AI Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus
Music industry critic Bob Lefsetz adopted a radically moderate posture when he wrote in a recent newsletter, “Can we all just agree that AI in music is here to stay? Can we start there? Can we acknowledge thirty years of internet/digital development?”
Those who pay attention to Christmas music saw the artificial intelligence (AI) incursion begin a few years earlier, not this year the way Lefsetz implies. In 2023, Daniel & The Holly Jollies, Dean Snowfield, the North Star Notesmiths, and Sleighbelle started showing up in Spotify holiday playlists next to Bing, Andy Williams, Peggy Lee, Kelly Clarkson, and more. People curious about them hunted around online and found little information. The release of Whispers of Winter by Daniel & The Holly Jollies prompted people to wonder if the EP was Justin Bieber under a pseudonym, but Leah Mandel at Third Bridge Creative found one different answer. “The group’s artist bio alleges that Daniel is ‘a studio musician with over 19 years in the music business,’ and that he ‘met his Hollie Jollies in New York during a mid-day writing session in 2013 on the lower east side,’” she wrote.
That bio has been taken down and replaced with “Covers of christmas classics, created by working artists and producers, distributed by Warner Music’s ADA.” That business-like text suggests that the act isn’t Bieber or a band that met on the Lower East Side. The only information we get from Apple Music is that Eleven-A holds the copyright.
Eleven-A is also responsible for Dean Snowfield’s A Nostalgic Noel, North Star Notesmiths’ Our Christmas Classic, and Sleighbelle’s Wrapped In Holiday Love. Each delivers what the title promises. Dean Snowfield sings holiday classics with arrangements that sound like what you remember Bing Crosby arrangements sounding like, particularly if you remember his oboe parts played on a synthesizer. Snowfield himself sounds like Auto-Tune on the edge, as if it could go to Cher’s “Believe” (life after love…) if the dial was turned one click more.
Sleighbelle’s Wrapped in Holiday Love slots into a more contemporary pop mode fronted by a female voice that imitates Sia on the version of her song, “Snowman.” Again, if you pay attention, her voice too sounds like it could break into a thousand digital pieces if stressed, and the bass on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is so rudimentary and square on the beat that no musician-based track would be released with something so flat.
No one has claimed responsibility for creating this stable of “artists,” and the Eleven-A website has no information on any of its activities. These cyphers are out there fending for themselves, and they’re not necessarily good but they’re good enough. On close and prolonged listens, the fabrication flaws show, but Eleven-A created Christmas music, which most people consume passively. They treat it as background music, and since the Eleven-A stable of EPs imitate familiar, often retro forms, some sonic imperfections can be casually attributed to the sound of yesteryear. From the names to the cover art to the tracks themselves, the EPs present themselves as lost artifacts from days gone by.
This year, AI “band” The Velvet Sundown started like Daniel & The Holly Jollies—pretending to be human. When the project launched in June, The Velvet Sundown members had names: Gabe Farrow, Lennie West, Milo Rains, and Orion “Rio” Del Mar. It was only after people on Reddit started asking questions about the band in their Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify that The Velvet Sundown’s X feed announced, “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.”
Producer Timbaland openly announced his interest in making AI stars. He helped entrepreneur Telisha Jones create the AI gospel artist Xania Monet, who signed a $3 million contract with a label run by a former Interscope executive, and he created the AI pop star TaTa Taktumi. Timbaland told Billboard that Taktumi “is not an avatar. She is not a character. TaTa is a living, learning, autonomous music artist built with AI. TaTa is the start of something bigger. She’s the first artist of a new generation. A-Pop is the next cultural evolution, and TaTa is its first icon.” So far at least, TaTa is also a little dull, and her song “Glitch x Pulse” is all state-of-the-art sound in search of a song.
Recently, AI-generated country artist Breaking Rust’s “Walk My Walk” made more news than it deserved for topping Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. Who buys downloads in 2025? But people saw “Billboard,” “country,” and “chart” in a phrase and declared the AI song a far bigger deal than it really is. Still, the attention pushed “Walk My Walk” to number two on Spotify’s Viral 50 USA chart.
One less reported story came from WTUL DJ Hunter King, who tracked the way AI has been weaponized. On his Storm Surge of Reverb website, King reported on someone releasing generic surf music under the names of indie surf bands and on a fabricated label, Hi-Tide, very close to the existing Hi-Tide Recordings. Since there’s not much money in indie surf, it’s more likely someone made the AI surf to poison the well or extract some kind of revenge.
None of this bodes well for the future. AI will learn to make better pop, and we’re only starting to recognize the ways it can be weaponized. Lefsetz drastically undersells the threat when he compares AI to musical instruments. Even if he’s right and “they’re all tools in making great music,” as he writes, the question with tools is how they’re used.
For more Alex Rawls musings, check out myspiltmilk.com and @myspiltmilk on socials.
