After Spokesperson Finally Admits Its Members Don't Exist, 'The Velvet Sundown', An AI-Generated Band, Has Surpassed 1 Million Monthly Listeners On Spotify

Rolling Stone – The AI band The Velvet Sundown, who currently have over 900,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, have officially admitted — in a new revisionto 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.”

This was only a matter of time. I knew a day would come where an AI-powered band would hit the scene, and their sweet synthetic sounds would be pleasing enough to the ear that we'd collectively decide it's worth compromising our values and ushering in the era of robot music. But I had hoped that band would be a little more exciting than The Velvet Sundown. Is The Velvet Sundown really the band we're going to risk opening the AI-music floodgates for? Their songs are perfectly fine. I don't hate them. I certainly wouldn't question them if they came on at the grocery store. But the bar for AI-music needs to be set higher than that. If that's as good as AI-music needs to be in order for it to breach the 1M monthly listens mark on Spotify, then we are making it WAY too easy for AI.

I'm not saying that The Velvet Sundown doesn't mix textures of 70's psychedelic alt-rock and folk rock, and blend effortlessly with modern alt-pop and indie structures in a way that doesn't shout for your attention, but rather seeps in slowly like a scent that suddenly takes you back somewhere you didn't expect.

But there is an endless number of exceptionally talented artists out there who the world will never get a chance to hear, simply because there's such an insane amount of music to choose from. There are so many bands with songs that could easily be Top 40 hits in this country, if only the powers at be decided to put their resources behind them. So if we're going to have an AI band go mainstream, their music better be really fucking good. Like, immediately texting your friends, "You have to hear this!" good. Listening on repeat for a week straight until you know the lyrics by heart good. Not, "Yeah that's a pretty good song" good. "Yeah that's a pretty good song" isn't nearly good enough for an AI band. If you have Drift Beyond The Flame by The Velvet Sundown in your daily rotation, you are WAY to eager to kick human-made music to the curb.   

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I'm hoping the reason The Velvet Sundown is as popular as they are is more due to curiosity, and the fact that they're the first AI-band the world has truly come to face with. But whoever is behind The Velvet Sundown, whether they did so intentionally or not, they've knocked their marketing out of the park. They went the good ol' fashioned payola route (which is apparently legal now) in paying Spotify to boost their placements on playlists. All photos of their band were the perfect level of AI-generated. Enough that the pictures were clearly AI. Enough to get themselves busted. But not too much so that people wouldn't look at the pictures and say, "I think The Velvet Sundown is trying to pull a fast one on us. They want us to think they're real people. Well not on my watch. They won't get away with this. I won't fall for this AI-music bullshit as I go over their pictures with a fine tooth comb, listen to their albums in full to see if I can uncover any inconsistencies, and write an entire blog about them. How dumb do they think we are?"

When the AI accusations first broke, The Velvet Sundown even had unsolicited (allegedly) strangers on the internet pretending to represent them. Creating Twitter accounts where they vehemently denied being a "fake band". One person went as far as to take a phone interview with The Rolling Stone in which he falsely claimed to be the band's spokesperson. All things that only furthered the conversation, and fanned the flames of all the internet sleuths who proudly managed to crack the code, and continued to loudly double, triple, and quadruple down on The Velvet Sundown being a NOT REAL BAND. All playing perfectly into The Velvet Sundown's hands, to the tune of 1.1M monthly listeners on Spotify. 

But as of a couple days ago, the actual person (or people) behind The Velvet Sundown released an official statement in which they finally fessed up to what exactly it is they're doing.

They even added it to their Spotify bio.

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That seems to be a popular justification of people who profit off the back of AI-powered whatever at the expense of real people. "This isn't some cheap trick. We're actually challenging the boundaries of authorship. It's a mirror to the world." Like they're trying to make some sort of greater statement about the current state of music. But regardless of what The Velvet Sundown is setting out to do, according to Wiseband.com, artists can expect between $3,000-$5,000 for every 1M streams. I'm not exactly sure how much time and money goes into running a successful AI-band, but I'm pretty sure it takes significantly less effort than producing two, 13-song albums of original man-made music. 

Of all the things AI could potentially take over one day, music might be the saddest of them all. There's just so many artists out there who put their whole lives into trying to make it in the industry. And even if their music is incredible, they still have to catch so many breaks in order to really breakthrough. Having to compete with AI technology capable of creating a hit song in literal seconds has to be such a punch in the gut. How dare you, The Velvet Sundown.

Third album of the year coming July 14th.