AI-Generated Band Velvet Sundown Has Millions of Streams

Entrepreneur

14-07-2025

Hot new band Velvet Sundown has revealed itself to be "not quite human."
If you are one of Velvet Sundown's adoring fans, seeing them perform in a city near you is going to be problematic.
After releasing two albums, Floating On Echoes and Dust And Silence, that have earned the group 1.2 million listeners on Spotify, the folk-country music "band" revealed itself to be an AI creation — everything from their music to their images and backstory.
In a post on X from Velvet Sundown's official account, the poster wrote, "The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence. 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."
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The post went on to state, "All characters, stories, music, voices and lyrics are original creations generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools employed as creative instruments. Any resemblance to actual places, events or persons - living or deceased - is purely coincidental and unintentional. Not quite human. Not quite machine."
The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.
This isn't a trick - it's a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of… pic.twitter.com/8qwoFFOPNx — The Velvet Sundown (@tvs_music) July 5, 2025
As The Guardian points out, Spotify and other streaming services are under no legal obligation to identify AI-generated work. This raises concerns over consumer transparency and infringing on the works of the human bands that the AI was trained on, say experts the paper spoke to. Sophie Jones, the chief strategy officer of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), told The Guardian that the organizaion was calling on law makers to "protect copyright and introduce new transparency obligations for AI companies so that music rights can be licensed and enforced, as well as calling for the clear labelling of content solely generated by AI."
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Jones added, "The rise of AI-generated bands and music entering the market points to the fact that tech companies have been training AI models using creative works – largely without authorisation or payment to creators and rights-holders – in order to directly compete with human artistry."
Velvet Sundown isn't the first AI-generated music act to gain traction. The 2023 track "Heart on My Sleeve" was created using AI-generated voices that mimicked The Weeknd and Drake, and Variety reports that the human behind the song submitted it for Grammy consideration.