Nick Arter, a thirty-five-year-old from Washington, D.C., never managed to become a professional musician the old-fashioned way. He grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in a music-loving family. His father and stepfather were into nineties hip-hop—Jay-Z, Biggie, Nas—and his uncles were DJs spinning seventies R&B. As a teenager, he and his cousins recorded their own hip-hop tracks, first on cassette boom boxes, then on desktop computers, imitating Lil Romeo and Lil Bow Wow, popular child rappers of the time. Music remained Arter's hobby throughout his undergraduate years at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, he briefly tried to turn professional by selling mixtapes at local concerts before taking a job as a manager of a government call center in Harrisburg. This role eventually led to a position at Deloitte in DC, and Arter continued to rap on nights and weekends without releasing any music. “I was getting too old to be a rapper,” he recalled recently. Then, late last year, he began using artificial intelligence to create songs, and within months he had hits on streaming platforms that racked up hundreds of thousands of streams. Perhaps he did have a musical career after all.
Arter's success symbolizes the accelerating penetration of AI into the music industry. No area of culture or entertainment has been left untouched by artificial intelligence: Coca-Cola just released a Christmas advert created using artificial intelligence visuals; Actors with artificial intelligence are promoted Hollywood. But the technology had a particularly immediate impact on songwriting. A couple of years ago, several AI tracks went viral using tricks like replicating the voices of pop stars including Jay-Z and Drake. We are now in the midst of a full-blown artificial intelligence music moment. This month, an AI country song called “Walk My Walk” (with percussive clapping and unforgettable lyrics like “Kick rocks if you don't like the way I talk”) took the No. 1 spot. Billboard Country digital song sales chart and surpassed three million streams on Spotify; behind him is a square-jawed digital avatar named Breaking Rust. In September, Ksenia Monet, the AIR&B singer created by a young Mississippi poet, signed a multimillion-dollar record deal after several Billboard– singles charts. And earlier that year, enigmatic psychedelic band Velvet Sundown racked up a million streams on Spotify before its creators admitted the band was “synthetic.” Spotify does not label AI-generated content as such, and the company has said it is improving its AI filters without defining what qualifies as an AI song. Over the past year, the platform has removed more than seventy-five million “spam tracks” from its service, but countless AI tracks remain unflagged, and many listeners are unable to tell the difference. IN one recent studyParticipants were able to successfully distinguish artificial intelligence-produced music from human-produced music only fifty-three percent of the time.
If you hear an AI-generated track online, chances are it was created using one of two popular song-making apps: Suno or Udio. Arter's process involves both. He writes his own lyrics, often on his phone. He then compiles text prompts with the lyrics and notes for the intended track and plugs them into two apps to see which one produces better results. (Arter told me that “a good clue consists of (year), (genre of music), (instrumentation), (mood) and (emotion.”) So he generates dozens of versions of each track, repeating the melody and instrumentation until he's happy with the result. Finally, he uses Midjourney to create album art for each new single—usually close-up portraits of mainstream soul musicians—and uploads the songs to streaming services including YouTube and Spotify. One of his biggest hits, with almost nine hundred thousand streams on Spotify, is “I'm Letting Go of the Bullshit,” a pastiche of a rousing late-Seventies R.&B. song with hip-hop lyrical power: “I'm in my flow this year / Fuck everything that doesn't help me grow.” The apps allow Arter to save a panel of style shortcuts, making it easy to create future tracks in a similar vein. “The algorithm sort of studies your taste,” he explained. Arter's music, released under the name Nick Hustle, is by no means subtle (another track is “Stop Bitching”: “no one ever gets rich/acts like a little bitch”), and the instrumentals and vocals are undermined by the empty tin that is the hallmark of AI's sound. But the melodies—and some lyrical accents, such as the prominent expletive in “Dopest MotherFucker Alive”—are catchy enough to be memorable.
The technology has “opened up a new realm of creative possibilities,” Arter said. He was never an accomplished singer; now he could dabble in the old school R&B he grew up with. Suddenly he could create ageless characters representing his music, with fictional backstories, instead of his aging millennial self. Arter has produced nearly one hundred and forty songs in the last year alone, and he makes no secret of the fact that his music is made with the help of AI, although the name of his YouTube account may not be noticed by the unsuspecting listener: “AI for Culture.” Many of his songs serve as punchlines to everyday life: They're “about being stuck in traffic and Chipotle screwing up my order,” Arter said. Some of his works include Trader Joe's Healthy Hoes and I'm Gonna Put My Ass to Sleep. [sic]and both “It’s time for me to quit vaping” and “I LOST MY VAPE AGAIN“, satisfying his audience and covering all stages of addiction. He has never marketed or promoted his music with artificial intelligence, but word of mouth and algorithmic recommendations like Spotify's Radio feature have elevated his work to levels of popularity he could only have dreamed of as a teenage rapper. Justin Bieber used Arter's songs to soundtrack Instagram posts, and 50 Cent posted a video of himself singing along to a Nick Hustle track in his car. Rapper Young Thug took the chorus from the song Arter's “All My Dogs Got This Dog In 'Em” for his hit “Miss My Dogs” and gave credit to Arter as a lyricist. Arter was able to quit his job as a consultant and start a full-time career as a semi-automatic musician. He now works with music distributor UnitedMasters and makes money on over fifty different streaming platforms for pop music (half the price if you provide your own lyrics). does is just a new way to be an artist: if your music “changes someone's life,” he said, “who cares if it's artificial intelligence?”
