Real or AI: Band confirms use of artificial intelligence for its music on Spotify

The Velvet Sundown, a four-person band, or so it seems, has garnered a lot of attention on Spotify. It started posting music on the platform in early June and has since released two full albums with a few more singles and another album coming soon. Naturally, listeners started to accuse the band of being an AI-generated project, which as it now turns out, is true.

The band or music project called The Velvet Sundown has over a million monthly listeners on Spotify. That’s an impressive debut considering their first album called “Floating on Echoes” hit the music streaming platform on June 4. Then, on June 19, their second album called “Dust and Silence” was added to the library. Next week, July 14, will mark the release of the third album called “Paper Sun Rebellion.” Since their debut, listeners have accused the band of being an AI-generated project and now, the owners of the project have updated the Spotify bio and called it a “synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.”

It goes on to state that this project challenges the boundaries of “authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.” The owners claim that the characters, stories, music, voices, and lyrics are “original creations generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools,” but it is unclear to what extent AI was involved in the development process.

The band art shows four individuals suggesting they are owners of the project, but the images are likely AI-generated as well. Interestingly, Andrew Frelon (pseudonym) claimed to be the owner of the AI band initially, but then confirmed that was untrue and that he pretended to run their Twitter because he wanted to insert an “extra layer of weird into this story,” of this AI band.

As it stands now, The Velvet Sundown’s music is available on Spotify with the new album releasing next week. Now, whether this unveiling causes a spike or a decline in monthly listeners, remains to be seen.