Meet Velvet Sundown, Spotify's hottest new band. But are they real?
The group have all the hallmarks of AI, from their lifeless photographs to the lack of evidence the musicians exist or have ever played live.
But just as their apparently hoodwinked 'fans' and the industry had concluded that this was another case of AI killing off real stars, the Velvet Sundown popped up to defend themselves.
'Absolutely crazy that so-called 'journalists' keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that The Velvet Sundown is 'AI-generated' with zero evidence,' they wrote on X to their rather underwhelming audience of 92 followers.
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'This is not a joke. This is our music, written in long, sweaty nights in a cramped bungalow in California with real instruments, real minds, and real soul. Every chord, every lyric, every mistake — HUMAN.'Just because we don't do TikTok dances or livestream our process doesn't mean we're fake … We are REAL!'
Adding to the mystery is that this X account is not the one linked to from their Spotify profile. Whoever is making the pleas, they have fallen on deaf ears. Deezer, the streaming service that flags AI music on its platform, said on a label: 'Some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence'.
However, Spotify does not have a policy of labelling AI music and some fans felt misled by the platform's 'verified artist' label attached to the Velvet Sundown, which only means that it is the artist's stream.
Daniel Ek, Spotify's co-founder and chief executive, has been generally positive about the potential of AI's impact on music. He said in May: 'I'm mostly optimistic and mostly very excited because we're just in the beginning of understanding this future of creativity that we're entering.
• Alexa's AI song generator angers music industry
'We want real humans to make it as artists and creators, but what is creativity in the future with AI? I don't know. What is music?'
However, while some artists such as the producer Timbaland and Ryan Tedder, a songwriter for Adele and Taylor Swift, are embracing it, the technology represents a threat to different parts of the industry.
• Jimmy Page: AI is putting the magic of human artistry at stake
The new AI music-making platforms such as Suno and Udio are being sued by the record companies for breach of copyright. Fraudsters are also uploading AI tracks and getting bots to listen to them to generate revenue.
Deezer said that 18 per cent of all music uploaded to the platform daily — more than 20,000 tracks — were 100 per cent AI-generated. Of these, 70 per cent were fraudulent, which risks crowding out genuine artists.
Spotify has a policy of not manually recommending AI tracks on playlists and will ban AI songs that impersonate real artists. However, the Velvet Sundown's success appears to have stemmed from the fact that Spotify has been putting the band's songs on the popular Discover Weekly playlist, which is algorithmically created.
The Velvet Sundown are not the only AI success story on Spotify. Music Business Worldwide this week identified 13 AI-made 'artists' on the platform with 4.1 million monthly listeners between them. They include a country artist called Aventhis (a million listeners), a group called the Devil Inside (700,000 listeners) and a Marvin Gaye-inspired Nick Hustles (200,000 listeners).
• Will AI give us new McCartney and Dylan albums in 2060?
The musician and author Chris Dalla Riva said on TikTok: 'Since it's so easy to generate music this way, you could flood services with this music and completely crowd out people who are trying to make a career as an artist, trying to make legitimate art. If you are just writing a prompt and generating hundreds of songs at scale, it's very clear that this is just a way for you to try to make money.'
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