Make AI music mashups like There I Ruined It: 4M TikTok followers
Famous songs "ruined" with genre swaps, sometimes with AI.
Musical taste plus a running joke is the real moat; AI is one instrument among many.
Figures as shown on TikTok and YouTube (checked Oct 19, 2026) · source
From @ThereIRuinedIt on YouTube · Oct 2024
The workflow
Where & with what
What they did
- 1The moveThere I Ruined It is musician Dustin Ballard's comedy project: famous songs remade in the wrong genre or by the wrong singer.
- 2Step 2Pick a song and a clashing genre
- 3Step 3Arrange and perform it yourself
- 4ResultThat video has 480,600 views and the YouTube channel has 1.39M subscribers; the TikTok @thereiruinedit has 4,000,000 followers and 132.2M likes (Oct 19, 2026).
Quick answers
What tools do you need?
Just the platform account.
How much does it cost?
No paid tools needed: this case uses only the platform itself, which is free to join.
Is it allowed?
Yes, if it is original. YouTube does not monetize mass-produced or repetitive content. Source.
Watch out: Reach, not income. Not every video uses AI. Cloning real singers' voices raises legal and consent issues, and parody rules vary.
Try it yourself
(Our template, not the creator's prompt.) Give me 10 "wrong genre" mash-up ideas for public-domain songs: the song, the new genre, a one-line joke for the caption and how to arrange the first 15 seconds.
Your first step
Paste the prompt into your AI assistant and swap the [brackets] for your own niche.
Full write-up & sources
More detail: Ballard, who gave a TED talk titled "Is AI Ruining Music?", uses AI in some videos, such as "A.I. imagines what a 90s concert was like".
Results: His most-viewed YouTube upload, "Snoop Dogg reacting to me ruining his song", has 16,957,323 views.
Source: @ThereIRuinedIt on YouTube · Oct 2024. Summarised in our own words; figures as shown on TikTok and YouTube (checked Oct 19, 2026). Updated .
