Welcome to Stems, a weekly newsletter on music, media, and tech written by Nathan Brackett, former editor at Rolling Stone and content exec at Amazon Music. Subscribe here for free to get every new issue in your inbox every Friday.
The Guy Behind Breaking Rust Says “Streaming is Broken”
A cautionary word from a heavily-streamed AI music maker
An early explainer of Gunna’s 2022 streaming success.
In addition to putting out some terrific writing on AI in music (lol), last week Rolling Stone published a solid overview of streaming fraud and fakery that ran through some of the most infamous alleged instances in recent memory: Young Thug claiming on tape that he bought Gunna a #1 hit in 2022 for $50K; Drake accusing UMG of paying for streams of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us”; a lawsuit against Drake accusing him of boosting his own streams via a scheme with an online casino; and albums from big stars such as Jimin of BTS having millions of plays removed from their stream counts after a Spotify crackdown on artificial streaming.
As the piece hinted at, some version of pay-for-play has been around since the dawn of the modern music biz, from 1950s payola to the ”Hit Men” era to 1990s record label street teams requesting songs en masse on The Box to questionable 2010’s streaming practices. But it’s worth dwelling on how AI-generated music has made it easier and easier for everyone from money laundering criminal rings to (importantly) enterprising solo operators to hijack Spotify. To use the parlance of my old employer Amazon, the combination of AI-generated music and streaming fraud has created a flywheel:
The ability to make songs quickly for next-to-nothing with AI tools like Suno means that fraudsters can take more shots at manipulating the DSPs, and make more money if and when they succeed; that incentivizes people to make more AI-generated music, and so on, and so on, and so on. The launch of better, faster AI models make the whole thing spin faster.
“Streaming is broken,” said Abraham Abushmais, the guy behind AI-generated artist Breaking Rust. I had a FaceTime conversation with Abushmais — a former producer for country-hip-hop artist Blanco Brown, whom Brown nicknamed “Abe Einstein” — after Stems broke the news that he was behind Breaking Rust in November. Abushmais was working remotely in Australia, where he had moved after a few months of living in Japan. He presumably had a decent travel budget: AI detection tool SlopTracker estimates that Breaking Rust has earned close to $300,000 in streaming royalties to date, from more than 74 million streams.
Abushmais declined to go into detail regarding his methods for getting Breaking Rust onto the Billboard and Spotify charts. The only thing he shared was that he had outsourced much of the work behind it. Whatever his process, it was interesting that someone making six figure royalty checks would have such a dark view of streaming. At one point, Abushmais expressed surprise that I actually liked working in music enough to have spent decades in it — the point being that he wasn’t in the music industry anymore. Why was someone who had arguably had a great 2025 waving a red flag?
Maybe it’s because the Michael Smiths of the world are winning. You may have heard of Smith, the North Carolina man who recently plead guilty to more than $8 million in streaming fraud in a landmark Federal case. Showing undeniable entrepeneurship (whatever you think of him), Smith set up a Rube Goldberg-like system of fake song production and stream-boosting with cloud servers and virtual Spotify-clicking code snippets. He ultimately posted hundreds of thousands of songs, getting billions of streams. Perhaps the most alarming fact from our vantage point: At the core of the scheme were fake tracks created with AI tools from (wait for it) 2017 — the Mesozoic Era in AI music terms.
The tools in 2026 — not just song generation tools like Suno but also AI coding tools and other magical helpers — make what Smith did exponentially easier. How many Michael Smiths are operating today? 100? 1000? More?
Estimates say that of the 100+ million songs on Spotify, 28% or more are AI-generated. How many of those are from fraudsters? As much as half? It’s a guess, but when you do some back-of-the-envelope math, that doesn’t feel like a stretch — it starts to make Young Thug buying a few streams for Gunna look almost cute. The Breaking Rust guy might have a point.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this; email me at [email protected]
Retro-Future on the Upper East Side
The Cooper-Hewitt’s “Art of Noise” exhibit is a parade of music and design cool
Who cares if those knobs on top of the 1963 Verner Panton 3300 Stereo (left) actually do anything? They look fantastic, The Model Thirty Six boombox from artist Tom Sachs (top right) is only recommended for playing Einstürzende Neubauten, and the Panasonic R-72 Toot-A-Loop (bottom right) is a bracelet / transistor radio that we hope goes back into mass production soon.
This Art of Noise exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt is well worth a couple hours of your weekend time if you are in NYC. Right before I got there on Sunday, Eno documentary directory Gary Hustwit was spinning records on the handmade audio mega-system that artist Devon Turnbul had installed in a room that was once Andrew Carnegie’s library. I settled for Turnbull himself spinning Coltrane’s “Blue Train,” which sounded spectacular.
The rest of the exhibit, spread out on one floor of the old Carnegie mansion on the Upper East Side, feels a bit like a walk through one of the Daft Punk guys’ retro-futurist heads.
The largest chunk is devoted to killer audio-playback design stretching back to Thomas Edison but leaning heavily on the golden age of the 60s and the 70s. Swedish design firm Teenage Engineering, who specialize in building super-cool stuff inspired by that era, built a lounge / listening area that you can spread out in, along with a quirky installation called Choir featuring foot-high wooden robots singing “TKTKKT” and other timeless jams
The graphic design section, which I loved, is a pocket visual history of NYC music. There’s a lonely index card that Kool Herc put up on a bulletin board in 1974 with information in ballpoint pen on one of his parties at TKTK sedgewick ave in the Bronx, and posters whose FOMO power is only getting stronger with the passage of time, like the almost comic-book-style Fania All-Stars ad for a 1981 Carnegia Hall gig. The Art of Noise runs through mid-August.
The Name of the Game is the Music-Themed Mini Crossword
Stems is pro-democracy and pro-crossword puzzles
The nickname for this week’s palate-cleansing, breezy puzzle is “fun.”
To learn more about Stems, visit the About page. To learn more about my consulting practice, visit here.
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: /in/nbrackett
The Free Newsletter That Tech Geniuses Love
Looking for a free tech newsletter trusted by the industry’s biggest names? Subscribe to The Current, a free daily tech newsletter written by Kim Komando to help you understand AI, keep up with tech news, and learn useful tips in just 5 minutes a day.