I don't have any evidence, but anecdotally I totally believe this. My wife's 'AI guided playlist' is completely full of popular song covers from people I've never in my life heard of. If they aren't fake/AI generated songs, I still think they're pushing the Great Value brand songs over the original name brand in order to save on costs.
Well, my equally valid anecdote, my AI DJ plays artists I play a lot and know and like. It's almost never somebody new, and if it is I usually like them and find out they have an actual history.
As somebody who's been into the AI space for a while now, I know AI music does exist, but at this point anything past 30 seconds sounds God awful. You'd know if it was AI, trust me.
The last time this happened, the deal was that the music was generated by bots, and also listened to by bots. Basically it was a scheme to get money out of Spotify.
But also, folks will use AI to generate anything these days, like these books that suggested that a good way to identify whether mushrooms are poisonous is to taste them.
Lots of music piped in in retail stores is like this. You can’t identify the music, even with Shazam, and it is yucky screaming-mimi type baby girl voices from hell. But no royalties!!
Most retail stores use services like epidemic sounds with royalty free music. It's still music made by real people it's just not released and only intended for public use and means you don't need to pay any additional fees like you would if you were just playing the radio or Spotify.
Meka is just one of thousands of artists whose music is on streaming platforms despite the fact that there are no real human footprints behind them
Even just within the article, this isn't true, is it? FN Meka had humans writing and recording stuff, the people that hired those humans just put a fake name and identity over it because they thought it would sell better or something. This is just the article discovering the concept of ghostwriters.