AI-Generated Band "The Velvet Sundown" Amasses Half a Million Spotify Listeners, Sparking Controversy

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.

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.

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.

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?