AI Singer Xania Monet Sweeps the First AI Music Awards — Artist, Song and Album of the Year
Xania Monet doesn’t exist — and she just had the biggest night at the first awards show built for artists like her.
The AI R&B singer swept the top honors at the inaugural AI Music Awards on Friday night (November 13) at The Mayan in downtown Los Angeles, winning AI Artist of the Year and AI Song of the Year for “How Was I Supposed To Know?,” according to Reuters, which covered the ceremony. Her album “Unfolded” took AI Album of the Year, an honor handed out at the Sonic Intelligence Academy’s summit a day earlier, and she added Best AI R&B Artist to finish with four trophies, per the academy’s winners list.
The awards are run by the Sonic Intelligence Academy (SIQA), which built a registry of verified AI artists and let those artists vote on the winners across 25 categories — and members weren’t allowed to vote for their own work, AllHipHop reported in its coverage of the show.
Behind the avatar is a real songwriter. Monet was created by Telisha “Nikki” Jones, a Mississippi poet and songwriter who writes every lyric herself, then uses the AI platform Suno to generate the music and the voice that sings them. On the red carpet Friday, Jones framed it as a sound the world simply has to adjust to. “I just feel like AI music is a new thing that people just have to get used to,” she told Reuters. “I don’t see it going anywhere anytime soon.”
The trophies cap a run that already rewrote the record books. “How Was I Supposed To Know?” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B Digital Song Sales chart and No. 20 on Hot R&B Songs, then entered the Adult R&B Airplay chart at No. 30 — making Monet the first AI-based act to land on a Billboard radio chart, according to Billboard’s reporting. Her gospel record “Let Go, Let God” also charted on Hot Gospel Songs.
That rise set off a bidding war. In September 2025, Jones signed the project to Hallwood Media, the label run by former Interscope executive Neil Jacobson, in a deal Billboard reported at $3 million.
Not everybody in R&B is clapping. When the deal was announced, Kehlani blasted it in a TikTok video, as reported by Complex: “There is an AI R&B artist who just signed a multimillion-dollar deal, and the person is doing none of the work.” She went further: “Nothing and no one on Earth will ever be able to justify AI to me,” adding, “I’m sorry, I don’t respect it.” Her argument — the same one musicians pressed all weekend in Los Angeles, according to Reuters — is that singers, producers and songwriters spend years learning the craft, and every lane an AI act takes is a lane a working artist loses.
Friday night didn’t settle that argument. It just made it official: the AI era of R&B now has its own awards show, and its first queen is a singer who isn’t real — with a very real songwriter standing behind her.
Sources: Reuters (ceremony coverage, November 14, 2026); AllHipHop (November 14, 2026); Billboard chart and deal reporting via Reuters and AllHipHop; Complex (Kehlani comments, September 2025); Sonic Intelligence Academy winners list. Cover photo: Xania Monet official press photo.
