Sweden’s current streaming champ isn’t human, but at least their charts are

An AI-generated Swedish “heartthrob” tops Spotify, but the country’s charts have (correctly) decided that if you want to be counted, you actually have to exist.

By Casey Epstein-Gross | January 20, 2026 | 1:00pm

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Ever heard of the song “Jag vet, du är inte min” by the up-and-coming artist Jacub? Yeah, me neither—but that just means we’re not Swedish. The folk-pop crooner has quietly become Sweden’s biggest song of 2026, racking up more than five million Spotify streams in a matter of weeks, all on the strength of a finger-picked guitar, a wounded chorus, and a man sadly realizing his late-night situationship is not, in fact, endgame. So who is this mysterious Jacub, anyway? As luck would have it, “he” is less tortured singer-songwriter and more group project: a virtual frontman built by a team of executives at Danish company Stellar Music, including staffers from its AI department, with both the voice and chunks of the composition generated by machine-learning tools.

Stellar, for its part, would really prefer you not call Jacub “fake.” Their line is that they’re not some shadowy tech bros pressing “sad guitar ballad” on a dashboard and going home early; they insist Jacub is the product of human songwriters and producers using AI as a mere “tool” in a “human-controlled creative process,” as if the algorithm is just another plug-in on the pedalboard. The feelings are real, they say, because the people behind the project are real. (As for whether Jacub is a real person, they replied “that depends on how you define the term,” which really does not bode well for the future of either music or humanity. For the record, the standard definition usually involves a heart, a pulse, and the ability to die, but I digress.) It’s a neat bit of rhetorical aikido: if the heartbreak comes from humans, who cares if the voice, the sound, and the words all belong to a dataset with good enunciation?

As it turns out, Sweden cares. The same week Jacub was sitting at the top of Spotify’s local Top 50, the country’s official chart body quietly benched the song. Under rules laid out by IFPI Sweden, a song that’s “mainly AI-generated” is simply not eligible for the national singles chart, no matter how many times it gets streamed by heartbroken teens in Gothenburg. The track can live on playlists, rack up royalties, soundtrack breakups—what it cannot do is show up next to human artists on the one list the industry still treats like a historical record. It’s just about the bare minimum, but it’s still a rare, faintly admirable line in the sand. Billboard, feel free to follow suit.

Spotify, however, does not give a flying fuck—which should surprise no one, considering this is the same platform that had no qualms about auto-playing an ICE recruitment ad between two indie songs and calling it “discoverability.” If the numbers go up, the numbers go up—and the song stays up. Whether the artist exists is, apparently, a philosophical question best left unanswered so long as the money’s good.

Still, there’s something quietly relieving about Sweden’s refusal to play along. Not because it solves anything—AI music is not going anywhere, as much as we’d like it to—but because it acknowledges that charts are supposed to mean something, even if that something is becoming (like the word “person,” apparently) increasingly hard to define. Streams can be automated, voices can be synthesized, heartbreak can be reverse-engineered, but a chart, at least in theory, is a record of whose voice is actually heard. For now, Sweden has decided that if you want to be counted, you have to exist. Which feels like a low bar. And yet.

Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].

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