The Velvet Sundown: AI-Generated Band Sparks Controversy and Debate in Music Industry

Half a million Spotify users are unknowingly grooving to an AI-generated band

Making art used to be a uniquely human endeavor, but machines have learned to distill human creativity with generative AI. Whether that content counts as "art" depends on who you ask, but Spotify doesn't discriminate. A new band called The Velvet Sundown debuted on Spotify this month and has already amassed more than half a million listeners. But by all appearances, The Velvet Sundown is not a real band -- it's AI. While many artists are vehemently opposed to using AI, some have leaned into the trend to assist with music production. However, it doesn't seem like there's an artist behind this group. In less than a month, The Velvet Sundown has released two albums on Spotify, titled "Floating On Echoes" and "Dust and Silence." A third album is releasing in two weeks. The tracks have a classic rock vibe with a cacophony of echoey instruments and a dash of autotune. If one of these songs came up in a mix, you might not notice anything is amiss. Listen to one after another, though, and the bland muddiness exposes them as a machine creation. Some listeners began to have doubts about The Velvet Sundown's existence over the past week, with multiple Reddit and X threads pointing out the lack of verifiable information on the band. The bio lists four members, none of whom appear to exist outside of The Velvet Sundown's album listings and social media. The group's songs have been mysteriously added to a large number of user-created playlists, which has helped swell its listener base in a few short weeks. When Spotify users began noticing The Velvet Sundown's apparent use of AI, the profile had barely 300,000 listeners. It's now over 500,000. When The Velvet Sundown set up an Instagram account on June 27, all doubts were laid to rest -- these "people" are obviously AI. We may be past the era of being able to identify AI by counting fingers, but there are plenty of weird inconsistencies in these pics. In one Instagram post, the band claims to have gotten burgers to celebrate the success of the first two albums, but there are too many burgers and too few plates, and the food and drink are placed seemingly at random around the table. The band members themselves also have that unrealistically smooth and symmetrical look we see in AI-generated images. View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Velvet Sundown (@thevelvetsundownband) The Velvet Sundown is not the only AI-generated act to invade streaming services. In a recent episode of Last Week Tonight focused on AI, host John Oliver highlighted an AI band called The Devil Inside that has released 10 albums in the past two years. Interestingly, both The Velvet Sundown and The Devil Inside seem to have many songs that reference dust and wind. That may simply be an artifact of repetition in music-generation models, or they may both be products of the same AI slop manufacturer. Labeling AI Spotify is happy to accept AI music and does not require listings to reveal if a song was created entirely by a machine. The Velvet Sundown is also available on other streaming platforms, including Deezer, which takes a harder line on AI. According to NME, the band's bio on Deezer includes a disclaimer that "Some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence." NME also notes that the Spotify bio previously attributed a flattering description of the band's music to Billboard. The flattery remains, but Billboard's name has been removed. Currently, the band's Instagram is flooded with comments calling out the use of AI, but the day may come when it's not so easy to tell. There's nothing inherently wrong with someone wanting to listen to an AI-generated song -- there are a ton of YouTube channels that stream essentially infinite AI music. It's interesting technology, and the output has come a long way since the original Google MusicLM and OpenAI Jukebox models debuted a few years back. But people should know what is and is not AI. Art created by living, breathing people says something about the world -- it's a manifestation of the human condition. The machinations of a machine, however, don't really matter in the same way. An AI-generated song might have a nice vibe, but it's just a remix of actual art assembled by a randomized algorithm. Google and others are endeavoring to create verifiable watermarks for AI images, but we may need something similar for audio if the largest music streamers continue to allow AI songs without disclosure.

From Sensual Butt Songs to Santa's Alleged Coke Habit: AI Slop Music Is Getting Harder to Avoid

AI slop is flooding every single digital platform, and music streaming services are no exception -- so much so, even someone who generally avoids AI might find themselves unknowingly listening to a robot hornily singing about butts. Take the sordid saga of "Make Love to My Shitter," an AI-generated track from an artist called BannedVinylCollection. Brace Belden, a host of the popular politics podcast TrueAnon, says that Spotify recently queued up the bawdy song after he'd finished listening to alt-country legend Lucinda Williams' 1992 album Sweet Old World. "I didn't realize the song was AI at first," he says. "I thought it might've been some obscene joke record from the 80s or 90s." The person behind BannedVinylCollection, who goes by "JB" and would not otherwise identify themselves to WIRED, confirmed that his output of X-rated novelty songs are made with AI. Other tunes in BannedVinylCollection's butt erotica-themed oeuvre include "Grant Me Rectal Delight" and "Taste My Ass." He says that he is making some money off the music, though most of the profit comes from Patreon and Bandcamp rather than Spotify. "I think it's fair to make money from it," he says. "Each song can take hours to make." His monthly earnings on Spotify, he says, are around $200. Tim Ingham, the founder and publisher of the trade publication Music Business Worldwide, documented his own experience tracking AI-generated music on Spotify last week. Like Belden, the first AI-generated music Spotify served up to him fell under the adult novelty umbrella; instead of butt-themed country music, it was 70s soul-inspired songs about substance use like "I Caught Santa Claus Sniffing Cocaine." Browsing around Spotify, Ingham writes that he quickly identified 13 artists that appear to be AI-fueled "with approximately 4.1 million cumulative monthly listeners between them." Not all of this music was overtly goofy -- some of it simply imitates popular genres like country. Spotify did not respond to requests for comment. The mainstreaming of AI music is not contained to Spotify alone. French music streaming app Deezer tracks the volume of AI songs on its platform and has found in recent months that its AI detection system flags 18 percent of tracks uploaded per day, which is around 600,000 songs per month. While Deezer's tools flag and remove some AI content, like the other major streamers, it doesn't yet offer a way for listeners to proactively block AI-generated songs from appearing through algorithmic recommendations. "I fully believe that all streaming platforms shouldn't allow the music to be uploaded," says Belden. Right now, there's no such streamer with a blanket AI ban. Major platforms like Spotify and YouTube prohibit AI music that deepfakes actual artists, while YouTube requires creators to label "realistic" AI content. Spotify does not have a disclosure rule around labeling content that's AI. Belden initially shared his story on X last week after media reports highlighted the overnight success of the Velvet Sundown, a psychedelic rock band that had swiftly amassed over half a million monthly listeners on Spotify within weeks of debuting its music on the platform. Reporters described both the images the band used to promote itself and its music as obviously AI-generated.

This Band With a Million Monthly Spotify Listeners Now Confirms It's Using AI

It's tough as a band to record, release, and market two new albums in under 30 days, but it's much easier if all of the music is artificially generated. That's confirmed to be the case with The Velvet Sundown, which has risen through the ranks on Spotify over the last month since the release of its first album. Listeners to The Velvet Sundown have grown since the early June debut, and after a week of accusations that the band were an AI-generated project, the owners of the Spotify account have now confirmed its use of AI. The band's social media and promotion has used hyper-realistic visuals that suggested to listeners the people pictured weren't real and that the music was also AI-generated. Now, the band's owners have updated its Spotify bio to confirm its use of AI alongside some human controlled elements. "The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence," the band's bio now reads. "This isn't a trick - it's a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the music of music itself in the age of AI." The statement was posted soon after someone faked ownership of the band in interviews with mainstream press. Andrew Frelon spoke to Rolling Stone claiming to have ownership over the AI-generated band. Since then, Frelon has admitted to lying in the interview and confirmed he isn't affiliated with the band. Within 24 hours of Frelon's own blog post, the band's owners updated the Spotify bio to confirm it is an AI-project for the first time. So far, the real owners have remained anonymous. We've yet to learn exactly which AI tools are being used for The Velvet Sundown. The band doubled its monthly listeners in the last week alone after outlets began covering the controversy and speculation ramped up on whether the band were AI-generated.

The Velvet Sundown's shaggy retro-rock has attracted 750,000 listeners -- but is it all an AI hoax?

The Velvet Sundown have come out of nowhere with their clumsily familiar name to rack up over 750,000 Spotify listeners. Unknown just a few weeks ago, they released two albums of throwback 1970s-style rock in June, and are poised to send another into the world this month. Despite the sensimilla smoke-wreathed ambience of their music, the four mystery men from an unknown location are apparently in the grip of an amphetamine recording jag. Floating on Echoes is their debut. It has lots of shaggy riffs, scrunched-eyes solos and heartily cried vocals. "Back Home Never Came" takes us to the Vietnam war. "Helicopters in the haze/Boys went off in a smoky blaze," singer and mellotron player Gabe Farrow exclaims, sounding not unlike Robert Plant making maladroit use of a rhyming dictionary. Dust and Silence is the follow-up. It finds the boys laying down a barefoot, organic sound, as though recumbent in a dream of a distant Californian day. This time, Farrow sounds like he's auditioning for The Eagles. He and his bandmates -- guitarist Lennie West, synth-player Milo Rains and percussionist Orion "Rio" Del Mar, who the bands Spotify bio characterises as "free-spirited" -- have provoked speculation that they are not who they claim to be. The stock nature of their song titles ("Dust on the Wind", "The Wind Still Knows Our Name", and so on) will be familiar to users of AI music generating platforms. The quartet have proved impossible to track down in real life. The "band" have clapped back on X at "the lazy, baseless theory" of AI fakery. A picture was tweeted showing them celebrating with a meal, holding hamburgers as if unsure what to do with them. A revelation in Rolling Stone that it's a hoax has been denied on their Spotify page. All this is surely a five-star wind-up, pranking a genre fetishised as "real music" and tweaking the noses of AI-phobes. The songs aren't so bad either. The lyrics are drivel, but the rest is a proficient exercise in retro-rock. You can listen without feeling that your soul has been drained like the knackered battery of an obsolete smartphone. ★★★☆☆

Velvet Sundown: Viral band success spawns AI claims and hoaxes

A band called The Velvet Sundown has had its tracks played hundreds of thousands of times on Spotify since appearing several weeks ago - without anyone knowing for sure what it is. The band has a verified page on the music streaming platform, with more than 850,000 monthly listeners. However, none of the four named musicians in the band have given any interviews or appear to have individual social media accounts, and there are no records of any live performances. It has prompted accusations that they and their music are artificial intelligence (AI) generated - something the band denies on social media. It did not respond to the BBC's request for an interview. Further confusing the story, Rolling Stone US reported that the band's spokesman had admitted The Velvet Sundown's music had been generated using an AI tool called Suno - only for the magazine to report shortly afterwards that the spokesman was himself a hoax. The man, who goes by the name of Andrew Frelon, said it was a deliberate plot to hoax the media. A statement on the band's Spotify page says that the group has "no affiliation with this individual, nor any evidence confirming their identity or existence." An account on X which claims to be the band's official channel, is also fake, it added. Professor Gina Neff, from the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, says it points to a problem which affects much more than just one band. "Whether this is an AI band may not seem important," she told me. "But increasingly, our collective grip on reality seems shaky. The Velvet Sundown story plays into the fears we have of losing control of AI and shows how important protecting online information is."

A viral band on Spotify is probably AI -- but there's no label to tell you

AI slop is flooding music streaming sites but only Deezer is flagging it AI slop songs are flooding Spotify -- and the latest hit is by an indie rock band called The Velvet Sundown. The track's success has intensified the ongoing debate on whether or not music streaming sites should label AI-generated songs. The group has attracted 474,341 monthly listeners on Spotify in under a month. Its top track, "Dust on the Wind" -- which sounds similar to the 1977 Kansas hit "Dust in the Wind" -- has been played over 380,0006 times since its release on June 20. The Velvet Sundown was first flagged as potentially AI-generated by Reddit users, who pointed out some suspicious signs. A profile picture that looks AI-generated. An Instagram account filled with images of band members that look...weird. And a bio with a purported quote from Billboard magazine saying their music sounds like "the memory of something you never lived, and somehow makes it feel real" -- a quote that appears to have never actually been published. There's also no online trace of the band's members listed in its Spotify bio: "vocalist and mellotron sorcerer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, bassist-synth alchemist Milo Rains, and free-spirited percussionist Orion 'Rio' Del Mar." Yet, there's nothing on The Velvet Sundown's Spotify page to confirm the band is AI-generated. Its tracks even appeared on some Redditors' "Discover Weekly" playlists, an in-app feature that recommends new songs to users. The Velvet Sundown is also available on Apple Music and Amazon Music. The only major streaming site where it's flagged as potentially AI-generated is Deezer. Earlier this month, Deezer became the first music streaming service to start tagging AI-generated content. Its algorithm can identify artificially created songs made using several popular generative AI models, including Suno and Udio, which turn basic text prompts into "music." Over 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks flood Deezer's platform each day. In April, bot-made audio made up 18% of "total uploaded content" -- almost double the 10% figure the company shared in January. Another popular AI-generated band is The Devil Inside, featured on a recent episode of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, titled "AI Slop." The Devil Inside's top track, "Bones in the River," has racked up 1.6 million listens on Spotify since it was released on May 16. Interestingly, the track has no credited creator under the platform's "View credits" tab. However, on Deezer the same song is flagged as AI-generated and credited to László Tamási, a Hungarian musician known for being the drummer of Honky Crew, an electro‑swing band. It represents a rare named credit for an AI-generated artist, who typically remain anonymous. We've reached out to Tamási for comment and will update this piece if they reply. Deezer is an outlier in its offensive on AI-generated music. Spotify has yet to launch any equivalent detector tool. It also hasn't made any attempts to label such content, at least not publicly. Other music streaming platforms, including Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal, have remained virtually mute on the topic. It's perhaps unsurprising that popular music streaming platforms are sitting on their hands. There are currently no regulations on the flow of AI-generated songs, or a consensus on what makes them acceptable or not. Even Deezer is divided. "AI is not inherently good or bad, but we believe a responsible and transparent approach is key to building trust with our users and the music industry, said Alexis Lanternier, Deezer's CEO, last week. "We are also clear in our commitment to safeguarding the rights of artists and songwriters at a time where copyright law is being put into question in favour of training AI models.". Last year, a group of US record labels sued Suno and Udio, alleging copyright infringement on a "massive scale." However, the two companies claim that training their models on copyrighted music falls under "fair use," a common defence from AI firms.

Spotify AI band controversy -- who is The Velvet Sundown and are they real?

Looks like there's a new band in town that's taking the world by Storm. They're called "The Velvet Sundown," they're a four-piece psychedelic rock act from "a sweaty garage in California," and they sound a little bit like a mixture between Pink Floyd, Tame Impala, and King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard on their least weird day. They're also, potentially, not real. Despite having over 400,000 monthly listeners at the time of writing, there are a bunch of different hallmarks that could well point out that "The Velvet Sundown" are AI-generated. So what on earth is going on? NME dug deep into the new act to try and work out where they came from. The act seems to have come effectively out of nowhere, a seeming mystery that has cropped up on Spotify with no fanfare, no marketing, no socials, and a bunch of what look like AI-generated images. Head over to the band's X account and you'll see something similar, and something interesting. There are similarly AI-alike images of distorted guitars (not the fun kind -- think twisted frets and bizarre neck lengths), fingers that merge with burgers, and otherworldly stares. Despite the images, the account looks to assure the world that they are, indeed, real people. They're apparently going to send free tickets to their next tour to their "Twitter" followers, and that "the truth is coming... stay tuned." It's all very weird, and slightly confusing. Good Question! Read their Spotify bio and you'll learn that the band consists of "singer and mellotron player Gabe Farrow," guitarist Lennie West, Milo Raines, who apparently "crafts the band's textured synth sounds," and percussionist Orion "Rio" Del Mar, who is apparently "free spirited." Ok then. People. Band members. Do any amount of searching online, however, and you won't find any social media accounts to match the names. Apparently, it's because they've had to close their accounts due to all the AI questions they've been receiving, even though no one has reached out to them for comment. At least, so the band complains. Somehow, the band has two albums out already, even though they've not been around for very long. Both share very similar covers, both were released in June 2025, and both feature identical track counts and run times within a minute of each other. Apparently, they're a very prolific group too, given there's a new album on the way on July 11th. It's all very, very strange, and it suggests that the band might be AI-generated. While they were initially discovered on Spotify, I've found the band is also found on Apple Music, Tidal, Qobuz, and Deezer. I've reached out to every single service to try and find out more, and so far, only Deezer has sent a response. While there's nothing about "The Velvet Sundown" as yet, the platform has put an AI-generated tag on the artist page, and tells me: "We've detected a significant uptick in delivery of AI-generated music only in the past few months, and we see no sign of it slowing down." says Deezer CEO, Alexis Lanternier. "It's an industry-wide issue," He continues, "and we are committed to leading the way in increasing transparency by helping music fans identify which albums include AI music". "Most of the daily delivery of AI tracks are never streamed on Deezer, but they are diluting the catalog and are used for fraudulent activity," says Qobuz. "Today up to 70% of all streams of fully AI-generated tracks are fraudulent." That raises a really interesting point when it comes to AI-generated music in general. I'll update the article when I hear back from more services as well. Recently, Spotify completely cut revenue for any band that falls below 1000 monthly streams, making it harder than ever for small bands to make any kind of money on streaming. I spoke to a small band, SorryPark, who've put in all the hard graft you'd expect for a band that wants to be seen on Spotify. "We've had 553 unique listeners over the last 28 Days," bassist Halil tells me. This can "fluctuate between 400-800," he continues, "but with good playlisting around new releases, we can get 4 figures." This is a band that has played "close to 100" live shows, come close to winning battle of the bands competitions, and filled out smaller local venues. They've appeared at Festivals, supported much larger acts, and released singles and an album. They're active on social media, with TikTok, Instagram and Facebook accounts. The band is putting in the work, but they're not able to garner the same impressive listening numbers as an act that's appeared out of nowhere. How much money have they made from Spotify streaming? Not "enough to write home about, unfortunately." They cover all their recording costs themselves, including a small private studio and producer for their full-length album. So I ask Halil about AI music, and how he can see it affecting the band and its chances. "I can't speak for the rest of the band, but it's so demoralizing seeing a free and humanless track getting tens or hundreds of thousands of streams," he tells me, "something we could only dream of." "We're back in the studio next week," he continues, "to sit down and record two new singles. The amount of effort that goes into our music is incredible, and that's before we've taken time off to travel to the studio." How do we support bands like this? "Come to gigs, buy merch! But also stream our music, share our socials. Just make more people aware of us." And that's one thing you'll never be able to do with AI music -- go and see it live. There will be a very real person (or people) behind "The Velvet Sundown." An AI model can't (yet) make this all unprompted for itself, as you might imagine. Yet there are lots of questions to be asked about AI music on streaming apps beyond the latest band on the block. AI music isn't a new problem. We've all seen adverts on Instagram for playlists of "Fantasy Music to Help You Sleep" that are 10s of hours long, and filled with eerily similar tracks that would almost fit into The Lord of the Rings soundtrack. Deezer knows it's a problem, and has made efforts to make the problem as obvious as possible. But it's not something that's likely to go away, much to the chagrin of small acts like SorryPark. AI music takes algorithmic presence away from smaller acts, while garnering massive numbers of monthly listeners that could generate as much as $2,000 per month. "The Velvet Sundown" doesn't seem to have had any marketing, but, by covering them like this, they're getting it for free. By highlighting the issue, are we making it worse? I'd like to hope we're doing the opposite, but I suspect the truth is something more uncomfortable. So. If you care about the music you listen to, it's more important than ever to go to those live shows and buy merch. Or, if you don't care, go ahead and listen to "The Velvet Sundown" -- it might be the future of music streaming.

Spotify's latest breakout band The Velvet Sundown appears to be AI-generated - and fans aren't happy

I wonder where they got that idea? (Image credit: The Velvet Sundown) Dust on the Wind, Drift Beyond the Flame, and End the Pain, are all songs by the hot new band The Velvet Sundown, who are blowing up on Spotify with over 470,000 monthly listeners. There's only one problem. It doesn't look like the band actually exists, and the music appears to have been created by AI. While the band appears as a Verified Artist on Spotify, the bio says an incredible amount of nondescript things about the band, like "There's something quite spellbinding about The Velvet Sundown. You don't just listen to them, you drift into them". The bio lists the band members as singer and mellotron player Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, Milo Raines, who "crafts the band's textured synth sounds," and "free-spirited" percussionist Orion "Rio" Del Mar. No amount of digging that I (or the music press) have been able to do has persuaded me that any of these people are real. The music itself sounds to me like a kind of mash-up of various mellow, country-influenced, rock bands like The Eagles, JJ Cale, and The Allman Brothers. I can also detect an element of another Texas band, Khruangbin, in their sound. The Velvet Sundown already has one album out, Dust and Silence, which you can listen to right now, and another, Paper Sun Rebellion, is set for release in 13 days on July 14, but the signs of AI are all over everything to do with them. For instance, both album covers look like two versions of the same AI-generated design. Both are surrealism scenes of a floating eye and a staircase in a desert landscape with mountains in the background. It looks like what happens when AI generates two or more versions of an image for you to choose between. Then take a look at pictures of the band - they look like they've been created by ChatGPT to me. If you look at the band's Instagram account, you'll see what obviously looks like AI-generated photos of the band. With powerful AI music creation tools like Suno available online, it's quite possible that the particular blend of easy-listening, middle-of-the-road, rock that The Velvet Sundown specializes in is AI-created too. Another giveaway for me is that the singer's voice sounds slightly different on each track the band plays, and the music has a soulless, generic quality to it, even if it makes for pleasant and inoffensive background listening. There's nothing cohesive between the tracks that makes me think they're played by the same people. As we reported in February, since 2024, Spotify has demonetized songs that don't get 1,000 streams a year - by some estimates, 86% of music on the platform - making it even harder for musicians to make a living. In a time when the big streaming services are reaping vast profits and artists who aren't in the top percentage of streamers are struggling, the fact that an AI band is grabbing the ears of listeners away from real human-generated music, while not being labelled as AI, is proving divisive. Many people are understandably unhappy that what appears to be an entirely AI-generated band is getting plays and being supported by Spotify. "Just looked them up, and the description on Spotify doesn't make any mention of them being AI. This honestly is making me lean towards cancelling my Spotify subscription", said Reddit user blyzo. "Yeah, that's what people are today; all frauds, and all supporters of the fake. Milli Vanilli came out decades too early!", commented Reddit user Big-Rabbit9119 However, Reddit user AnyPomegranate4981 said, "ngl the songs are fire". We reached out to Spotify for comment on how this band had achieved Verified status and if it thought The Velvet Sundown was a real band, despite all the obvious evidence, but they haven't responded. We'll update this article if we get a response. One thing that did occur to me was that if it is a real band, then this could be a very clever marketing campaign. Generating controversy by appearing to be a fake AI band would be a great way to get yourself noticed. If The Velvet Sunset is indeed an AI band, though, one thing is for sure - we're unlikely to ever see them play live.

AI Images of Fake Rock Band Help Propel Them to Half a Million Spotify Listeners

Photographers are going to struggle to get pictures of the latest psych-rock sensation The Velvet Sundown since they don't actually exist. Despite a plethora of images available online for the chill rock outfit and nearly half a million monthly listeners on Spotify, The Velvet Sundown is entirely AI-generated. According to Musically, the band started getting recommended to Spotify users. Music lovers started digging the four-piece band that fuses "1970s psychedelic textures with cinematic alt-pop and dreamy analog soul." The band members even have names: Gabe Farrow on vocals, Lennie West on guitar, bass player Milo Rains, and "free-spirited" percussionist Orion 'Rio' Del Mar. "The band feels like a hallucination you want to stay lost in," adds a telling description. Redditors and TikToker quickly realized that there was something off about the band, likely because of the group photos that have a distinct uncanny feel to them. Interestingly, music author Chris Dalla Riva on TikTok says the vocals also have a "metallic-y sheen" that is apparently common among AI-generated vocals, similar to AI photos. An Instagram page set up for The Velvet Sundown makes it painfully clear the whole thing is AI-generated. One post showing the "band" recording music is titled "In the studio working on our new album, we know you'll all love it" was mocked by an Instagram user who replied: "In the 'studio' 'working' on your new 'album'." Other pictures on the feed show a mockup of The Beatles' Abbey Road album cover in which the members of The Velvet Sundown are all exactly the same height, the band going to the movies, and performing live. Other giveaways include the generic song titles, such as the band's biggest hit Dust in the Wind, and fake quotes on the band's biography from Billboard that simply doesn't exist. Riva calls The Velvet Sundown "concerning" since Spotify's promotion of AI music may come to the detriment of real musicians. It is a similar tale in the image world where stock photographers fret that they are being replaced by AI.

Apple and Spotify are sleepwalking into an AI music crisis - and The Velvet Sundown mess shows they need to act fast

The first time I heard The Velvet Sundown's album Dust and Silence on Spotify, I thought to myself, hmm, that's not too bad. It hits a lot of the notes I look for in music I can listen to in the background while I work: acoustic guitar, nice vocals, chill beats, and a mellow 60s psychedelic vibe. There's only one problem: this band might not exist. The Velvet Sundown is suspected of being an entirely AI-generated band. Despite posting pictures of its band members on its Instagram and X.com accounts, the pictures look very fake. In fact, they look exactly like they were created by AI. It's very hard to prove definitively if the band is fake, but the evidence mounts up: The pictures look fake, there's no evidence that the band members really exist, and the music sounds like it could have been generated in an AI music tool, like Suno. Famous YouTube musician Rick Beato even released an episode about the band, breaking down its songs into individual tracks to see if he could tell if it was AI-generated. His opinion? Yes, it is. The band's account on X.com is adamant that the band is real and makes its own music, even promising an upcoming live tour! A post from the band says, "This is our music, written in long, sweaty nights in a cramped bungalow in California with real instruments, real minds, and real soul. Every chord, every lyric, every mistake -- HUMAN." I've reached out to the band, and they've emailed me back, saying they're happy to answer questions, except that as soon as I suggest a video interview, they immediately ghost me. It feels like whoever is behind The Velvet Sundown is very much trolling the rest of us for publicity by pretending to be a real band, and as this article shows, it's working. Yesterday, The Velvet Sundown had 470,000 monthly listens on Spotify. When I look at its page today, they have gone up to 634,000. That's a lot of revenue being diverted away from real bands who actually made their own music and towards a band whose music is created by AI from being trained on other people's material, usually without attribution. What's interesting is that both Apple and Spotify are happily streaming the band's music while not flagging it as AI. Don't we, the paying punters, deserve to know if the band we are listening to is fake? In fact, The Velvet Sundown is one of a number of recent 'bands' that have exposed a massive loophole in the big music streaming services like Apple, Spotify, and Amazon Music: They have absolutely no requirement that AI music be flagged as AI-generated. Interestingly, the smaller-sized streaming service Deezer does, and it has used its own technology to identify The Velvet Sundown's music as AI-generated, and it flags it as such. The Velvet Sundown isn't the only band suspected of being AI-generated (other suspected bands include Stellar Cruise and The Luna Lounge), but we're only at the start of this problem. Music streaming services are about to be overrun by AI-generated content, and they need to act fast. I don't want to be sending whatever meagre cents that music streams generate these days to a band that doesn't exist when there are plenty of struggling artists who need genuine support. Perhaps this whole mess will lead Apple and Spotify to rethink their policies on flagging AI music and take a leaf out of Deezer's book, because I think it should be their responsibility to tell us, their paying customers, if the music we are listening to is AI-generated or not. Whether they are real or not, after the success of The Velvet Sundown, an absolute deluge of AI music will be on the way now that people have realized it's an easy way to generate revenue, and Apple and Spotify do not flag it as such. And the next generation of AI bands will probably be a bit cleverer about hiding the fact that they are AI-generated. We've reached out to both Apple and Spotify for comment on AI music on their streaming platforms and will update this article if we receive any.

The Velvet Sundown changes Spotify bio, gives AI update

Remember The Velvet Sundown, that new Spotify group that people accused of being AI-generated? Welp, it turns out it's AI-generated. Or at least partly. Over the weekend, the band - which currently has over a million monthly listeners on Spotify - updated its "About" page to address its use of artificial intelligence. Here's the update, in full: "The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence. This isn't a trick -- it's a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI. All characters, stories, music, voices and lyrics are original creations generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools employed as creative instruments. Any resemblance to actual places, events or persons -- living or deceased -- is purely coincidental and unintentional. Not quite human. Not quite machine. The Velvet Sundown lives somewhere in between." So there we go -- it turns out pumping out two albums in the same year was a bit suspicious after all. Mashable has reached out to Spotify for comment and we will updated this story if we hear back.

An "Indie Rock Band" That Appears to Be Entirely AI-Generated Is Making Alarming Amounts of Money on Spotify

While real artists struggle to earn money on Spotify, a seemingly AI-generated "band" has garnered enough streams to actually make a buck. As Music Ally reports, the act in question, The Velvet Sundown, recently appeared out of the blue on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, and even YouTube -- despite having no digital footprint prior to this summer. Despite being so seemingly young, The Velvet Sundown -- whose name is a clear ripoff of Lou Reed's legendary psych-rock band The Velvet Underground, perhaps with a mix of Sunset Rubdown, a predecessor to indie freak band Wolf Parade -- has racked up more than 550,000 listens this month (which, for perspective, is fewer than The Velvet Underground is pulling in, but vastly more than either Sunset Rubdown or Wolf Parade.) With Spotify's per-stream payouts ranging from $0.003 to $0.005, those streams alone could be garnering thousands of dollars per month, and that's without getting into the band's presence on other streaming services (there's a non-zero chance that bots play a role in that "listenership," too.) First flagged by Redditors perturbed by the band's appearance in their Discovery Weekly playlists on Spotify, it didn't take much surface-scratching to reveal the act's probable nature. Apart from a flag from Spotify competitor Deezer that the band's tracks may be AI-generated -- something the platform very recently began to detect -- there are a ton of other glaring red flags surrounding The Velvet Sundown. For one, none of its purported "members" -- Gabe Farrow, Lennie West, Milo Rains, and Orion 'Rio' Del Mar -- appear to exist. Save for a defunct Instagram account for a cat bearing the name "Milo Rains," neither Music Ally nor Futurism could find any digital footprint for any of those names prior to June 2025. Were that complete lack of evidence not convincing, one need only peek at the phony musicians' Instagram account to tell that they are little more than an algorithmic creation. Each of the photos on the band's page bear the unmistakable sheen of AI, a creepy je ne sais quoi that suggests they are denizens of the uncanny valley. None of those posts are older than a few days, either. Perhaps the greatest "tell" about the band, as Sterogum noted, is a rapturous blurb that previously appeared in its Spotify bio and was attributed to Billboard -- but never appears to have actually run in the storied music publication. "They sound like the memory of something you never lived, and somehow make it feel real," the faux Billboard review read. Since Music Ally and other sites began reporting on the band's fakeness, the reference to Billboard was removed from the band's bio, though the text itself remains. We've reached out to Spotify and the other streaming platforms where The Velvet Sundown's music appears to ask whether they've looked into the AI allegations against the band. Unfortunately, only Deezer and YouTube actually mark AI-generated content, so even if the platforms acknowledge that the band is fake as heck, users won't be warned.

"Indie Rock Band" That's Clearly Using AI Claims That "We Never Use AI"

An "indie rock band" called The Velvet Sundown, which is marketing its music with AI-generated pictures of members that don't appear to exist, is now claiming that "we never use AI." After being publicly accused of being the fabrication of AI, an "official" X account for the band is now seemingly attempting to control the narrative, or at least to gin up a few more streams. "Absolutely crazy that so-called 'journalists' keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that The Velvet Sundown is 'AI-generated' with zero evidence," the account wrote in a Sunday tweet. "Not a single one of these 'writers' has reached out, visited a show, or listened beyond the Spotify algorithm." Anything's possible, but it's a hard denial to believe. All the band's "photos" are obviously AI-generated, and its bio previously referenced a nonexistent writeup by Billboard. If that stuff's all fake, why should we believe that the band's music -- or its protestations -- are genuine? The incident highlights the turbulent effect that generative AI is having on the music industry. It's been a hotly debated topic, with numerous mainstream artists voicing their support for AI regulation in light of a tidal wave of AI slop flooding streaming platforms. The Velvet Sundown, which is currently racking up more than 550,000 listens per month on Spotify, drew scrutiny on social media when users raised red flags about the band's authenticity. "As a music maker, it breaks my heart," one Reddit user wrote. "As a music lover and Spotify user, I find it offensive that there is no mention anywhere that it is a fabricated band." "Report this shit man..." they added. "What else can we do?" Spotify competitor Deezer also flagged the band's most recent album, "Dust and Silence," as being "AI-generated content," noting that "some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence." In our own investigation, we found no evidence that any of its purported "members" actually exist. The band's Instagram page is chock full of images that are clearly AI generated, suggesting that its latest claim to "never use AI" is misleading at best. As Stereogum points out, the band's bio on Spotify also shows plenty of evidence of having been generated by an AI. It also happens to deploy a highly suspicious sentence structure that hints at the possible use of an AI text generator, such as ChatGPT. "The Velvet Sundown aren't trying to revive the past," the blurb reads, using AI's trademark negation construct. "They're rewriting it. They sound like the memory of a time that never actually happened... but somehow they make it feel real." The Velvet Sundown -- a name that appears to be a lazy portmanteau of the legendary psych-rock band The Velvet Underground and Montreal indie outfit Sunset Rubdown -- is now in damage control mode in light of a flood of criticism. "This is not a joke," the band's apparent X account wrote. "This is our music, written in long, sweaty nights in a cramped bungalow in California with real instruments, real minds, and real soul." "Every chord, every lyric, every mistake -- HUMAN," the tweet reads. "Just because we don't do TikTok dances or livestream our process doesn't mean we're fake," the account wrote in a follow-up. "The fact that some blog editors would rather pretend we're a bunch of machines than admit an unknown band is out here grinding & made something people enjoy is insulting." However, without any actual evidence that the band is "REAL" -- a simple video of the band rehearsing in the studio would suffice -- it's hard to know what to make of its claims. As PC Gamer points out, The Velvet Sundown may be gaming the algorithms of music streaming platforms by closely mimicking popular artists in a bid for visibility. AI-based music-generating tools have also become incredibly sophisticated, allowing practically anybody to create convincing-sounding tracks on the fly. In December, The Beatles legend Paul McCartney warned that AI "could just take over and we don't want that to happen, particularly for the young composers and writers [for] who, it may be the only way they['re] gonna make a career." We've also seen several AI-generated diss tracks go viral, leading to mainstream record labels representing artists like Aubrey "Drake" Graham to force music streaming services to remove the offending songs from their platforms. It's still unclear whether The Velvet Sundown's music was the output of a generative AI. But considering their incredibly bland and generic lyrics, and vocal performances that sound completely inconsistent from track to track, it certainly seems likely. In short, even if the music was recorded by real human artists, the blatantly AI-generated images on its social media pages strongly suggest that the band -- if it even exists -- is lying about never using AI. Futurism has reached out to the band on X, but has yet to hear back.

AI-Generated Music Is Starting to Crowd Out the Real Stuff on Streaming Platforms

The digital platform era hasn't been kind to musicians, to put it lightly. Though platforms like Spotify and Apple Music make it easier for audiences to access their favorite bands than ever before, the algorithms and contracts behind those apps are ruthless, paying artists fractions of pennies for their work. Though companies like Spotify have tripled their value during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of artists who are even eligible for royalties, regardless of the paltry amount, continues to shrink. Now, the rising tide of generative AI is boxing out real artists as those same music algorithms become infested with gobs of computer-generated slop. As Pitchfork's Kieran Press-Reynolds explored in his latest column, the "lo-fi" genre -- which emerged in the 2010s in an earlier, though less overt era of algorithmic chaos -- is fast becoming a wasteland of unchecked beatspam thanks to the rise of AI bots. Younger app dwellers will know lo-fi as the dreamy, unobtrusive genre that first took shape via hours-long beat mixes on YouTube, usually dressed up with nostalgic videos playing on loop. Its devotees make up a close-knit digital community, sharing skills, advice, and new tracks via social media and messaging apps. At least, they used to. Now, Press-Reynolds writes, those artists are losing out on royalties and production contracts, as they struggle to discern which tracks were even made by a human, and which have been pumped out by an algorithm. Many are leaving the scene altogether, saying the genre's been "overtaken" by AI crud. "Previously, you could stream a track on Spotify or Apple and almost be certain you followed them on Instagram or spoke to them on Discord because the community was so tight-knit," a beatmaker named Mia Eden told Press-Reynolds. "Now, it feels so nameless -- where this could be an artist that maybe doesn't like to show face, or it's a computer. You can't always distinguish now, and I'd say it's over half [AI]." Alex Reade, another artist from the UK, streams his work under the pseudonym Project AER. His once-growing Spotify account previously clocked two million listeners a month; now it's down to less than 500,000. While Spotify's notoriously opaque royalty system is hard to parse by design, artists who've similarly reported clocking 2 million streams say that's worth a little over $7,600, not accounting for expenses. That's a lot of revenue to dry up overnight -- indicative of the precarious nature of the platform economy. "I'm trying to find any other means so I can take that reliance that I have on lo-fi out of my life because it causes me a lot of stress," Reade said. Lo-fi isn't the only genre being polluted by slop. Earlier this week, social media users flagged an "indie rock band" called The Velvet Sundown which appears to be entirely generated by AI. The "band," which now boasts over 750,000 monthly listeners, has no presence beyond social media. Everything it puts out -- band photos, album covers, and especially the music -- show telltale signs of having been spat out by GenAI. The group's track names are suspiciously close to existing hits: "Dust on the Wind," for example, not to be confused with the iconic Kansas hit "Dust in the Wind." Even the group's name runs agonizingly close to Lou Reed's influential The Velvet Underground, which some crafty bot farmer is no doubt capitalizing on. At the time of writing, a search for "The Velvet" on Spotify shuffles Sundown to the top, with Underground camping underneath. (After initially denying it, the group's creator admitted the whole thing was an AI creation.) This is just a taste of the rent-seeking beatslop that's pushing real artists out of visibility. Thanks to the dominance of for-profit content feeds, the only ones who can reverse the bot flood are the tech executives who will do just fine either way.

Creator of "Indie Band" Who Insisted It Wasn't AI-Generated Just Admitted the Truth

A "band" that sparked a heated debate for heavily relying on generative AI -- and still somehow accumulating over half a million listeners on Spotify -- has finally admitted the truth. Earlier this week, a self-proclaimed "indie rock band" called The Velvet Sundown claimed on its "official" X account that it "never" used any AI, accusing "so-called 'journalists'" of "pushing the lazy, baseless theory that The Velvet Sundown is 'AI-generated' with zero evidence." It was a preposterous claim that flew in the face of a mountain of damning evidence, from clearly AI-generated images of the band's four fictional members to a lazily-written bio that fabricated an accolade from Billboard and bore other hallmarks of having been spewed out by something like OpenAI's ChatGPT. Now, the creator of the whole thing, who's calling himself Andrew Frelon, revealed in an interview with Rolling Stone that -- shocker! -- The Velvet Sundown never really existed. Despite facing some scorching criticism online for brazenly ripping off other people's work and undermining the livelihoods of musicians everywhere, Frelon argued that all press is good press. "People before, they didn't care about what we did, and now suddenly, we're talking to Rolling Stone, so it's like, 'Is that wrong?'" Frelon told Rolling Stone. "Personally, I'm interested in art hoaxes," he added. "We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real." "And that's messed up, but that's the reality that we face now," Frelon said. Frelon band member admitted to using Suno, an AI-powered music-generating app, to come up with the band's uninspired songs. However, he claimed no wrongdoing as far as cashing in on Spotify royalties is concerned. "I'm not running the Spotify backend stuff, so I can't super speak to exactly how that happened," Frelon told Rolling Stone. "I know we got on some playlists that just have like tons of followers, and it seems to have spiraled from there." The use of AI in the world of music production has been a lightning rod, generating high-profile lawsuits and open letters signed by hundreds of artists calling for meaningful regulation. Music streaming platforms have been inundated with a tidal wave of AI slop, threatening the royalties of human artists. In short, Frelon's milquetoast admission that it was all a "hoax" is unlikely to sit well with artists. Should they really bend over backwards and admit defeat in light of an inevitable AI takeover? If anything, the incident highlights some injustices in Spotify's approach to allowing AI-generated content on its platform. After all, it's not exactly incentivized to do anything against it. "Most fake bands still won't be successful, and of course nobody notices when an AI band gets no listeners, but there are no protections against it happening, and probably from Spotify's business point of view it's not even clear that this is a bad thing to be 'protected' against," former Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald told Rolling Stone.

Spotify hit band The Velvet Sundown comes clean on AI

The Velvet Sundown burst onto the music scene in early June and in the space of just a few weeks gained an astonishing 400,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. But its bland music style, hyper-realistic band images, and lack of a digital footprint quickly led many people to suspect that the The Velvet Sundown was AI-generated. And it turns out they were right. Recommended Videos After weeks of speculation, a new message posted on its Spotify page over the weekend finally admitting that the band and its music are the work of generative AI. "The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence," the message says. It continues: "This isn't a trick -- it's a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI. "All characters, stories, music, voices and lyrics are original creations generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools employed as creative instruments. Any resemblance to actual places, events or persons -- living or deceased -- is purely coincidental and unintentional." Finally, it says: "Not quite human. Not quite machine. The Velvet Sundown lives somewhere in between." In another bizarre twist that came just before the weekend admission, an individual going under the pseudonym "Andrew Frelon" contacted CBC News and Rolling Stone to claim that he was the person behind the "art hoax," while at the same time apologizing to anyone upset by the experiment. Frelon said he created The Velvet Sundown tracks using the generative-AI tool Suno before posting them on Spotify, where the band now has more than a million monthly listeners. Case settled, then. But apparently not. The Velvet Sundown then posted a message on its Instagram page saying that Frelon "is attempting to hijack the identity of The Velvet Sundown by releasing unauthorized interviews, publishing unrelated photos, and creating fake profiles claiming to represent us -- none of which are legitimate, accurate, or connected in any way to us." On the same day, Frelon popped up again to say that actually he had nothing to do with the band and that he'd made everything up. So, Frelon was a hoaxer, even if the band wasn't. Though was it? Finally (are you still with us at the back?), someone ... not Frelon, presumably ... posted another message on The Velvet Sundown's Instagram page and also its Spotify page, which we included at the start of this article, about the band being a "synthetic music project." Commenting on the latest message, Instagram user justminmusic highlighted the controversial issue of AI-based music generators like the one used to create The Velvet Sundown's tracks: "They are trying to steal your 'identity' which your ai music stole from other real artist ... just stop this already." It's not clear where The Velvet Sundown will go from here. Will there be an acrimonious breakup, perhaps? Or will it drop its third album in the coming days? While many people following the fortunes of The Velvet Sundown will no doubt be saying, "Well, we knew that from the start," the bizarre episode has shone a spotlight on how AI can rapidly and convincingly generate not just music, but entire artist identities, blurring the line between authentic human creativity and AI-generated imitation. And as generative-AI improves, it will only become harder for music fans to tell the difference. Although arranging a live tour may prove somewhat tricky ...

Psych-rock band The Velvet Sundown racks up well over 400,000 Spotify listens within a month, but very quickly turns out to be AI-generated

A psych-rock musical project has racked up 400,000 listens since it started dropping music on Spotify a little under a month ago. So why am I, a girlypop with a penchant for German metal and videogame soundtracks, talking about them? Called The Velvet Sundown (not to be confused with either 2014's Velvet Sundown or Lou Reed's Velvet Underground), there's more than a few tell-tale clues that everything from the band's Instagram to the music itself is AI-generated. According to the band's Spotify blurb, members include "singer and mellotron player Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, Milo Rains, who crafts the band's textured synth sounds, and free-spirited percussionist Orion 'Rio' Del Mar." The waffly blurb also features both hyperbole that ultimately tells you nothing and badly deployed simile, which feels deeply reminiscent of the textbook shortcomings of LLM output. Furthermore, this up-and-coming musical outfit is apparently made up entirely of technological hermits as I couldn't track down a single scrap of social media for any of its named members. Join me at my red-string corkboard, why don't you? The 'group' began posting music to Spotify with their first album, Floating on Echoes, on June 5. Their third album is currently slated to drop on July 14. Besides the very obviously AI-generated album covers, that sort of timeline is suspiciously truncated to say the least. So far, so circumstantial but there's more. The band itself has an Instagram page that began posting very obviously AI-generated pictures -- complete with self-aggrandising Abbey Road tribute -- on June 27. Unlike a real band, no venues or gig dates are promoted in any of these posts, and looking at them via the phone app flags that the music featured on the band's profile "may have been created with AI." While false positives are entirely possible, Deezer offers the final nail in the coffin. Musicradar spotted that The Velvet Sundown were sharing music in a number of places outside of Spotify, with each of the 'band's' three albums on Deezer accompanied by the note "Some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence." I couldn't find a similar disclaimer on the band's Spotify, Amazon Music, or Apple Music pages. Though The Velvet Sundown's one-note blandness is a dead giveaway for its AI-generated origins, it offers little comfort. Besides the lack of AI-content disclosures, or the fact Spotify continues to pay pennies to human artists getting 1 million listens, there's the matter of the 400,000 listens. These could be bots, though Spotify is explicitly against this, stating, "Paid 3rd-party services that guarantee streams aren't legitimate." What's more likely is that The Velvet Sundown has enjoyed an algorithmic nudge as it so closely mimics popular artists in the genre. The band has also appeared in some anonymous user-generated playlists that have been popular largely because of the 'real' songs in the listings, pulling in listens off the back of other artists' work. Whatever the case, driving an AI wedge between human listeners and human artists is still pretty bleak. To approach this from a slightly different angle, I make no secret of the fact that I'm a Miku Hatsune fan, and I can imagine some may be scratching their heads over how I reconcile that musical interest with my clearly stated, deep cynicism about AI's creative applications. For those that don't know, Miku Hatsune is a fictional character that acts as the visually striking mascot for the Vocaloid voice synthesiser software (though she's popped up in all sorts of other places too, including Fortnite and our Kara's desktop). She's marketed as a virtual idol, sans any pretense that she's a real person -- unlike The Velvet Sundown which is not exactly being upfront about its use of AI generated content. I would also argue that this is not such a tricky square to circle once you remember that Miku Hatsune is a character designed by human artist Kei Garō, voiced by human actress Saki Fujita, and cast as the virtual protagonist of many a human music producer's story. While the voice software Miku Hatsune represents is owned by Crypton Future Media, the artists that contributed to her creation signed contracts and were paid for their work -- not scrubbed from the record by a black box that can only amalgamate. Bottom line, Miku Hatsune is an adaptable creative tool... or, the case could be made, something closer to a community art project rather than anything AI -- but maybe I ought to save that for a future opinion piece. Anyway, instead of giving The Velvet Sundown any more listens, maybe give my favourite Vocaloid music producer, DECO*27, a go instead?

What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: 'The Velvet Sundown' and AI Music

The internet is full is misinformation, conspiracies, and lies. Each week, we tackle the misunderstandings that are going viral. Have you heard of The Velvet Sundown? Me neither. but the indie rock band has been heating up Spotify's charts this week, with nearly 600,000 monthly listeners presumably jamming out to the band's limp, country rock glurge. "Dust on the Wind" (not a cover of the Kansas song "Dust in the Wind") has over 500,000 plays on the world's most popular streaming service. So the band's career is blowing up, as the kids used to say. But The Velvet Sundown doesn't seem to exist. All signs suggest everything credited to the band is entirely AI generated: the music, the band photos, the album covers. All of it is created by computers. The fake band's story has been covered by PC Gamer, our pals at Mashable, Tech Radar and countless other sources. But The Velvet Sundown is not alone. They are one of an army of fake-seeming musicians on music streaming services, and they aren't even the most successful. It's not possible to determine for sure whether music was made by computers just by listening to it, so the best you can do is speculate, but I strongly suspect Velvet Sundown's music is AI generated. Their music is so relentlessly mediocre, so devoid of personality, that it couldn't have come from humans. Everything from the lyrics to the song structures to the instrumentation is boilerplate. It's not even good AI prompting. It's not that The Velvet Sundown's music is bad; it's that it's not anything. There's a difference between the sound of, say, an electric guitar and a soundwave made by digitally smelting, combining, and imitating the sounds of countless other electric guitars. It's hard to describe the difference, exactly, but it's there. Also: For what it's worth, French music streaming platform Deezer's AI detection tool has declared that Velvet Sundown's music is "AI-generated content." The photo above is on the header of the X account associated with The Velvet Sundown. While there aren't any extra fingers or other telltale "this is AI" signs in the image, it feels AI. Like the music, it's hard to explain the difference between a human face and an amalgamation of millions of human faces, and it's hard to explain the deadness in the eyes of AI "people," but it's there. More tellingly, though, this is the one of two images of the band I can find online. How many guys in bands do you know who don't like being photographed? Until an X account was created this week, the Velvet Sundown's entire online presence consisted of a few songs on streaming services. No website, no TikTok, no Instagram, no SoundCloud, no fan forum, no upcoming gigs, no nothing. It's just not how real bands do things in 2025, where an online existence is expected. Only fake bands suddenly appear on streaming services, especially bands polished enough to be as mediocre as The Velvet Sundown. According to the Spotify bio, Velvet Sunset's members are Gabe Farrow, Lennie West, Milo Raines, and Orion "Rio" Del Mar. I can find no evidence of these people having played with other bands, or existing. Spotify doesn't announce how much of the music on its service is made by AI, but at this point, I guess the answer is "most of it." It's just so much easier to create an AI-generated piece of music than make your own. To be in a real band, you have to spend years practicing music, then find other people who want to play music with you, rent a studio, write the song, etc. It takes years to go from nothing to "here's my first song." It took Leonard Cohen five years to record "Hallelujah." It took me eight minutes (I timed it) to use Claude.ai and Suno to create radio-ready country hit "Waiting to Die." The Velvet Sunset are not alone. There are entire genres of music online that sound like they were made by machines. The Velvets (as fans call them) are not even the most successful fake-seeming band on Spotify. Take a listen to the Jazz for Study playlist. The first "artist" listed, "The Super Smart Trio," has no presence online outside of music streaming services, has released a total of 12 songs, and its biggest hit, "Ease Up," has been played over three million times. Or the "Tate Jackson Trio." They have over 12 million plays for "It's in the Middle of the Night," but they don't have a website and there's no evidence they've ever played a show. Check out lofi chill, a Spotify-curated playlist where "artists" like "Mellow Mirror" rack up millions of plays, despite only having released 12 songs, and showing no sign of existing. I can't say for sure whether it's all AI, but it walks like a duck and it's quacking really loud. If someone's enjoying "Dust on the Wind" while they're studying or planning a killing spree, what difference does it make if Orion "Rio" Del Mar (the wacky one) is fake? There's no use in shaking your fist at a thunderstorm; the takeover of everything good and human is happening, no matter how you or I feel about it. But (as illustrated by my country hip-hop masterpiece "Waiting to Die") we don't have forever in this life, and I'd like to choose whether or not to partake in AI-generated art experiences. When I hit play on a song, I'm entering into an unspoken agreement that somewhere, somehow, a human being sat down and tried to express something. That's why I like music. Back in the 1970s, when Kraftwerk imagined the machine-generated music of the future, at least it was cool: robotic, precise, cold, hypnotic, and undeniably futuristic. The AI music flooding Spotify today isn't visionary; it's just mediocre human music made by computers that were trained to be boring. Can we just get an opt-out button? The whole thing has me so mad I had AI write a KROQ-ready pop punk song about it.

An indie band is blowing up on Spotify, but people think its AI

The music streaming service Deezer says music by The Velvet Sundown is one hundred percent AI generated. An indie psych rock band has amassed more than 850,000 listeners on Spotify in a matter of weeks and generated buzz throughout the music industry -- but nobody is exactly sure if it's real or not. The Velvet Sundown, a band bent on "Saving Modern Rock," according to its Instagram account, has even some music industry veterans confused. The images put forward by the band all look like they were created by AI. The music? That's harder to say. Rick Beato, a music producer with more than 5 million subscribers on YouTube identified what he called "artifacts, particularly in one of the track's guitar and keyboard parts. He said that can indicate a song was created by AI. "This is having a lot of problems and I suspect that it may be because this is an AI track," Beato said in a YouTube video, after running one of The Velvet Sundown's songs through Apple's Logic Pro track splitter. "Every time you have an AI song, they are full of artifacts." Whether the band is real, fake or something in between, its emergence and the broader debate about it add to a growing concern about the future of art, culture and authenticity in the era of advanced generative artificial intelligence. Many major tech platforms have already seen floods of AI-generated content, while AI influencers are becoming increasingly common on social media platforms. Velvet Sundown appears to have first emerged in June, according to its social media profiles. On Spotify, the band has a "Verified Artist" badge, offering some sense of authority. On X, The Velvet Sundown teased an upcoming album "Paper Sun Rebellion," and nodded to questions about doubts about the band's origins. Aside from the quick rollout of songs, its uncannily plasticine promotional images of band members have prompted accusations of AI use as well. In a video announcing the release of its upcoming album "Paper Sun Rebellion" later this month, the band pushed back against accusations that they aren't "real," stating in one video that "you believed the lie, and danced to it anyway." "They said we're not real," the account posted. "Maybe you aren't either." The band's Spotify bio claims that the group is composed of four people: singer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, Milo Rains, "who crafts the band's textured synth sounds," and percussionist Orion "Rio" Del Mar. Farrow also allegedly plays the mellotron, which is an electro-mechanical instrument that plays pre-recorded sounds when its keys are pressed. "There's something quietly spellbinding about The Velvet Sundown," their Spotify bio states. "You don't just listen to them, you drift into them. Their music doesn't shout for your attention; it seeps in slowly, like a scent that suddenly takes you back somewhere you didn't expect." Questions about the band's origins were further complicated after other social accounts purporting to represent the band began rejecting claims that the band was using AI-generated images or music, as well as a person who spoke to Rolling Stone claiming to be connected to the band who called it an "art hoax." That person later admitted in a Substack post that his claim to represent the band was itself a hoax. The Velvet Sundown said that the person quoted in the article is not affiliated with them in "any way." "He does not represent us, speak for us, or have any connection to this project," The Velvet Sundown said in a statement to NBC News via Instagram. On Thursday, the social media accounts tied to the band's Spotify account posted that "someone is trying to hijack the identity of The Velvet Sundown by releasing unauthorized interviews, publishing unrelated photos, and creating fake profiles claiming to represent us." The Velvet Sundown's YouTube publisher Distrokid did not respond to requests for comment. Spotify also did not respond to a request for comment. The band's meteoric rise highlights modern issues around AI, and how difficult it can be to verify what is and is not real on the internet. Last year, Google researchers found that AI image misinformation has surged on the internet since 2023. A Consumer Reports investigation found that leading AI voice cloning programs have no meaningful barriers to stop people from nonconsensually impersonating others. According to the music streaming app Deezer, which uses its own tool to identify AI-generated content, 100 percent of The Velvet Sundown's tracks were created using AI. Deezer labels that content on its site, ensuring that AI generated music does not appear on its recommended playlists and that royalties are maximized for human artists. "AI generated music and AI bands may generate some value to the user, so we still want to display that," Alexis Lanternier, the CEO of Deezer, said. "We just want to make sure that the remuneration is taken in a different way." Every week, about 18 percent of the tracks being uploaded to Deezer -- roughly 180,000 songs -- are flagged by the platform's tool as being AI generated. That number has grown threefold in the past two years, Lanternier said. Suno and Udio, both generative AI music creation programs, declined to say whether The Velvet Sundown's music was created using their software. "I think people are getting too far down the rabbit hole of dissecting, is it AI, is it not AI? And forgetting the important question, which is like, how did it make you feel? How many people liked it?" said Mikey Shulman, CEO and co-founder of Suno. According to Suno's rights and ownership policy, songs made by its users who are subscribed to its higher tier plans are covered by a commercial use license. That allows them to monetize and distribute songs on platforms like Spotify without attributing them to Suno. "There are Grammy winners who use Suno, you know, every day in their production," said Shulman. Recently, Grammy Award-winning record producer Timbaland launched an AI artist named TaTa with his new entertainment company, Stage Zero. He told Billboard that TaTa, who created a catalog of AI-generated music through Suno, was neither an "avatar" nor a "character." Suno was one of two AI companies sued last year by major record labels -- including Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group -- who allege that the companies infringed on the labels' recording copyrights in order to train their music-generating models. About a year into the legal battle, however, the music labels have begun talks to work out a licensing deal so that Suno and Udio could use copyrighted recordings by compensating the artists for their work, according to a Bloomberg report published last month. It's a trend that's become worrisome to artists like Kristian Heironimus, who is a member of the band Velvet Meadow (not to be confused with the now-viral The Velvet Sundown). "I've been working for like, six years just constantly releasing music, working my day job," Heironimus said. "It is kind of disheartening just seeing an AI band, and then in, like, what two weeks, [have] like, 500,000 monthly listeners." The creep of generative AI into music and other creative industries has incited backlash from those who worry about the devaluation of their human work, as many AI developers have been known to scrape data from the internet without human creators' knowledge or consent. Beyond ethical debates about the consequences of the AI boom on human labor, some online worry about the rise of low-quality AI slop as these tools grow increasingly capable of replicating voices, generating full-length songs and creating visuals from text prompts. Heironimus said there are similarities between his band, Velvet Meadow, and The Velvet Sundown, beyond just the names. One of the members pictured in The Velvet Sundown's Spotify band photo, for example, looks similar to a photo of Heironimus when he used to have long hair, he said. The bands also fall within the same genre, though Heironimus described The Velvet Sundown's tracks as "soulless." Shulman, of Suno, said most streaming music is already "algorithmically driven." "People don't realize just how depersonalized music has become, and how little connection the average person has with the artist behind the music," he said. "It's a failure of imagination to think that in the future, it can't be a lot better." But Lanternier, of Deezer, argues that as AI continues to evolve, streaming platforms should also be trying to ensure artists can make enough royalties to survive. "People are not only interested in the sound. They are interested in the whole story of an artist -- in the whole brand of an artist," Lanternier said. "We believe that what is right to do is to support the real artist, so that they continue to create music that people love."

Spotify's Viral Band The Velvet Sundown Is Completely AI -- And We Knew It All Along

The truth is finally out: everyone's favorite new Spotify band is absolute generative AI, just as most of us had suspected all along. Who or What Are The Velvet Sundown? If you've still not heard about The Velvet Sundown, they're a new musical group taking Spotify by storm, racking up a truly astonishing one million monthly listeners in just a couple of months. It's a phenomenal figure for a group publishing what can only be described as generic psych-rock with some folk-rock overtones. It's not bad, but it's also not mindblowingly good, either. However, The Velvet Sundown caught the imagination of enough Spotify users to propel the group into the unexpected spotlight -- and with it, intense scrutiny that the band is completely AI-generated, from top to bottom. We Knew The Velvet Sundown Was AI All Along But now, an update to The Velvet Sundown's Spotify Artist About page confirms what many have long suspected, including this writer. The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence. However, the AI-generated band is framed as an artistic project "designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI." The signs of AI creation were clear to see. The images of the band standing together have a distinctly generative AI glow to them, despite some editing and touching up. Small edits can alleviate some of the issues with generative AI, but ultimately, anyone who has used AI to create images of humans knows that tell-tale style: uniform textures, a yellowish, sepia hue, and that uncanny, almost "over-human" generic look. Oh, and they look a little different in each picture -- just as the supposed lead singer sounds different on every single track. Then there was the fact that this band appeared out of nowhere, overnight, and somehow managed to produce two full studio-sounding albums. In this day and age, that's pretty unheard of, especially with the supposed quality of The Velvet Sundown. And there is another album launching at the end of this week, making it three full albums in 2025. The Velvet Sundown (and AI Music) Aren't Going Anywhere It appears that, despite the revelation that The Velvet Sundown is completely AI-generated, the "band" will continue to produce and publish music. The supposed popularity of an AI band of this nature is intriguing for several reasons. One, The Velvet Sundown is so middle-of-the-road that I can't think of reasons why people would specifically turn it off. You might not specifically turn it on, but it's familiar enough, with that classic 1970s-style psych/folk rock sound, that you could listen to for hours. Its lyrics are also startlingly basic, but easy to follow and learn. Take The Velvet Sundown's most listened song, Dust on the Wind: [Verse 1] Dust on the wind/ Boots on the ground/ Smoke in the sky/ No peace found/ Rivers run red/ The drums roll slow/ Tell me brother, where do we go? [Chorus] Raise your hand/ Don't look away/ Sing out loud/ Make them pay/ March for peace/ Not for pride/ Let that flag turn with the tide Nice and vague, with some national pride and military overtones, but nothing offensive. Combined with the music, it's a perfect combination of almost soul-soothing familarity, tinged with the backdrop of nothingness -- which makes it oh-so-listenable. But there's another angle. There are more than a few suspicions that The Velvet Sundown may also be profiting from Spotify's listening bots, another issue that plagues the platform. It isn't difficult to imagine the generator of a completely AI band using Spotify listening bots to inflate the AI band's stats, pushing it into those lucrative Spotify-generated playlists. AI music has been gradually appearing in more Spotify playlists, with the platform actively promoting certain AI artists. For example, another AI artist, Aventhis, appeared on my Discover Weekly at one point. It was ultra-generic, and I skipped the track, only realizing that Spotify had served me up some AI-generated music after the fact. So, whether you like it or not, Spotify is pushing AI music on its subscribers, and there is currently no way to opt out. The rise of The Velvet Sundown highlights a turning point for music discovery. When AI-generated bands can rack up millions of streams, land on curated playlists, and blur the line between real and synthetic artistry, what does that mean for emerging human musicians trying to break through? It also raises questions about transparency: should platforms like Spotify clearly label AI-generated content? And as AI music becomes increasingly indistinguishable from the real thing, will listeners even care who -- or what -- is behind the music they're hearing? One thing's clear: this isn't just a novelty. It's the future knocking.

AI 'Band' The Velvet Sundown Used Suno, Is An 'Art Hoax,' Spokesperson Admits

"Things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real," a band spokesperson tells Rolling Stone The Velvet Sundown, an obviously fictional "band" that's gone viral after somehow racking up over 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify out of nowhere, used the generative-AI platform Suno in the creation of their songs, and consider themselves an "art hoax," a band spokesperson reveals to Rolling Stone.  On their X account, the "band" fervently and repeatedly denied any AI usage after multiple media outlets reported on their mysterious popularity -- but pseudonymous band spokesperson and "adjunct" member Andrew Frelon now admits, "It's marketing. It's trolling. People before, they didn't care about what we did, and now suddenly, we're talking to Rolling Stone, so it's like, 'is that wrong?'" "Personally, I'm interested in art hoaxes," Frelon continues. "The Leeds 13, a group of art students in the U.K., made, like, fake photos of themselves spending scholarship money at a beach or something like that, and it became a huge scandal. I think that stuff's really interesting.... We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real. And that's messed up, but that's the reality that we face now. So it's like, should we ignore that reality? Should we ignore these things that kind of exist on a continuum of real versus fake or kind of a blend between the two? Or should we dive into it and just let it be the emerging native language of the internet?" In the phone conversation Tuesday morning, Frelon originally maintained that AI was used only in brainstorming for the music, then admitted to use of Suno but "not in the final product," and finally came to acknowledge that at least some songs ("I don't want to say which ones") are Suno-generated. "I haven't admitted that to anyone else," Frelon says. He also acknowledged employing Suno's "Persona" feature -- the same one Timbaland is using with his controversial AI artist TaTa -- to maintain a consistent singer's voice across songs, although he continues to claim that's not the case on every track. Some observers have wondered whether some kind of playlist manipulation was used to build Velvet Sundown's Spotify listenership, but Frelon dodged that question. " I'm not running the Spotify backend stuff, so I can't super speak to exactly how that happened," he says. "I know we got on some playlists that just have like tons of followers and it seems to have spiraled from there." Did Frelon and his associates use playlists of their own to boost the process? "I don't have an answer that I can give to you for that because I'm not involved," he says. "And I don't want to say something that's not true." The Velvet Sundown enigma began in June, when two of the band's albums suddenly appeared on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music and other streaming services. A band that no one had ever heard of, and didn't seem to have any sort of digital footprint, suddenly had hundreds of thousands of listeners for music that the band described as "fusing Seventies psychedelic textures with cinematic alt-pop and dreamy analog soul." But how real was it? The songs, like "Dust on the Wind," felt like generic reproductions of Seventies rock, and "photographs" of the group obviously had the amber-encased glow of AI-generated content. On Reddit, two posters called out what one poster called "a completely fake band"; musician and writer Chris Dalla Riva questioned their existence on TikTok; and the streaming service Deezer noted that "some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence." The site Music Ally determined that most of the Spotify playlists which featured the band came from just four Spotify accounts -- and no one could explain how the band's catalog ended up on a playlist of songs evoking the Vietnam War. Early this week the "band" pushed back on its X account, claiming it was "absolutely crazy that so-called 'journalists' keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that the Velvet Sundown is 'AI-generated' with zero evidence.... This is not a joke. This is our music, written in long, sweaty nights in a cramped bungalow in California with real instruments, real minds and real soul." ("Then make an appearance on live TV," responded one person on X. "Proof [sic] it make a real video," replied another.) Spotify, for one, has no rules against AI music. In the past, says Glenn McDonald, a former data alchemist at Spotify, "fake listeners were a larger problem than fake music. It might have flipped." McDonald feels the Velvet Sundown's prominence on that platform is the result of several factors: Artists and content creators are able to pay for more exposure on playlists, he says, and the company's recommendations systems have moved "away from understandable algorithms with strong grounding in actual human listening and communities" and toward AI-driven systems that "can pick songs for recommendations based on characteristics of their audio." Added together, McDonald says, these factors "increase the lottery-like dynamics of the system so that there are fewer reasons why a fake band couldn't be successful. Most fake bands still won't be successful, and of course nobody notices when an AI band gets no listeners, but there are no protections against it happening, and probably from Spotify's business point of view it's not even clear that this is a bad thing to be 'protected' against." (A spokesperson for Spotify declined to comment.) As for the viral attention Velvet Sundown has garnered, "it's because they're AI, not because the music's great," says one veteran A&R executive, who asked for anonymity. "It doesn't feel authentic. That said, it's clearly just a matter of time before AI creates a genuine hit song. Not convinced yet it will create a sustainable hit artist. My prediction is that a hit song will appear that the public loves. At that point, someone will reveal it to be AI. No one will care because they love the song." The Velvet Sundown's Frelon, meanwhile, says that music fans need to learn to accept AI tools, calling the fear of them "super overwrought." "I respect that people have really strong emotions about this," he says. "But I think it's important that we allow artists to experiment with new technologies and new tools, try things out and, and not freak out at people just because they're using a program or not using a program. People have this idea that you have to please everybody and you have to follow the rules. And that's not how music and culture progress. Music and culture progressed by people doing weird experiments and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. And that's kind of the spirit that we're [embracing]."

AI 'Band' the Velvet Sundown Officially Confirm They're AI -- and a 'Provocation'

'Spokesperson' for AI 'Band' Velvet Sundown Now Says He Is an Imposter The AI band The Velvet Sundown, who currently have over 900,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, have officially admitted -- in a new revision to their Spotify bio -- what was obvious to experts and non-experts alike: their music is, in fact, AI-generated. "The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence," the band bio now reads. "This isn't a trick -- it's a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI." The "band" went viral and attracted extensive media coverage after emerging out of nowhere in June and appearing on popular Spotify playlists. They also inspired an apparent hoaxer, using the name Andrew Frelon, who now says he impersonated the band on X and falsely claimed to be a spokesperson for the band in interactions with the media, including a phone interview with Rolling Stone. His elaborate, days-long hoax was aimed at testing the media, he claimed in a lengthy Medium post. The Spotify bio goes on to say, "All characters, stories, music, voices and lyrics are original creations generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools employed as creative instruments. Any resemblance to actual places, events or persons - living or deceased - is purely coincidental and unintentional. Not quite human. Not quite machine. The Velvet Sundown lives somewhere in between." Glenn McDonald, a former "data alchemist" for Spotify, told Rolling Stone earlier this week that The Velvet Sundown's popularity there is likely because the streaming service now accepts payments to boost playlist placement, while also increasingly moving away from human-driven playlist selections toward algorithms that "can pick songs for recommendations based on characteristics of their audio."

'Spokesperson' for AI 'Band' Velvet Sundown Now Says He's a Hoaxer

'Spokesperson' for AI 'Band' Velvet Sunset Now Says He Is an Imposter The pseudonymous Eric Frelon, who spoke to Rolling Stone on Wednesday as a spokesperson for the viral AI band Velvet Sundown, and runs a Twitter account that purports to represent the band, was running an elaborate hoax aimed at the media, he now says in a Medium post. The band's official Spotify page also posted a notice insisting that Frelon -- who "confirmed" that the band created music with the AI tool Suno -- is unaffiliated with the band. Velvet Sundown currently have more than 700,000 listeners on Spotify. A Velvet Sundown X account that's linked to from the band's Spotify page messaged Rolling Stone early Thursday morning asking for a correction and reiterating their disavowal of Frelon. "We understand the intrigue our project inspires -- and we're not here to dispel mystery," the Spotify-linked account Twitter said in a DM early Thursday morning. "But we are here to correct the record....The Velvet Sundown is a multidisciplinary artistic project blending music, analog aesthetics, and speculative storytelling. While we embrace ambiguity as part of our narrative design, we ask that reporting on us be based on verifiable sources -- not fabricated accounts or synthetic media." (The "band" have not yet responded to a request for further comment.) In his lengthy Medium post, Frelon claims that he took advantage of the Velvet Sundown's lack of social-media presence and transformed another account he had started in March into what purported to be the band's "official account." From there, he claims, he used a long list of "social engineering" tricks, including interactions with the media, to make it appear to be the band's actual account -- with the supposed aim of testing journalists. "Knowing from past projects something about the dynamics of journalistic news coverage," he writes, "I thought it would be funny to start calling out journalists in a general way about not having reached out to 'us' for commentary." Frelon also told Rolling Stone on Wednesday that he had a strong interest in "art hoaxes." (The phone number Frelon called from, with a 514 area code, now has a "not in service" message.) Despite the obvious AI origins of its photos and music, Velvet Sundown has been picked up on numerous Spotify playlists, attaining substantial listenership that led to widespread media coverage. Glenn McDonald, a former "data alchemist" at Spotify, told Rolling Stone that their prominence on the streaming service is emblematic of a move "away from understandable algorithms with strong grounding in actual human listening and communities" and toward AI-driven systems that "can pick songs for recommendations based on characteristics of their audio."

'Spokesperson' for AI 'Band' Velvet Sunset Now Says He's a Hoaxer

Hear Foo Fighters Return to Roots With 30th Anniversary Minor Threat Cover The pseudonymous Eric Frelon, who spoke to Rolling Stone on Wednesday as a spokesperson for the viral AI band Velvet Sunset, and runs a Twitter account that purports to represent the band, was running an elaborate hoax aimed at the media, he now says in a Medium post. The band's official Spotify page also posted a notice insisting that Frelon -- who "confirmed" that the band created music with the AI tool Suno -- is unaffiliated with the band. Velvet Sundown currently have more than 700,000 listeners on Spotify. A Velvet Sundown X account that's linked to from the band's Spotify page messaged Rolling Stone early Thursday morning asking for a correction and reiterating their disavowal of Frelon. "We understand the intrigue our project inspires -- and we're not here to dispel mystery," the Spotify-linked account Twitter said in a DM early Thursday morning. "But we are here to correct the record....The Velvet Sundown is a multidisciplinary artistic project blending music, analog aesthetics, and speculative storytelling. While we embrace ambiguity as part of our narrative design, we ask that reporting on us be based on verifiable sources -- not fabricated accounts or synthetic media." (The "band" have not yet responded to a request for further comment.) In his lengthy Medium post, Frelon claims that he took advantage of the Velvet Sundown's lack of social-media presence and transformed another account he had started in March into what purported to be the band's "official account." From there, he claims, he used a long list of "social engineering" tricks, including interactions with the media, to make it appear to be the band's actual account -- with the supposed aim of testing journalists. "Knowing from past projects something about the dynamics of journalistic news coverage," he writes, "I thought it would be funny to start calling out journalists in a general way about not having reached out to 'us' for commentary." Frelon also told Rolling Stone on Wednesday that he had a strong interest in "art hoaxes." (The phone number Frelon called from, with a 514 area code, now has a "not in service" message.) Despite the obvious AI origins of its photos and music, Velvet Sundown has been picked up on numerous Spotify playlists, attaining substantial listenership that led to widespread media coverage. Glenn McDonald, a former "data alchemist" at Spotify, told Rolling Stone that their prominence on the streaming service is emblematic of a move "away from understandable algorithms with strong grounding in actual human listening and communities" and toward AI-driven systems that "can pick songs for recommendations based on characteristics of their audio."

Is AI Music For The Ear Or Soul: Lessons From The Velvet Sundown

Enter your email to get Benzinga's ultimate morning update: The PreMarket Activity Newsletter Like so many others, the music industry isn't immune from artificial intelligence (AI), as it's begun infiltrating creative domains once thought to be exclusively human. AI-generated bands are gaining massive followings despite little promotion and with minimal social presence, raising questions about transparency, authenticity, and the future of music creation. The recent controversy surrounding The Velvet Sundown, a band that amassed over 550,000 monthly streams on Spotify without disclosing its AI origins, highlights the complex intersection of technology, art, and consumer expectations in today's digital landscape. The Velvet Sundown Phenomenon The Velvet Sundown appeared seemingly out of nowhere on Spotify in early 2024, quickly accumulating hundreds of thousands of listeners with tracks like "Midnight Drive" and "Ocean Eyes." The band's indie rock feel with hazy vocals resonated with fans who added their songs to personal playlists. Algorithmic recommendations further boosted their reach. Have a listen, it's easy to understand the music's likability. Along the way, however, music industry observers began noticing peculiarities about the group. Despite their growing popularity, The Velvet Sundown had minimal social media presence, with a meager Instagram profile, no tour dates, no interviews, and no identifiable band members. Technical analysis of their music revealed telltale signs of AI generation: slightly unnatural vocal phrasings, oddly structured lyrics, and instrumental arrangements that, while pleasing, contained subtle inconsistencies typical of current AI music generators. Still, the "band," or someone representing it, vehemently defended its authenticity in a series of posts on X. The Big Revelation All that came to a halt, however, when a spokesperson for The Velvet Sundown just recently disclosed it to be an "Art Hoax." This revelation sparked a plethora of commentary on Reddit, with contrasting views. One user wrote, "Is it really a hoax if basically no one was fooled?" While another exclaimed, "The real hoax is how many times this [expletive] AI band can get their name in a headline." The latter to which, I suppose, I am guilty. The Scale of AI in Music Production The Velvet Sundown case is merely the visible tip of a rapidly expanding iceberg and is hardly the first of its kind (just the most infamous). According to Vox, one of the first examples of AI-generated music dates back to 1956 where a string quartet piece composed by an old school ILLIAC I computer was produced by professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Today, the forecast for AI-generated music growth is massive, with Grand View Research reporting a 2023 market size of $440.0 million and growth projected to reach $2.7 billion by 2030. The Technology Behind AI Music Modern AI music generation relies primarily on machine learning models trained on vast datasets of human-created music. These systems analyze patterns in melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, and production techniques to generate new compositions that mimic human creativity. As Ars Technica explains, the most sophisticated AI music systems employ a combination of: Generative adversarial networks (GANs) that pit two neural networks against each other, one generating music and the other evaluating its authenticity Transformer models similar to those powering ChatGPT that understand musical context and structure Diffusion models that gradually transform random noise into coherent musical compositions The latest systems can generate complete songs, including vocals that mimic specific artists' voices, from simple text prompts like "upbeat indie rock with female vocals about summer romance." Human vs. AI: A Comparative Analysis The distinction between human and AI-created music continues to blur. In fact, 82% of listeners find it difficult to tell the difference between music created by AI and pieces composed by humans. Still, significant differences remain: Technical Quality The technical quality of AI-generated music has reached impressive levels, with systems now capable of producing highly polished, commercially viable tracks, as The Velvet Sundown phenomena has affirms. Still, subtle technical markers often reveal AI's artificial nature. These include slightly unnatural vocal phrasings, oddly structured lyrics, and instrumental arrangements that, while pleasing to the ear, contain subtle inconsistencies typical of current AI music generators. While the technical execution is increasingly sophisticated, it remains a complex interplay of algorithms rather than genuine artistic expression. Emotional Depth and Authenticity Where AI still falls short is in conveying authentic emotional experiences. While music-generating AI software can produce a multitude of variations on a theme, it may lack the emotional depth and nuance that comes from human experience. This, because AI music systems learn from scraping existing songs, making it challenging to create completely new and emotionally complex sounds that often captivate and resonate with listeners the most. "Without a personal, individual, human expression, it's just a craft, not necessarily an 'art,' one Reddit user wrote on the subject. "The art of art is the human touch based off one's unique perception of the world around them. That's only unique to one person, the artist." This sentiment was echoed by many Velvet Sundown listeners who expressed feelings of betrayal upon learning of the band's likely AI origins. "This makes me angry and disillusioned as an actual human artist," another Reddit user wrote. Innovation vs. Imitation Human artists continue to push creative boundaries in ways AI cannot yet match. While AI excels at mimicking existing styles, it struggles with true innovation that breaks established patterns. Many musicians note that AI will lead to a homogenization of music styles, with songs that sound too similar to each other and lack the originality that makes music special. While it's true that AI has already shown impressive capabilities in generating music, it still has some way to go before it can match the depth and complexity of human creativity. AI Music Investment and Market Implications For investors watching this space, several key trends are emerging: AI Music Creation Tools Companies developing consumer and professional AI music generation software are seeing substantial growth. AI music creation platform Soundful (now TopMediaAI), secured $3.8 million in an oversubscribed seed round. Another platform, Aiva Technologies, raised over $2.48 million, with its latest Series A generating an undisclosed amount just last year. Rights Management Technology As AI-generated music proliferates, technologies that can detect AI content and manage rights are becoming increasingly valuable. One of the most popular tools, ircamamplify.io, which tags AI-generated tracks at scale, was developed with a self-proclaimed charter to "secure a fair and transparent environment for music consumption on streaming platforms...empowering the music stakeholders to bring the balance between artificial and genuine creation." Investors should stay abreast of more and more companies developing fingerprinting and authentication technologies for digital music. Hybrid Music Generation Models The most promising business models combine AI efficiency with human creativity. These platforms enable human artists to leverage AI tools while maintaining creative control, showing strong growth metrics and market acceptance. Rather than completely replacing human musicians, these hybrid approaches are creating new workflows where AI serves as a sophisticated creative assistant, augmenting rather than supplanting human artistry. The future landscape for these hybrid platforms appears particularly bright, as industry experts predict increased collaboration between human artists and AI tools rather than complete replacement. Regulatory Uncertainty The regulatory landscape for AI-generated music remains in a state of flux, creating a complex environment for creators, platforms, and investors alike. The situation is further complicated by questions about intellectual property rights when AI systems are trained on existing musical works, leading to potential legal challenges from human artists and record labels. This uncertainty extends to royalty distributions, with no standardized framework for how streaming payments should be allocated when AI is involved in the creative process. While these uncertainties pose challenges, they also create opportunities for early movers who can help establish industry standards and develop compliant solutions for AI music creation and distribution. The Transparency Question The Velvet Sundown controversy has accelerated calls for greater transparency in how AI-generated music is labeled and marketed. Industry groups including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have begun advocating for clear disclosure requirements. Many feel consumers deserve to know whether they're listening to human artists or AI systems. "There is a clear path forward through partnerships that both further AI innovation and foster human artistry. Unfortunately, some bad actors - like Midjourney - see only a zero-sum, winner-take-all game," said RIAA president Mitch Glazier in a recent statement about Midjourney litigation. "These short-sighted AI companies are stealing human-created works to generate machine-created, virtually identical products for their own commercial gain." Indeed, it isn't about limiting AI creativity, but ensuring transparency in the marketplace. Spotify has announced it is developing a labeling system for AI-generated content, though implementation details remain unclear. Apple Music, with its Resemble.AI product, primarily established to identify a creator's IP, is being used to flag synthetically-generated music. Meanwhile, while Amazon Music has introduced AI technology to help users find new songs, the company is also working to address challenges surrounding AI-created music. The Future Landscape for AI Music As AI music technology continues to evolve, industry experts predict several developments: Increased collaboration between human artists and AI tools rather than complete replacement More sophisticated detection tools to identify AI-generated content Emergence of new musical genres that specifically leverage AI capabilities Revised royalty and compensation models that account for AI's role in creation We're entering an era where the boundary between human and machine creativity becomes increasingly fluid, creating both challenges and opportunities for artists, listeners, and businesses alike. For the music industry, navigating this new landscape will require balancing innovation with authenticity, efficiency with artistry, and technological capability with human connection, ensuring that in the pursuit of perfect algorithmic compositions, we don't lose the imperfect humanity that gives music its soul. And when it comes to personally identifying AI-generated music, my advice is to start with the basics. As one Reddit user remarked about The Velvet Sundown, "All that AI and they couldn't even come up with a good name for the band." Feature Image: AI-Generated by Andre Bourque Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Mysterious band The Velvet Sundown soars in popularity, fuelling AI music debate

A mysterious rock band that may not be a band at all has soared in popularity on music streaming sites, raising fresh concerns over the rise of artificial intelligence in the music industry. The group, known as The Velvet Sundown, amassed nearly a million listeners in just a few weeks. But many observers aren't sure the band even exists in the traditional sense. Reddit and TikTok users were among the first to flag the group's two albums, which appeared suddenly on Spotify and other platforms in June. A growing number of listeners believe the music is entirely AI-generated. In a promotional video for the band, a voice asks, "Are you sure we're not real?" AI-generated songs have been flooding streaming services daily, but The Velvet Sundown is drawing particular attention as debate heats up over whether platforms should be required to label music created using artificial intelligence. Music journalist Eric Alper gave the music a listen and described it as "pretty good," with a sound reminiscent of "generic 1970s southern swamp rock" and bands like Kansas and Creedence Clearwater Revival. "So far, there's really no indication that the music industry cares a whit about mentioning what is AI and what's not," said Alper, pointing to a 2023 Billboard magazine study that found 35 per cent of songs on the Hot 100 chart used at least some form of AI. Another fully AI-generated band, The Devil Inside, has also made waves. Its biggest track, Bones in the River, has more than 1.7 million plays on Spotify. Currently, Spotify has no rules preventing the upload of AI-generated music, and listeners can be unaware they're streaming content created by machines. Meanwhile, French music streaming platform Deezer has taken a different approach. In April, it reported that 18 per cent of the new songs uploaded to its service were fully AI-generated -- about 20,000 songs a day. Last month, Deezer became the first major platform to launch an AI detection tool that flags such content for users. "AI is not inherently good or bad, but we believe a responsible and transparent approach is key to building trust with our users and the music industry," said Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier in late June. On Thursday, Lanternier confidently told NBC News the music from The Velvet Sundown is "100 per cent" AI-generated. The explosive growth of generative AI in music has also prompted a wave of lawsuits, with musicians and songwriters alleging their material is being used without permission to train AI models. Websites like Suno and Udio now allow users to generate entire songs using only text prompts. And experts say the technology is getting better -- fast. "The quality is so high that it's almost impossible to tell that a machine created it," said CTV News technology analyst Carmi Levy. "It's basically the wild west across Spotify, because you can post content and you're not required to let anyone know that it is, in fact, AI-generated," Levy added. CTV News approached people in downtown Toronto to get their opinions on the band and AI music. After listening to some of the music, many said they would like to see it identified as being machine-made. "If I knew it was AI I probably wouldn't listen to it, even if it was good," said Yasmin Mkalaf. "So, I think they should definitely be transparent with that for sure." Asked if he'd listen to AI-generated music, Paul Groche had a different take: "If it's a good song and I like it, then sure, why not?" Others, like Mahshad Jalali, disagree. "I do have a Spotify subscription and I kind of don't like that I'm supporting that now," she said. "Because I do pay for it." Tech expert Levy said, "I think the industry in general -- whether the tech industry, the music industry and, quite frankly, all of us -- need to arrive at standards for labelling content that was created using artificial intelligence. Right now, it's anything goes."

Meet Velvet Sundown: The AI music band with over 10 lakh Spotify listeners

As AI bands rise, Velvet Sundown amplifies the tension between innovation and emotional truth in music. In an era where algorithms dictate our playlists and artificial intelligence churns out art like a factory, The Velvet Sundown has stormed the music scene, amassing over 850,000 monthly Spotify listeners since June 2025. Their nostalgic, psychedelic rock sound seduces casual listeners, but their murky origins, almost certainly AI-driven, cast a troubling shadow. This so-called band isn't just a musical act; it's a wake-up call, forcing us to confront an unsettling truth: AI-generated music risks diluting the human spirit that has always defined great art. Also read: Udio AI tool can do what OpenAI's Sora can't, generate music in seconds The Velvet Sundown's breakout track, "Dust on the Wind," with over 10 lakh streams, has infiltrated Spotify playlists like "Vietnam War Music" and "Good Mornings - Happily Positive Music to Start The Day." Their sound, a slick blend of '70s psychedelic rock, alt-pop, and folk rock, mimics The Eagles or Tame Impala with uncanny precision. But the cracks show quickly. The band's supposed members, Gabe Farrow, Lennie West, Milo Rains, and Orion "Rio" Del Mar, exist only as social media ghosts, their accounts popping up on June 27, 2025, with no history. Their promotional images, glossy yet eerily artificial, scream AI generation, likely from tools like Midjourney. Their discography, including albums "Floating on Echoes" and "Dust and Silence", emerged in quick succession, with a third, Paper Sun Rebellion, slated for July 14, 2025. Deezer, a platform hosting their music, flagged these albums with disclaimers: "Some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence." The music itself, while catchy, feels like a soulless algorithm's attempt at nostalgia. People on Reddit and X have called it "elevator music for hippies," polished to appease but lacking the grit of human struggle. Their meteoric rise reeks of algorithm manipulation, Spotify's algorithm, which thrives on playlist gaming, likely boosted their visibility, sidelining genuine artists scraping by in an oversaturated market. Initially, a social media account claiming to represent the band insisted the music was human-made, born from "long, sweaty nights in a cramped bungalow in California." But the lack of live performances, interviews, or tangible history fueled skepticism. Their Spotify bio, initially a vague ramble about "chasing echoes through the desert," offered no clarity, deepening the mystery surrounding their identity. Also read: Ghibli style AI-generated images are good for one simple reason On July 6, 2025, The Velvet Sundown's Spotify bio dropped the pretense, admitting they're a "synthetic music project" using AI for composition, vocals, and visuals. They call it an "artistic provocation," but it feels more like a cynical stunt. A supposed spokesperson, Andrew Frelon, told Rolling Stone they used "Suno", an AI music generator, only to later claim he was an imposter, piling on the absurdity. This isn't art as much as it is a tech demo masquerading as creativity. The rise of tools like Suno and Udio, which churn out songs from text prompts, threatens to flood platforms with generic tracks, drowning out human voices. Spotify's refusal to mandate AI disclosure, unlike Deezer's transparent tagging, enables this deception, prioritising profit over integrity. A 2025 Music Business Worldwide report warns AI music could claim 10% of streaming revenue by 2030, starving independent artists already struggling to survive. The Velvet Sundown's success, likely amplified by algorithmic favoritism, proves AI can mimic commercial viability, but its hollow output lacks the emotional depth that makes music resonate across generations. This band is no mere experiment; it's a warning of a future where music becomes a sterile product of code, not heart. Can AI capture the glee of a festive ballad or the defiance of a protest anthem? Should listeners care about a song's origin? In an era where algorithms craft chart-topping hits, The Velvet Sundown challenges the industry to redefine authenticity and confront the future of creativity. Listeners deserve transparency, and artists deserve a fair shot. As this synthetic project churns out more algorithm-friendly albums, we must demand art that reflects our messy, beautiful reality, not a machine's cold calculations.