AI Artists Are Behind a Surprising Surge in Old School Sales — The Reason May Be Simple

In mid-October, just below The Zombies‘ re-recorded 1960s classic “Time of the Season” and Tame Impala‘s new indie hit “Dracula,” a curious track landed at No. 10 on Billboard‘s Rock Digital Song Sales chart. “You Got This,” built on a chanting “don’t quit like this/hold your ground” chorus and Nickelback-style vocals, scored 1,000 download sales and 294,000 streams in a week, and it has nearly 3,700 TikTok comments, including from a bearded man about to undergo cancer surgery and a widow looking for a sign from her late husband. “‘You Got This’ was the phrase he ALWAYS said,” she posted.

Who is this inspirational new rocker? Unbound Music, which has posted more than 120 tracks on TikTok over the past year, adds a disclaimer: “All songs have AI elements in them.” It’s not unusual for AI artists to hit the charts — Xania Monet, an AI artist whose lyrics come from a Mississippi-based songwriter, went Top 10 on R&B Digital Song Sales for two straight weeks in September and No. 22 on overall Digital Song Sales. What is harder to understand is why these artists are selling so many tracks online in addition to all the streaming.

There may be a simple explanation: Creators find digital-download files to be cleaner source material for training generative AI systems than recordings based on Spotify or Apple Music streams. And AI creators look for successful AI tracks so they can follow similar blueprints. “That’s what’s driving the sales, is the experimenting and curiosity behind it,” says Ahmed Kordofani, who goes by Chord of Annie, a London producer who “humanizes” AI tracks. “People can use existing AI-generated tracks to train AI to do a better job. You can use that downloaded track to make something grander, even bigger.”

Many of the charting AI artists have mysterious origins — nobody responded to a DM through Unbound Music’s TikTok account. But “You Got This” is one of several likely AI and AI-enhanced artists hitting sales charts in recent weeks. Enlly Blue’s “Through My Soul” landed at No. 15 on the latest Rock Digital Song Sales chart, with 1,000 downloads and 224,000 streams in a week, according to Luminate; and ChildPets Galore’s “The Only Thing I Can Take to Heaven” peaked at No. 14 on Christian Digital Song Sales in mid-August and has racked up 305,000 Spotify streams and nearly 600,000 YouTube views since July. “AI has been booming these days, and a lot of people have been using AI to enhance or generate new songs,” Kordofani says.

In addition to the chart activity, Billboard‘s charts team has identified several apparently AI-enhanced tracks that have sold an unexpected number of downloads, suggesting real people, not just online bots designed to boost streaming data, are fans of the music. That may be due in part to lingering iTunes habits from Christian and country consumers, among others. About 5% of overall music fans reported purchasing a download from Apple or Amazon stores in 2024, according to a MusicWatch survey, compared to 9% of country fans; 23% of Christian-music listeners reported listening to digital-music files, compared to 18% of listeners overall. 

“Country fans are much more likely to still be buying downloads. The Christian genre is smaller, but they’re still more likely to be listening to things from iTunes or Amazon,” says Russ Crupnick, Music Watch Inc.’s managing partner. “One could make the argument: If there’s a lot of AI falling into those genres, and they’re available on downloads, and those [listeners] are more likely to fall into downloads as well as streaming — you can tie all those bows together.”