AI-Generated Crooner Accounts for Three of Top Five Songs on iTunes

If you happen to glance at the iTunes music chart this week, you will notice a silky-voiced R&B crooner completely dominating the list. His name is Eddie Dalton, and he currently accounts for an astonishing three of the top five songs. With a vocal tone that sounds like a masterful mix of Otis Redding’s soulful grit and B.B. King’s bluesy swagger, Dalton seems like a seasoned veteran finally hitting the jackpot. There is, however, one minor detail separating Dalton from his legendary predecessors: He isn’t actually a human being.Eddie Dalton is entirely generated by artificial intelligence. From his gravelly pitch to his weathered, 70-year-old persona in photos, everything about this rising star is a product of code rather than life experience. Yet his digital origins haven’t slowed his meteoric rise. His track “Another Day Old” — a deeply ironic title for a singer who will never age a single second — is resonating massively with audiences. He’s also had big hits with “Running to You,” “Cheap Red Wine,” and his latest, “Stay a Little Longer.”Across the board, Dalton’s numbers are staggering. His YouTube page says he joined on March 13, describing his style as “Old School Soul & Blues.” He has just 17 videos but has amassed a whopping 8 million views on YouTube. He’s also got 230,000 devoted Facebook followers.The most fascinating part of this digital deception? The fans are completely in the dark. The first report on his true identity came just a few days ago when Roger Friedman wrote about the phenomenon for Showbiz 411.Scroll through the comment sections of Dalton’s videos, and you will find hundreds of earnest listeners marveling at the music, swapping theories about the singer’s tragic backstory, and praising the authentic, raw emotion of a man who does not even have a pulse.The puppet masters behind this silicon sensation are Crusty Records (also referred to as Crusty Tunes), a company based at Greenville, South Carolina. They have been quietly releasing AI-generated music for the past couple of years, but Dalton marks their first bona fide chart-topper.Defending their futuristic business model, the company says: “We believe technology is a tool for creative expansion, not something to be resisted. Crusty Records actively embraces emerging platforms and production methods to help artists move faster, reach wider audiences, and retain ownership. Progress isn’t the enemy — stagnation is,” Showbiz411 reported.But some music fans don’t like it, “not one bit.”“For me, the part of art that I like is the human expression. I want to experience people’s joy, sadness, anger, melancholy … I want to relate to music,” says a Reddit comment from “djfishfingers.”“AI music does not do that for me. It can replicate all of that, but it will never be true human expression. Think of all the great music that you’ve listened to by real human beings. And then consider that AI takes all of that and puts out something without any soul to it. I don’t like it, not one bit,” the redditor wrote.

AI-Generated Crooner Accounts for Three of Top Five Songs on iTunes

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