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.
Dust and Silence
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.
Hard times
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.
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