From a few days, in America as well as in Italy, we talk a lot about a first track on iTunes – an Apple app where you can buy songs digitally and listen to them. The song is called Another Day, the artist is Eddie Dalton and most of the articles titularly like this: “The artist who does not exist first in the iTunes ranking”. The reason is very simple: Eddie Dalton does not really exist, he is a fictitious artist whose songs are generated with artificial intelligence, but the fact that he is first in the chart with the song Antoher Day – but also fourth and fifth with two other songs, respectively, Running To You and Cheap Red Wine – is enough to unleash media panic. In fact, to understand what that result represents, it is necessary to distinguish between the different systems of measurement of musical success and their weight in the current industry.
The iTunes ranking is based exclusively on digital sales of individual tracks. That of the sale of digital songs was a dominant model until the first half of the years 2010, but today very marginal compared to the streaming, which is the true indicator of fame of a song nowadays. According to data from industry associations such as the Recording Industry Association of America, in the United States more than 80% of recorded music revenue comes from streaming, while digital sales represent a residual and steady decline. It increases, however, the sale of the physicist, especially the vinyl format that for a few years has returned quite central in the field. This means that the ranking position on iTunes reflects the number of purchases made at a given time, not the overall consumption of a track.
In absolute terms, to understand, a few thousand downloads are enough concentrated in a short time span to reach the top positions of the iTunes chart. The data should be read in relation to the scale of the market: in the same days, the most listened songs on Spotify in the United States total millions of daily streams. A track that reaches, for example, some hundreds of thousands of listeners in two weeks – as in the case of Another Day, released on March 15 and that today on Spotify has about 300,000 total listening – is located on a much lower level, far from the standards of widely spread hits. To make a comparison, I Just Might, Bruno Mars’s single released at the beginning of 2026 to promote the new album The Romantic, totaled 277 million listens on Spotify. The same is currently seventh on iTunes – behind the three tracks of Eddie Dalton, but also behind the BTS and Miley Cyrus, two other heavyweights of international music.
This difference also comes from the nature of digital sales, which can be influenced by coordinated purchasing dynamics. Organized fanbases, targeted promotional campaigns or simple temporal concentrations of purchases – perhaps organized by the same record companies – can determine rapid and temporary peaks in the iTunes charts, without that corresponding to a real spread in the public. It is a phenomenon known and already observed in recent years also for independent artists or for niche outputs.
Eddie Dalton’s case becomes even more “curious” and entertainment source, more than information, when he arrives on the newspaper pages: musical production, and in general artistic, generated with artificial intelligence tools is in fact a very hot and debated subject. In recent years platforms like Suno AI and Udio have made it possible to create complete tracks – including voice – with reduced costs and times. This lowers the entry threshold and also allows subjects without an artistic career driven behind to publish music and test its circulation. And it is often a topic of discussion on social media comments.
It is not the first time content generated by AI reaches relevant positions in partial rankings. The most famous case was in 2023 with the song Heart on My Sleeve, attributed to synthetic versions of Drake’s voices and The Weeknd. Heart on My Sleeve had accumulated millions of ratings on different platforms before being removed for some violations of the rights of artists and in that case, however, the relevant data was the volume of listening and viral diffusion, not a position in a ranking based on limited sales.
In Italy, the perception of these rankings, especially on general media, is often still linked to a successful idea built in the years of digital download. However, the Italian market, monitored by FIMI (Federation Industria Musicale Italiana), has long been using metrics that integrate streaming, sales and airplay to determine official rankings. In short, a location on iTunes alone is not considered indicative of the impact of a track.
The result obtained by Another Day shows therefore above all the ease with which a content can scale a specific ranking in the presence of a limited number of concentrated sales but does not provide sufficient indications on the actual diffusion of the track or on its cultural or commercial weight in the American music market: at the most it allows to make a few more clicks to those who speak with alarmist tones.
L’articolo A song made with AI is first on iTunes does not mean anything proviene da IlNewyorkese.
L’articolo Che un brano fatto con l’IA sia primo su iTunes non significa nulla proviene da IlNewyorkese.
