From Bat Bunny's massive streaming numbers to Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl,

2025 electrified music bands across the globe.

There was a wild card this year, though, AI.

As artificial intelligence continues to push the music industry into strange new territory,

how might it impact what we call music?

Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Friday, December 19, 2025.

Joining me to discuss some of the biggest stories in music this year is USA Today,

national music reporter Melissa Ruggieri.

So good to have you on the show again, Melissa.

Love being here.

Before we dive into how 2025 shaped up for some of the world's most loved artists, I want to talk about

a rapidly emerging point of friction.

AI is forced the music industry to confront what creativity really means, how we define art and

artists. At the end of 2025, where does that conversation stand? It stands in a really precarious

place, actually. You know, the Grammy Awards had to reckon with AI a couple of years ago.

If you remember that artist, ghostwriter, who dumped this fake duet between the weekend and Drake online and then wanted to submit it for a Grammy.

And then the Grammys came back and said, no, no, no, no, no, that is not how this is going to work.

There has to be

a human element involved in it, which is also very different than what the Beatles did in the end

of 2023 with now and then when they re-released a song or they put together a song using technology,

but from old tapes that the band was actually part of. So those are two very distinctive things

that I think we need to keep in mind

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