Update, Thursday July 3: In a further twist to the story of The Velvet Sundown, we've been contacted by a representatives of the band who claims that "Over the past days, a number of impersonator accounts have surfaced across social media platforms, publishing fabricated statements and AI-generated imagery falsely attributed to us. Unfortunately, some of this material was cited in your recent article."
Since the same information is contained in the Spotify bio for the band, we are taking this new information on good faith and have updated the social media link in this article to reflect this. The new information in no way contradicts the suspicion put forth in the article that the band's music is AI-generated.
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.
Upcoming tour
I’ve reached out to the band to clarify who created its music, and I'll update this article once I receive a reply.
Yesterday, The Velvet Sundown had 470,000 monthly listens on Spotify. When I look at its page today, they have gone up to over 700,000. 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.
Apple and Spotify
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.
