That New Hit Song on Spotify? It Was Made by A.I.

Nick Arter, a thirty-five-year-old in Washington, D.C., never quite managed to become a professional musician the old-fashioned way. He grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in a music-loving family. His father and stepfather were big into nineties hip-hop—Jay-Z, Biggie, Nas—and his uncles were working d.j.s spinning seventies R. & B. By his adolescence, he and his cousins were recording their own hip-hop tracks, first on cassette boom boxes, then on desktop computers, mimicking Lil Romeo and Lil Bow Wow, the popular kid rappers of the day. Music remained a hobby throughout Arter’s college years, at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.