It is far from the first time that AI-generated music has climbed the Spotify charts
By Max Pilley 15th January 2026
The Spotify logo is seen displayed on a smartphone screen CREDIT: Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
An AI artist currently has three songs in Spotify’s Viral 50 playlist, and one of them has caught the attention of Selena Gomez.
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Sienna Rose is an AI-generated music creator with 2.7million monthly Spotify listeners, with a biography that describes her as “an anonymous neo-soul singer whose music blends the elegance of classic soul with the vulnerability of modern R&B”.
AdvertisementThree of Rose’ songs – ‘Into The Blue’, ‘Safe With You and ‘Where Your Warmth Begins’ – are currently placed in the Viral 50 – USA playlist on the streaming platform, and it is the latter song that recently featured as the background music on an Instagram post from Gomez. The singer has since removed the song from the post.
Rose released 10 albums between September and December last year, and in a statement to Rolling Stone, Deezer confirmed that many of Rose’s albums had been detected as AI. Consequence have also pointed out that Sienna Rose’s account had previously presented her as a white woman with an acoustic guitar, before scrubbing her previous music from Spotify.
An AI artist named Sienna Rose has 3 songs getting streamed in the Spotify top 50 and I'm pretty sure nobody knows it's an AI artist
Selena Gomez just posted one of the songs on her Instagram for the Golden Globes pic.twitter.com/UVNfuXRCLq
— Ahmed/The Ears/IG: BigBizTheGod 🇸🇴 (@big_business_) January 13, 2026
It is not the first example of an AI-generated track climbing up the charts – in November, ‘Walk My Walk’ by Breaking Rust topped Billboard’s Country Digital Songs chart, as well as the Viral 50 chart.
Last week, Bandcamp officially banned AI music from its platform. “If you encounter music or audio that appears to be made entirely or with heavy reliance on generative AI, please use our reporting tools to flag the content for review by our team,” they said. “We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI generated.”
RecommendedThe AI-generated band The Velvet Sundown made headlines last year after gaining around 400,000 monthly Spotify listeners, with a “spokesperson” for the act later admitting that he was running a hoax aimed at “the media”.
The AI-generated artist Xania Monet also made headlines last year after signing a multimillion-dollar record deal and becoming the first AI artist to chart on the US Billboard rankings. The poet and designer behind the project said she saw Monet as “a real person” who is “challenging the norm”.
Kehlani has hit out at the success of Monet, telling fans that the proliferation of AI in music was “so beyond out of our control.” She went on to highlight the power of AI to create fully formed songs without users having to “credit anyone” involved in making the copyrighted works on which such generative music systems are trained.
“Nothing and no one on Earth will ever be able to justify AI to me,” she added.
AdvertisementIn September, Cardiff rock group Holding Absence hit out at an AI ‘band’ which had overtaken their streaming figures on Spotify. Frontman Lucas Woodland wrote: “So, an AI ‘band’ who cite us as an influence (ie, it’s modelled off our music) have just overtaken us on Spotify, in only TWO months.”
The vocalist continued: “It’s shocking, it’s disheartening, it’s insulting – most importantly – it’s a wake up call.”
Meanwhile, audiences are reportedly finding it difficult to distinguish between “real” and AI music, with a recent report from streaming service Deezer finding that 97 per cent of people “can’t tell the difference” between the two.