The folks over at Capitol Music Group made waves this month by signing the first ever AI rapper FN Meka to its record label. The move was short lived, however, as Capitol Music decided to part ways with the digital rapper after allegations of cultural appropriation and racism.
“CMG has severed ties with the FN Meka project, effective immediately,” a Capitol Music Group spokesperson said to The Hollywood Reporter. “We offer our deepest apologies to the Black community for our insensitivity in signing this project without asking enough questions about equity and the creative process behind it. We thank those who have reached out to us with constructive feedback in the past couple of days — your input was invaluable as we came to the decision to end our association with the project.”
The record company was much sunnier about things when it announced that it signed the rapper, releasing a single called “Florida Water” with rapper Gunna and a streamer named Clix. FN Meka is the brainchild of Anthony Martini and Brandon Le, who own a virtual music artist company called Factory New. Martini and Le are not Black themselves.
At first, it seemed like a harmless novelty move that could potentially be profitable if it took off. However, a group of industry professionals called Industry Blackout wrote an open letter to Capitol calling FN Meka a “direct insult to the Black community and our culture” and claiming the rapper was an “amalgamation of gross stereotypes [and] appropriative mannerisms that derive from Black artists, complete with slurs infused in lyrics.”
Check out the full letter below:
The group said the move shows a “serious lack of diversity” and illustrates the “tone deaf leadership” of the company. They asked for a public apology and for all the money that would be used on the rapper to be re-allocated to “charitable organizations that directly support black youth in the arts….”
In an interview with Music Business Worldwide, Martini explained that “Technically speaking, FN Meka is voiced by a human, but everything else about him — from his lyrics to the chords and tempo underpinning his music — is based on AI.”
The rapper is/was exceedingly popular online and had more than 10 million TikTok followers, so it makes sense that someone would try and capitalize on that success. The rapper also had a few hits. Check out a sample below:
Whether this is truly the end of AI rapping or the beginning remains to be seen, but it doesn’t bode well for the future of music performed by actual people.