willing to accept them. While much criticism of AI music focuses on the loss of human creativity, these genres have always placed significant emphasis on the message a song communicates and the community it creates. Find Your Rest by Solomon Ray. It’s the message, not the medium For much of popular music history, the singer has been central to how audiences understand and relate to songs. Lyrics take on meaning as listeners connect them to the perceived experiences of the person performing them. This helps explain why celebrity culture is so central to contemporary music: fans follow artists’ lives and develop a strong sense of personal connection, even without knowing them. Taylor Swift’s Swifties and the South Korean pop group BTS’s fans, known as Army, are prominent examples. These new AI artists disrupt this relationship between embodiment and authorship. Their identities exist primarily to deliver the music rather than to become celebrities in their own right. Virtual personas provide a visual identity, but the emotional connection comes from the song itself and the values and familiarity it represents. Without the messiness of human experience, these AI artists are less vulnerable to the controversies that affect human celebrities. They meet audience expectations and present a consistent version of the worldview they have been designed to represent. Currently, this is can be seen in music that offers traditional constructions of gender alongside particular cultural and religious values, such as Breaking Rust’s rugged cowboy masculinity and Solomon Ray’s Christian messages of devotion. AI-generated artists are finding success in genres where affirming listeners’ beliefs may matter more than who made the music or whether it offers something new. These first successful AI artists are not necessarily replacing the celebrity musician, but they are potentially changing the ideological role that musicians play. Walk My Walk by Breaking Rust. In my current research exploring YouTube comments on charting AI artist videos, I am finding that many listeners continue to describe AI-generated songs as emotionally meaningful even after discovering they are not human-made. What matters is not who made the music, but what it offers the listener for their own emotional wellbeing and enjoyment. Ultimately, does it matter if music is produced by AI if someone has an emotional connection to it? This does not make concerns around copyright or the environmental costs of generative AI any less important. The early success of AI-generated artists suggests that acceptance depends partly on what audiences want from music in the first place. Where listeners value a song because it reflects shared beliefs, provides emotional reassurance, or reinforces ideology, the identity of the creator becomes less important than the message. If audiences increasingly care less about who wrote a song than whether it expresses the values they want affirmed, then AI may be changing what we think musicians are for. These personas can deliver a consistent message without a personal life that might contradict or jeopardise it. But the absence of a human performer does not mean the absence of human choices. Someone still decides which stories are told, what the artist looks like, and whose values they represent. The question then not only becomes whether AI music can move us, but who gets to shape the beliefs and identities it invites us to share.