Billboard has excluded human performers from its music charts before. Why should AI tracks feature?

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.For strict institutional gatekeepers, Billboard has been quite lax about allowing fake artists on its charts. By November, several AI performers were featured, including country music’s Breaking Rust and R&B’s Xania Monet.It’s the kind of casual absurdity that AI music startups like Suno are hoping will become, well, casual. “The technology finally allows for billions of people to be creative, to have the fruits of their labor, to feel fulfillment in a different way,” Suno co-founder Mikey Shulman told Forbes in April.But the inclusion of those fruits—AI creations—on the music charts is an existential emergency signal, raising logistical questions for the music industry.

The good news? Answering them correctly should be straightforward for Billboard. The company has spent the last 113 years meticulously defining its hallowed charts, finding reasons to keep actual human beings off them. Now, for the sake of artistic innovation and good-natured competition, Billboard needs to use that same discernment to keep AI out.A lot of its earlier exclusions came down to technical designations.

By the time Billboard decided to factor video streams into the Billboard 200 in 2020, rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s YouTube presence had already rendered the measurement a moot point. His YouTube dominance had outpaced his success on the albums chart by so much that it became a sociology lesson. On the charts, he was an emerging star.

On YouTube, he was already one of the biggest. That schism was the result of an institution refusing to update a system audiences had outgrown.That classification gap distorts and defines ideas of mainstream stardom, and even genre. In the spring of 2019, rapper-singer Lil