A fifth of music on streaming site is AI generated

The Herald Scotland

10-07-2025

Enter The Velvet Sundown, a mysterious, new, all-male four-piece peddling blameless acoustic balladry and racking up large numbers of plays. Dust In The Wind, a track from debut album Floating On Echoes, released last month, has over a million on Spotify and at the time of writing the group enjoyed 1.1 million monthly listeners. But are they real? Many think not. The band members are named but there are no associated social media accounts. They've never given an interview. They've never played live. As far as anyone can tell.
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Someone did pop up claiming the project was an 'art hoax' but was then revealed in turn to be a hoaxer. Rolling Stone investigated but only muddied the waters, though Yahoo Entertainment did receive a communication from someone claiming to be a true representative of the band. 'The Velvet Sundown is a multidisciplinary artistic project blending music, analog aesthetics, and speculative storytelling,' it read. Whatever that means. Website Tech Radar was a little more forthright in its judgement. 'Apple and Spotify are sleepwalking into an AI music crisis,' it wrote last week. 'The Velvet Sundown mess shows they need to act fast.'
Does it matter? It does. As with all things AI-related, generated music is a potentially grey legal area given ongoing wrangles over potential copyright infringements. Trouble is it's also a way to make money by throwing into the digital ether huge amounts of music of dubious quality and – if something takes off – sitting back and watching the royalties roll in. Or simply using bots to generate millions of plays, which has the same effect.
In September 2024, in the first case of its kind, the FBI arrested one Mike Smith and charged him in an AI streaming fraud case involving just that practice. The United States Attorney's Office has charged Mr Smith with 'a scheme to create hundreds of thousands of songs with artificial intelligence and use automated programs called 'bots' to stream the AI-generated songs billions of times.' The contention is that he 'fraudulently obtained more than $10 million in royalty payments through his scheme.' Mr Smith denies the charges and is currently on bail, but faces a significant prison spell if found guilty.
Unhelpfully, Spotify doesn't flag AI-generated content, one of the prompts for that Tech Radar headline. But last month music streamer Deezer did launch an AI tagging system which will show which albums on the site are entirely AI generated. This follows data released by the Paris-based company revealing how much of all music uploaded to its platform daily is AI-generated: 18%. That's more than 20,000 individual tracks.
To fall back on the lyrics of two men who were real – the great Motown songwriting duo of Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong – the world today is a ball of confusion. And let's throw in some Jim Royle too: The Velvet Sundown, my arse.
Boxing clever
The Edinburgh TV Festival has announced the shortlist for its TV Awards, with the winner to be announced on August 21 as part of the annual industry meet. And there's a decent Scottish showing in the prestigious Best Drama category, with Baby Reindeer and Lockerbie: A Search for Truth both bagging nominations – though they'll have stiff competition from fellow nominees Slow Horses, Rivals, the excellent Northern Ireland-set cop show Blue Lights and (surely the winner) Netflix smash Adolescence. Richard Gadd (Best TV Actor) and Ashley Storrie (Best Breakthrough Performance) are also nominated.
Richard Gadd, of Baby Reindeer (Image: PA)
In the Best International Drama category, meanwhile, you'll find After the Party, Dope Thief, Mussolini: Son Of The Century, Severance, The Studio and the Marmite-y Ripley (well, I liked it).
For the record, the BBC leads the shortlist with 25 nominations across the broadcaster and individual talent categories with ITV in second place with 15 nominations. Channel 4 has 14 while streamers Netflix, Apple TV and Disney+ have 12, five and four respectively. Not that anyone's counting.
Yeah, right.
The festival, which will be celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, runs from August 19 to 22 and will also see Sir Lenny Henry given the Outstanding Achievement Award in recognition of his own half century.
And finally
The Herald's theatre critic Neil Cooper is continuing to take the temperature of the well-liked Bard In The Botanics programme at Glasgow Botanic Gardens. Appropriately enough for the time of year he watched a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, here given an equally timely free festival makeover albeit with a 1970s twist, and then sampled far darker fare with Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in Jennifer Dick's three-actor version. Then it was off to Pitlochry Festival Theatre for another tale that does not end well – a new adaptation by Elizabeth Newman of F Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age classic The Great Gatsby.
Elsewhere dance critic Mary Brennan enjoyed Ballet Nights, a curated evening of dance which saw some Scottish Ballet luminaries return to Glasgow's Theatre Royal, among them Sophie Martin, Constance Devernay-Laurence and Eve Mutso. Five stars for this bold new initiative. 'Here's hoping Ballet Nights adds Glasgow to its touring schedules,' is how Mary signs off. Fingers crossed.
Barry Didcock is an Edinburgh-based Herald writer and freelance journalist specialising in arts, culture and media. He can be found on X at @BarryDidcock