Have you ever heard of The Velvet Sunset? Me neither. however the indie rock band has been heating up Spotify’s charts this week, with almost 600,000 month-to-month listeners presumably jamming out to the band’s limp, nation rock glurge. “Mud on the Wind” (not a canopy of the Kansas track “Mud within the Wind”) has over 500,000 performs on the world’s hottest streaming service. So the band’s profession is blowing up, as the children used to say. However The Velvet Sunset would not appear to exist. All indicators counsel the whole lot credited to the band is fully AI generated: the music, the band images, the album covers. All of it’s created by computer systems.
The faux band’s story has been coated by PC Gamer, our buddies at Mashable, Tech Radar and numerous different sources. However The Velvet Sunset shouldn’t be alone. They’re considered one of a military of fake-seeming musicians on music streaming companies, they usually aren’t even essentially the most profitable.
Tips on how to inform whether or not a band exists
It isn’t potential to find out for positive whether or not music was made by computer systems simply by listening to it, so the very best you are able to do is speculate, however I strongly suspect Velvet Sunset’s music is AI generated.
Exhibit one: The music
Their music is so relentlessly mediocre, so devoid of persona, that it could not have come from people. Every thing from the lyrics to the track buildings to the instrumentation is boilerplate. It isn’t even good AI prompting. It isn’t that The Velvet Sunset’s music is unhealthy; it is that it isn’t something. There is a distinction between the sound of, say, an electrical guitar and a soundwave made by digitally smelting, combining, and imitating the sounds of numerous different electrical guitars. It is exhausting to explain the distinction, precisely, but it surely’s there. Additionally: For what it is price, French music streaming platform Deezer’s AI detection instrument has declared that Velvet Sunset’s music is “AI-generated content material.”
Exhibit two: the picture
Credit score: tvs_music/X
The picture above is on the header of the X account related to The Velvet Sunset. Whereas there are no additional fingers or different telltale “that is AI” indicators within the picture, it feels AI. Just like the music, it is exhausting to elucidate the distinction between a human face and an amalgamation of hundreds of thousands of human faces, and it is exhausting to elucidate the deadness within the eyes of AI “individuals,” but it surely’s there. Extra tellingly, although, that is the considered one of two photographs of the band I can discover on-line. What number of guys in bands are you aware who do not like being photographed?
Exhibit three: the context
Till an X account was created this week, the Velvet Sunset’s whole on-line presence consisted of some songs on streaming companies. No web site, no TikTok, no Instagram, no SoundCloud, no fan discussion board, no upcoming gigs, no nothing. It is simply not how actual bands do issues in 2025, the place an internet existence is anticipated. Solely faux bands instantly seem on streaming companies, particularly bands polished sufficient to be as mediocre as The Velvet Sunset. In keeping with the Spotify bio, Velvet Sundown’s members are Gabe Farrow, Lennie West, Milo Raines, and Orion “Rio” Del Mar. I can discover no proof of those individuals having performed with different bands, or present.
Exhibit 4: The regulation of averages
Spotify would not announce how a lot of the music on its service is made by AI, however at this level, I assume the reply is “most of it.” It is simply a lot simpler to create an AI-generated piece of music than make your individual. To be in an actual band, it’s a must to spend years working towards music, then discover different individuals who need to play music with you, lease a studio, write the track, and so on. It takes years to go from nothing to “this is my first track.” It took Leonard Cohen 5 years to document “Hallelujah.” It took me eight minutes (I timed it) to make use of Claude.ai and Suno to create radio-ready nation hit “Ready to Die.“
What do you assume to date?
The AI music invasion
The Velvet Sundown aren’t alone. There are whole genres of music on-line that sound like they have been made by machines. The Velvets (as followers name them) aren’t even essentially the most profitable fake-seeming band on Spotify. Take a hearken to the Jazz for Research playlist. The primary “artist” listed, “The Tremendous Sensible Trio,” has no presence on-line outdoors of music streaming companies, has launched a complete of 12 songs, and its greatest hit, “Ease Up,” has been performed over three million occasions. Or the “Tate Jackson Trio.” They’ve over 12 million performs for “It is within the Center of the Evening,” however they do not have a web site and there is not any proof they’ve ever performed a present. Try lofi chill, a Spotify-curated playlist the place “artists” like “Mellow Mirror” rack up hundreds of thousands of performs, regardless of solely having launched 12 songs, and exhibiting no signal of present. I am unable to say for positive whether or not it is all AI, but it surely walks like a duck and it is quacking actually loud.
Why we must always care
If somebody’s having fun with “Mud on the Wind” whereas they’re finding out or planning a killing spree, what distinction does it make if Orion “Rio” Del Mar (the wacky one) is faux? There is no use in shaking your fist at a thunderstorm; the takeover of the whole lot good and human is occurring, irrespective of the way you or I really feel about it. However (as illustrated by my nation hip-hop masterpiece “Ready to Die“) we do not have eternally on this life, and I might wish to select whether or not or to not partake in AI-generated artwork experiences. Once I hit play on a track, I am getting into into an unstated settlement that someplace, someway, a human being sat down and tried to specific one thing. That is why I like music.
Again within the Seventies, when Kraftwerk imagined the machine-generated music of the longer term, at the very least it was cool: robotic, exact, chilly, hypnotic, and undeniably futuristic. The AI music flooding Spotify right now is not visionary; it is simply mediocre human music made by computer systems that have been educated to be boring. Can we simply get an opt-out button? The entire thing has me so mad I had AI write a KROQ-ready pop punk track about it.
