For the first time ever, an AI-generated song has hit No. 1 on a Billboard chart. “Walk My Walk,” a track released by Breaking Rust, an AI avatar, has been at the top of Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart for three weeks. The song sits above “Choosin’ Texas” by Ella Langley, a human being, and “Don’t Tread On Me”, an AI-generated song by another AI avatar, Cain Walker.
Breaking Rust is sitting at a little over 2 million Spotify listers and 37,000 followers on Instagram. Their Instagram page does not disclose that they are AI, but features clearly AI-generated videos marketed as “Outlaw Country.”
Breaking Rust’s first song, “Whiskey don’t talk back” was released October 11, 2025, and the avatar has since released four more singles and an EP. Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor is credited as the primary composer and lyricist according to Spotify, but his lack of any presence on social media suggests that it might be a pseudonym for the human generator. Taylor is also behind Defbeatsai, a YouTube and Spotify channel for raunchy, AI-generated country songs.
Aaron Ryan, who first reported on the story for Whiskey Riff, an online country music magazine, was on NPR recently to address the controversy and detail his research into Taylor and Breaking Rust.
“I think it's a big deal because it's going to force country music and kind of the music world as a whole to decide what's acceptable,” he said. “Randy Travis, who's a country music legend, he lost his voice in a stroke a couple years ago. He recently released a song that he wrote and used AI to recreate his voice, and even that was controversial, even though it kind of had the artist's blessing. And so now we're getting even further from that to songs that are completely AI-generated and artists who are completely AI-generated.”
While most streaming services don’t yet have any policies or rules in place about uploading AI-generated music, the French-based streamer Deezer has implemented a pop-up box that informs users if the music they are listening to was flagged as being AI-generated. Deezer reported in September that 30,000 of the songs uploaded daily, about 28%, are fully AI-generated. Spotify has announced that they are enabling spam filters to eliminate bots and uploaders that farm streams, but have yet to make any rules regulating AI-generated content.
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