I Ranked 2025’s Most Streamed AI Music So YOU Don’t Have To

This isn't what it looks like (on AI as the biggest detriment to art we've ever witnessed)

^Cy Twombly’s Dutch Interior (my favorite painting EVER) and me, my first time ever seeing it <3

I’m sorry. I didn’t know how else to reach you. This is very important and I need you to stay with me and listen carefully. If you clicked on this essay there was implied interest in music made by artificial intelligence and the way things work today means that you might not have listened if I had been more forthcoming. 

For about a week early in the first semester of my sophomore year of college, there was a homeless man residing near the benches in front of the elementary school playground downtown. Almost desperately, I tried to convince myself that this was not what I was seeing. Since my first year of school, I’d been coming to that playground at night in an attempt to get some time alone. There was a small swing set that faced the street and the docks into the bay that ran parallel to it, and I enjoyed watching the sun set over the water, just as I would in my hometown. If I’m being honest, I liked the lack of proximity from the streetlights– I went to a small school in a small city that prompted a feeling of constant nudity, and I needed to believe that if I wanted to escape, I could. Even if I was spotted, no one could really be certain it was me there and not just a trick of the light. This, in fact, is what I attempted to convince myself the homeless man was, wrapped in a sleeping bag: just a trick of the dim lamp ahead, some bushes shaking in the wind that I’d forgotten to notice before.

Later that weekend, the city I lived in put on their yearly boat show at the docks directly across from this man’s spot of refuge. One of the larger tents that year that I could see from my place on the swings was advertising “Yachts of the Future!” featuring hefty price tags paired with artificial intelligence generated pictures of happy men on large machines, families swimming in the background. This intrigued me. Though I did not have a boat nor a ticket to get closer to the exhibition, I found myself imagining these people fortunate enough to have gamed the system, ones able to reside comfortably both on land and on sea, now riskily forking over advance money for more– and not just more, but fake more. A computerized fantasy. Were these our best and brightest? Were the salesmen? Was it idiocy, was it luck? Or was all of it too fake to tell?

As the streetlights began to turn on on the final day of the show, the homeless man I’d noticed barely a week ago grew livid and dehydrated, and began to scream at pedestrians, “Pigs! Pigs, all of you, how can you stand here and do this?” During his tirade, he managed to crawl into the street, into busy traffic. Somebody from the “Yachts of the Future!” tent across the street watched in awe for several minutes, then finally blocked off the road and called him an ambulance that there’s no way he could have afforded. He screamed until it arrived. The boat show cleared out. I’ve been around this city for several years now and haven’t encountered him  since, but I’d like to assume the best. I have to. I can’t really bear to think of anything else.

I consider that weekend often, for all the wealth placed flagrantly on display, people failed their best attempts to ignore its dire opposite screaming at them. Good, I want to shout, good that someone from the fake tent had to aid someone in reality. Immediately after its occurrence, I spent a great deal of time writing on this, conversing about it with friends, trying to make some semblance of sense of what I had witnessed. One friend came back with some of her own questions, in a slightly different vein than that which I’d been tracing, but one I found lucrative to explore nonetheless. If these consumers already had a boat, why buy another boat? What purpose does the not-yet-real boat serve? What must these people who have so much be searching for that causes them to cling onto an idea of something they already have?

If I’m being honest, I can not answer any of these questions fully. Maybe there is something to it all that I am missing. I lack the knowledge to adequately speak on boating. But I know what it is to seek something, and I know what it is to try and fill that hole with whatever may be placed in front of me. I, like many others, have found myself at times addicted to progress for no sake other than its own.

Just before his passing, Stephen Hawking published a final collection of essays titled Brief Answers to the Big Questions, in which he attempted to answer the most pressing questions regarding God, space travel, alien life, and technology. His work “Will Artificial Intelligence Outsmart Us?” has stayed with me since my initial reading of it. Hawking begins his essay by stating, “Intelligence is central to what it means to be human. Everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence.” He goes on to explain that our modern efforts at playing god have been successful, in a sense: just as our own universe is constantly expanding, so is our creation of cyberspace. In fact, Hawking says, “If computers continue to obey Moore’s Law, doubling their speed and memory capacity every eighteen months, the result is that computers are likely to overtake human intelligence in the next hundred years.” Characteristically, it is not stated whether or not Hawking sees this as a general win.

While I admire Hawking as a scientist and intellectual, this is often where his writing falls flat to me. One could argue that all of his Brief Answers to the Big Questions was him giving his own takes on matters, but it all tends to feel more to me like a factually informed prediction. Hawking not stating his own opinion on the state of humanity in the computerized age plays into an idea many of us still find ourselves faced with. Of course we want the technologies we have developed to work, but their ultimate optimization, as Hawking has implied, seems out of our hands. Would we rather have that than keep the reign of our own intelligence? In this light, AI does in fact seem like the antithesis to all we may have began developing it for: in the quest for broadening our knowledge, having all knowledge at our fingertips may work to end the evolution of our own minds. 

One of the most mind-boggling facts about evolution in my opinion also happens to be one of the simplest, that being that it is an indefinite act. It has no end, there is no ultimate goal for us to get to. In fact, in a perfect world, there would be no limit to what we could become. Obviously, change happens slowly and time moves as time does, and in the current earthen conditions, there is an imaginable finality we will be faced with. This does not negate the fact that AI as the ending would be devastating to not only humanity– inviting us into a new era of life as a shell of our own species– but to the physical world as well. It is no secret that the resources used to generate AI– the raw materials involved in creating it as well as the water and energy used to keep it running– are depleting. And in a computerized dystopia, when they run out, all else must. We would jumpstart the end of our world and die slowly and painfully in the blackness. If we are to continue as we have been, the equation states that something will have to die eventually or we all will. 

Perhaps we’ve been looking too broadly at what’s possible. Perhaps I am being melodramatic. Still, when reading Hawking’s essay I am struck by the realization of progress around me. Just a few decades ago, my parents were in a similar position as me, in college, but without computers– at least without them as I know them. In sixth grade, I myself was dumbfounded by the idea that my mother wrote and rewrote each draft of her final term papers by hand, and though I have in fact turned in handwritten essays during my own college experience, I still find this action shocking. I cannot begin to comprehend the nearly double time she must have spent poring over each word, for each class, likely more thoughtful in one draft than I have been in three. 

My parents met in art school, studying drawing and painting at the peak of the contemporary (postmodern) renaissance. My father, like many of his counterparts while he attended, was incredibly technically gifted but chose most often to paint abstractions. I did not recall this until very recently, when I divulged, after a few laps through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that I found myself drawn to contemporary work, and my favorite artist within the collection there to be Cy Twombly. 

Made famous for his large-scale abstract pieces, Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly is one of the most controversial artists of the contemporary age. If you do not partake in the arts often, you may fall into the subgenre of people who critique his sort of contemporary art as “not art at all.” A famous phrase I hear constantly repeated as I ogle near his engulfing Dutch Interior is, “My toddler could have made that.” I fear, however, that these well-intended critics may be missing the point entirely. While it is true that Twombly’s work is built on simplicity, there is something masterful in that alone. To be able to take a massive canvas and scribble on it without it looking like an eyesore is an artistic feat. But of course, art is subjective. What is often not taken into account regarding contemporary art is the historical context surrounding it. We must become aware of the cultural, often technological shifts that have served as parallels to what and how we create since the very beginning of time. Just as portraiture grew looser with the invention and further advancement of the camera (taking the more practical purpose away from hyper-realistic renderings), we find ourselves more and more capable to obtain and create whatever we want, however we want, thus art too has become more imaginative. As a society, we have come full circle to a place where technical skill in an artistic endeavor may mean very little. When everything is at our fingertips, we yearn for something exclusive– just as all arts once were. And in the most human way possible, what we wish to create (and what we wish to consume) is not the machinistically perfect, but the undeniably personal. Pablo Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Abstract art, impressionism, and other looser stylistic methods thus reign supreme in today’s age. Likewise, in a world where I can see a photograph of any person, any animal, any scene, Cy Twombly’s work moves me. It reminds me of something I once had, an image of that which I can never get back.

This is not to say technicality has preceded us. In fact, if you want to check out some contemporary portraiture, I myself have spent many a rainy day lost in Amy Sherald’s American Sublime exhibit at the Whitney. Humans still want to capture the real, in every possible way. Now, however, we are faced with another set of prerequisite questions.  We must ask ourselves what it means to be human, and what it means to be art. Biologically, a human is nothing but another mammal, albeit a dominant one in today’s global ecosystem. We examine our society and find it to be the most advanced based on our constant stream of progress, and to a degree we are correct for this. Humans have been able to both master and manipulate the earth to fit a level of accessibility we deem acceptable, and when that begins to feel too slow, we do it again. I wonder very often if as cyberspace advances and expands, it will grow closer and closer to its most basic form, or if it will grow closer to ours. I wonder if at some point that answer may change, as one intelligence asserts itself as the newly dominant one in that equation. Just as we developed the uncanny valley phenomenon for faces, art too is threatened when something attempts mimicry too well. We must then see art as being something that is intrinsically human. 

During a music theory class several years ago, one that I only begrudgingly attended, I sat next to a friend who prided herself on having an incredibly unique music taste. And rightfully so: there were many discussions where she was able to bring in some obscure recording nobody from class– often including the professor– had previously been aware of. One memorable instance of this happened during a particularly difficult class where we had been tasked with considering the one count– both in terms of its importance in a song and how to find it. Someone asked what to do when a piece of music didn’t have a one count, and someone else responded that simply was not possible, a statement that was, of course, completely untrue. Immediately in opposition, my friend brought up Jon Cage’s Music of Changes, four books of music composed for piano indeterminately, using the Chinese classic book I Ching, or, Book of Changes, a system canonically used to derive and order future events purely by chance. Cage would come up with a question about his composition, use the I Ching to answer, and that would determine what went down on the staff. The result is what can only be described as intellectual keysmash. The music, much like I suppose contemporary art is for some, was only enjoyable to me once I heard its backstory. But it was music, technically, either way– whether something has a beat or a hummable tune or a one count, if it was created to be music, it must be that. It is art. Just as all other art has done, it has drawn on work that has come before it. In doing this, Cage’s composition is inexplicably a human one. Still, while I crave humanity as much as anyone else, I would not choose to listen to this keysmash over again. Many contemporary pieces of art share a similar “unattractiveness.” It is part of the modernity, or more accurately, part of the rebellion against it. Still, there is an old film rule that claims that it doesn’t matter how shoddy your video is if your sound quality is okay. If something is to be “unattractive,” I prefer looking at it than having to hear it. Music then walks a finer line. Plus, really, in the age of EDM and DJ sets, is AI music really that harmful?

Here it may be beneficial to recall a brief musical history. Before anything, music was used as a means of storytelling and record keeping. Homer’s famed works The Iliad and The Odyssey were written in verse not because that is how they originated, but because it is how they survived until they were documented through written language. However, music also evolved with society. By the renaissance era, being able to study and even hear music and instruments was a luxury reserved only for royalty and the highest social classes. Still, keeping a beat proved helpful for keeping time while working, as well as a solid way of preserving lessons and histories for those who could not access literacy even as far as the twentieth century. And while the ruling class was able to witness live performances of the greatest composers to ever live, art is intrinsic. It could not be gatekept. Subgenres of music branching from both classical and folk songs emerged, leading to the different musical scenes we have today. This evolution is seen as a positive one: undoubtedly, the expansion of music both as an art form and a tool for community building shaped parts of our culture in ways that nothing else could. And arguably, we needed it. 

In the anthropocene– an era characterized by and even named for our human progress– this necessity to consume is one of the most marked and evolutory proofs of life. Today’s culture allows us to perform the act in droves. In a society that is built around the act of consumption, the prioritization of ease was inevitable. For better or for worse, we have thus trained ourselves to grow uncomfortable with any prolonged feeling of want. Accessibility is not only something we have grown comfortable with, but something we have built our modern lives from. If we were to lose much of our modern technology tomorrow, we would find ourselves rebuilding from primitivity– or, more morbidly, we would not find ourselves at all. But how accessible must things be? In a world where we have literally witnessed the perpetual development of nearly every art form for this very purpose, the line gets hazier and hazier. I find, however, art is not as inaccessible as many claim it to be. With the varieties of means and methods at people’s disposal, it should not be too hard for anyone to find some method of creation. If you can press buttons on a keyboard, you can finger paint, at the very least. If you can use text to speech, you can sing or dictate poetry and other written work. If you have access to a computer, I guarantee you have access to some sort of paper and a means to mark it, some sort of online instrument that you yourself can manipulate into a song without the use of artificial intelligence. If you wish to get better, we have a million lessons at our fingertips– good progress. If you feel your work is still not good, at least it is still human. At least you still made something instead of passively watching a machine do it for you. 

Or is that what people want? Recall our earlier discussion of evolution: to continue on our own path as creatures evolving on this planet, our species must not be dominated by the machines that we have created. However, in terms of art, it is not strictly necessary for our most basic executive function. I would argue that we’ve seen its benefits in communities, but when the communities are depleted, when the real people who feel real emotions are gone, the art is just another thing to take up space, whether it be physical or digital. Call me harsh, but if not for human interest or desire, then why would any machine create at all? There is no practical use of art to a robot– just because it can identify it or even make it in some approximation does not mean that it needs to. Instead of a tool, as it was once used, art in every form will become a way of the past, a long tradition lost to evolution just like so much before it. 

Obviously, artificial intelligence is a nuanced subject. I cannot in good faith tell you that all we have done with it is purely evil, but I will say that as it pertains to the arts, AI is most certainly detrimental. It can be argued how many areas of progress we have dominated may fall into the same boat. Yet while our past progresses have led us to new styles and methods to create, AI leads us away from creation as a whole. When we stop creating, progress stops there too. It all is connected, and once humanity reaches any stage of progress, it is very rarely possible to go back. Did you know that even the unsolved time travel equations only really allot for forward motion? You truly can’t change fate.

My favorite text that I have studied during my undergraduate time is a very short piece by famed French essayist Michel de Montaigne entitled On the Cannibals. In this essay, Montaigne recalls an expedition a partner of his once took to a small island off the coast of Spain (now believed to be Brazil.) There, this partner encountered the native people, dubbed by Montaigne as the barbarians (a name which I shall temporarily forgo the moral implications of and will, for the sake of ease, also be using to refer to these people from here on), living primitively off the land. It is not their autochthonous ways of life itself that strikes me, but rather Montaigne’s depiction of them, twinged with a sense of wistful grief. You see, in talking about the barbarians, Montaigne is also very aware of himself, of his own lifestyle as a French nobleman. He admires the barbarians’ family-oriented, simple yet rewarding way of life with what seems to be a sliver of grief. He knows that even if he were to go see the barbarians and their land, he could never fully achieve what they have for himself. For all its progressivity, his life lacked the community the barbarians had, and that was a trade he had very little choice in making. In fact, throughout On the Cannibals, Montaigne often calls the barbaric way of life “natural,” because of the very primitivity his society– and ours still today– worked so hard to get away from. In class, a fellow student joked that “Montaigne would be one of those girls who only listened to The Beatles and claimed she was ‘born in the wrong era,” and everyone of course laughed, but I do have to wonder if there is a deeper truth to that. 

I don't think Montaigne lamented his life of privilege. I suppose it wouldn’t matter much even if he did. However, the bittersweet grief present in On the Cannibals lingers throughout much of what he published during his years on earth. He admits in another of his essays, On Experience, that “There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge. We try all ways that can lead us to it.” And though Montaigne’s essays are based solely in his own experience, I believe we can see throughout history how On Experience speaks factually. As all things have evolved, humans have gone quite far to make them do so. Our creation is in pursuit of our knowledge, our consumption is in pursuit of our knowledge, even if it is only knowledge that we have the most exclusive thing. Really, it’s a catch-22– maybe we were all doomed from the start. But our natures seem to state that we may be able to pursue our way out.

Either way, no matter who you are, what you mourn or what you believe in, AI art in any form is one of the final stages before human evolution ceases. If we are to allow the cornerstones of our modern lives to take godly positions over us, we will eventually have no choice but to sit down and submit. And as their power grows, we will all be demoted to creations ourselves, malleable in the hands of a power we once birthed. Have you listened? I have crawled into the street and now I am screaming. Soon they will take one of their followers and carry me away too. Do not tell them that you have read this. Do not tell them where you found me. Slowly close the browser and nod. Whisper to yourself as a reminder as you back away: I listen to music because I am human, I consume art because I am human, and because I will stay human, and because I will stay human, and because I will stay human, and because I will stay human.