The Velvet Sundown, the AI-generated band with over 850,000 Spotify listeners

The Velvet Sundown , a band unknown and largely unknown on the internet, has managed to surpass 850,000 monthly listeners on Spotify with soft guitar-driven songs and male vocals. None of the men featured in the band's photo on the music platform exist in real life. Both the image and all of their songs are generated using artificial intelligence.

This band, first reported by Rolling Stone , has sparked a storm of doubt about musical authenticity in the age of AI. First, a purported spokesperson for the band—one Andrew Felon—told the publication that the songs had been generated using Suno , a free platform specializing in music generation and text-to-music conversion. Felon himself later confessed that he had fabricated his business relationship with the band: “A deliberate plot to deceive the media.”

The confusion is such that the group's own verified page on Spotify has published a statement disassociating itself from both the spokesperson and the account that supposedly represents them on X (formerly Twitter).

Meanwhile, rival platform Deezer claims its detection tool has flagged the songs as “100% AI-generated.” Spotify has not yet commented, though its CEO, Daniel Ek , told the BBC in May that it had no plans to ban AI-generated music, though it did reject its use to mimic real artists.

Gina Neff, a professor at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, explained on the BBC that this case is a symptom of something much larger and more relevant: “It may not matter whether this gang is AI or not, but it does matter that we are increasingly struggling to distinguish what is real.”

The debate over copyright and the use of human material to train AI models continues. Musicians such as Elton John and Dua Lipa have unsuccessfully tried to pressure the British government to regulate the use of their works. "This is exactly what we feared: theft disguised as competition," lamented Ed Newton Rex , founder of Fairly Trained, an organization that defends creators' rights, in several interviews.

The music industry, through figures such as Sophie Jones, head of strategy at BPI , the association that defends copyright in the United Kingdom, is calling for clear measures: “The Velvet Sundown case reinforces the concerns we have been expressing about the relationship between AI and music rights.”