By Aaron Davoren
The last two months has seen a meteoric rise of a mysterious psychedelic rock/ country band named “The Velvet Sundown” on Spotify. The supposed band released not one but two full albums in June and are expected to release their third full LP on 14 July. With over 1.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify as of 11 July, and millions of streams with their catalogue of songs, to the blind eye, many may categorise it as an instant success story and yet another upcoming rock band to add to a stacked list in the last year or two for music lovers. However, something isn’t quite right…
Many people have looked further into the band in recent weeks and have seen multiple glaring clues to suggest that the band’s members and music are AI generated. These allegations were indeed correct, as of 11 July, the ‘about section’ of the band (on Spotify) states that “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction and composed, voiced, and visualised with the support of artificial intelligence.” Some would argue that at least admitting to the use of AI is somewhat applaudable, however this wasn’t the case in previous weeks. According to Neve Dawson from the Independent, “The band’s Spotify page claimed that they were a four-piece consisting of singer “Gabe Farrow”, guitarist “Lennie West”, bassist “Milo Rains” and percussionist “Orion ‘Rio’ Del Mar”.“
When people went digging the internet to find anything about these supposed artists, absolutely nothing was found. No live performances, interviews, previous work, social media… nothing.
To add to this, the cover picture they use on their spotify profile is clearly fake and while the music may sound good to some, upon closer listening, the sound is robotic and the lyrics are certainly likely to be AI generated.
There is some suggesting that this bot band gets most of its listeners from bot fans. Music artist Andrew Southworth noticed that Velvet Sundown gained exactly 18,679 monthly listeners per day and 79 new followers for 3 weeks straight. This isn’t confirmed proof but without question eyebrow raising.
First of all, the lack of transparency from the origins of this band, initially trying to claim as real people is unacceptable but also a scary example of the powers of artificial intelligence conning people from reality.
Secondly, whether people believe in using AI in the creative and arts industry or not, it needs to be more strictly monitored and taken more seriously from a legal standpoint . The Velvet Sundown are taking over a million monthly listeners away, (legitly or not) from real artists, real music, real talent. In an industry suffering the greatest due to new technology we need to keep our stars protected.