{"id":641111,"date":"2026-10-09T10:44:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T10:44:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/641111\/"},"modified":"2026-10-09T10:44:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T10:44:14","slug":"ai-music-has-become-the-ozempic-of-the-industry-everyone-is-on-it-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/641111\/","title":{"rendered":"AI music has become \u2018the Ozempic of the industry\u2019. Everyone is on it \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sweet treats in a child\u2019s lunch box. Good idea? Bad idea? Is it possible to be neutral about such a thing? A woman\u2019s Instagram account, @ashleighjamz<\/a>, went viral at the start of the new school year for posting text messages the creator claimed were from the \u201cmom\u2019s group chat\u201d at her daughter\u2019s school. The messages revolved around a request from \u201cMichelle\u201d for the other mothers not to pack Oreos in their children\u2019s lunch boxes. Over a series of 40+ videos, the \u201cmoms\u201d castigate one another over their parenting choices and plot against \u201cMichelle.\u201d The posts have been viewed millions of times, reposted, stitched, commented on by everyone from parents to dietitians to the official Oreos account (\u201cOreo-gate was NOT on my 2026 bingo card\u201d). So far, so clickbait.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t seem to matter if the messages were entirely fictional \u2013 it\u2019s fair to say their authenticity is, at best, uncertain. Doesn\u2019t really matter as long as they go viral, right? The storm became known as #oreogate, and media outlets from Good Morning America to Business Insider reported on it. Generally the reporting focused on parents\u2019 opinions around allowing kids to have treats in their lunch boxes, coupled with a strong helping of disdain for the fictional women involved in the chat, a disdain that effortlessly spilled on to real women. <\/p>\n

Posting ludicrous texts or group chats to social media is nothing new. What struck me about it was that @ashleighjamz\u2019s posts were set to music using the generative AI<\/a> platform Suno, and presented in video form. She explicitly acknowledges this, describing herself as \u201ca mom turning her hectic life into songs using @sunomusic\u201d and \u201cSuno Partner\u201d. The music is funny and absorbing enough. The text is delivered in the high-camp mode of a Broadway musical comedy, full of drama and flair. In contrast, the images in the videos are fairly boring, featuring screenshots of the texts overlaid on an extreme close-up of Ashleigh\u2019s emotionless face. <\/p>\n

Watching it unfold, I thought of the French film theorist Michel Chion, who developed the concept of \u201cadded value\u201d to describe how sound functions in cinema. In his 1993 book, Audio Vision: Sound on Screen, Chion outlines how when we watch a clip soundtracked with sad music (for example), it\u2019s the music that induces the emotion, making us feel the images are inherently sad, rather than the images themselves. In the case of #oreogate, it\u2019s clear that the music is doing the heavy lifting; without the ability to rapidly turn the texts into comedic music using Suno, I doubt the posts would have gone viral.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of generative AI platforms for music \u2013 including Eleven Labs, Udio and Riffusion \u2013 but Suno is considered the most powerful globally. The company is valued at $5.4 billion. In a recent pitch deck, Suno claimed that users were creating more than seven million songs per day on the platform. To put this in perspective: the platform outputs the equivalent of Spotify\u2019s entire catalogue once a fortnight. <\/p>\n

The first of the #oreogate videos has had more than 12.7 million plays on Instagram at time of writing. It appears to be the most viral piece of verified AI content since 2024\u2019s \u201cBBL Drizzy\u201d, a Drake diss track featuring a Udio-generated sample, released by producer Metro Boomin at the height of the Kendrick Lamar-Drake feud. <\/p>\n

Tracking the success of Suno-generated material is difficult. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to tell who is using the platform, because users who pay for subscriptions automatically gain commercial rights, can download their tracks and post them outside of Suno.com with no obligation to disclose that Suno was used in the process. <\/p>\n

There are plenty of musical slop merchants releasing an album every week by fictional artists such as Masters of Prophecy<\/a> (36.2 million subscribers on YouTube). But it is impossible to know how many real musicians have signed up for the higher-tier subscriptions and quietly integrated Suno into their practice. The company is very much aware of this. Earlier this year Mikey Shulman, the company\u2019s chief executive, described to The Guardian how Suno was \u201cthe Ozempic of the music industry \u2013 everybody is on it and nobody wants to talk about it\u201d.<\/a><\/p>\n

However, @ashleighjamz didn\u2019t just use Suno to create the music for her videos: she was paid to generate the videos. This detail is lost in much of the reporting, but as a musician I find it critical. Mikey Shulman describes Suno\u2019s mission<\/a> as facilitating a future \u201cwhere music is a bigger, more valuable, and more meaningful part of people\u2019s lives than it even is today\u201d. But Suno\u2019s latest viral success is not with a musician, it\u2019s with a paid influencer using their tech to make short-form video \u2013 the dominant medium of our time \u2013 more compelling. The Oreogate influencer is not looking to sell albums or concert tickets: she\u2019s selling T-shirts and mugs with quotes from #oreogate printed on them. <\/p>\n

Is this what music is for now? Is this the inevitable use the logic of generative AI impels us to put music to: music not just as a way to \u201cadd value\u201d to short-form video, but as the grease that keeps the wheels of content creation turning? <\/p>\n

Jennifer Walshe is professor of composition at Oxford University<\/p>\n