AI music is out to destroy the bands you love

...and yet they can’t survive without them

One of the very first blogs I wrote for Modern Metal Academy was about how, in the face of the exponential rise of amp modellers, real amps will never die, because modelers need them to survive.

Modellers are great for their portability and versatility, but their tonal DNA lies in real amps; the tones they produce are copies of real amps. AI works in a very similar way. If you ask ChatGPT how to cook potatoes, what it essentially does is Google the answer for you at a rapid rate – it regurgitates pre-existing information found somewhere on the internet. It has no innate knowledge; it gleams everything it needs from recipe websites, vlogs, and beyond.

What AI ultimately is, in this instance, is a time saver. You won’t need to trawl through different websites to get your answer; Chat GPT will do the legwork for you and spew out the top lines you need. 

Broken Avenue are the latest in a sadly growing list of AI artists clocking up big listener stats on Spotify. At the time of writing, they have 153,112 monthly listeners on the streaming service - up 25,000 from four days ago, when Metal Injection wrote its fierce and wickedly worded hit piece on this AI-generated bullshit. Any press is good press, right?

The biggest issue, of course, is that the music is intentionally generated to be a direct copy of bands like Knocked Loose, Counterparts, and The Devil Wears Prada; their music is marketed on the success of others. Its music was very much created with prompts of 'create a song like...' There's no originality and no integrity.

And it's not just the music: the finally free cover is a blatant counterfeit of Counterparts' Nothing Left to Love cover, You're All I See couldn't be more obviously a rip off of Knocked Loose's outrageously good You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To album cover.

AI feeds off real art

Without those bands, Broken Avenue wouldn't exist. Now, you could argue that without Black Sabbath, half the metal bands you love wouldn't exist; but Tool are more nuanced than that. The influence is there, but it mingles with new ideas, genuine innovation, and imagination.

Let’s look at it another way. The rhythm amp on Misha Mansoor's new signature Neural DSP plugin is a hybrid of an EVH 5150 and an Omega Ampworks Granophyre. So that wouldn't exist without those two amps, but it's not just a lazily produced thing; real thought and effort has gone into its creation. Misha thought it would be cool for a best of both those amps, and then Neural DSP's experts made it happen.

In the case of Broken Avenue, whoever put the prompts into whatever AI music generator they used is reaping the rewards, without putting any human endeavour into the mix. Whatever is generated is uploaded; there’s no craft, nothing that makes art, art.

Why is this damaging to real artists?

One track, brazenly called Pierce the Veil, has 81,542 streams. According to the Spotify royalties calculator from Soundcamps, that means whoever is behind the 'band' has earned a cool $190.40 from that song alone. It doesn't seem a lot, but at the same time, it's practically free money, practically pure profit.

The track is 2:05 long, so you’re looking at 160,000 minutes, approximately 2,666 hours, or 111 days' worth of listening time taken away from a hardworking artist.

There's an understandable conspiracy theory that Spotify, or a Spotify-adjacent firm, could be behind these faux artists. Why? Well, if Spotify owns the Broken Avenue name/rights/whatever-the-fuck-we're-dealing-with-here, then for that one song alone, that's nearly $200 it doesn't have to pay out to an artist.

This AI slop is taking listener attention from real artists, and the speed at which this ‘music’ is being pumped out – seven EPs across 2025 – is like pouring tar down the sink. It’s clogging up the pipes, and the water you want to get through is being impeded.

Where do we go from here?

Clearly pissed off that his band has been so blatantly ripped off, Counterparts vocalist Brendan Murphy is offering a financial incentive to anyone who can identify the person/people behind Broken Avenue.

But the problem is that labels are in bed with AI firms. They don’t care about protecting artists, they care about making money, and if there is a demand for these acts – the listenership figures tell you that some people are happen to listen to them – then why would they invest in an artist, and spend thousands on recording and promotion, when AI generates music that people will lap up, and can work at a much faster rate?

In November Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group signed licensing deals with AI startup Klay, the first deal of its kind. Artists were not believed to have been consulted, while the plans for a new AI music platform are reported to be “trained entirely on licensed music.” That tells you all you need to know.

What we're also seeing is AI firms trying to sell AI as a shortcut to achieving your musical dreams, and they've - controversially - got genuinely brilliant musicians like Mohini Dey involved to help with the hard sell. It authenticates the product. Thankfully, there has been a musician backlash to these adverts, with most disappointed that Dey and co. would join 'the dark side' when it goes against everything that their career has been founded upon thus far.

What this changing musical landscape ultimately means is that the onus is on the listener – the customer – to be savvy; to do due diligence to see if that cool song came from a person or an algorithm. In some places, AI content must be flagged. This needs to carry on into the music industry, where a blue tick-like system highlights which artists have used AI, so consumers can make the concious decision whether to support them or not. Until then, it feels like we're being tricked for a quick buck.

AI music will continue to grow in prominence so long as there is an audience for it. Right now, these ‘artists’ are slipping, discreetly, into our playlists and will continue to do so unless action is taken to buck the trend.

But as AI continues to improve by sucking the lifeblood out of the work of hardworking musicians, it’s going to get harder to tell what’s man, and what’s machine.

These are uncertain times.

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