The Velvet Sundown, the AI-generated rock band that's taking off

A huge artistic deception. Music fans have been wondering for weeks about The Velvet Sundown , a band that came out of nowhere and is enjoying meteoric success on Spotify. This track, for example, titled “Dust on the Wind,” has a million streams. And the band has nearly a million subscribers on Spotify in just a few weeks of existence.

Whirlwind career debuts do exist, but there are some very strange things about them. Quite a few clues suggest that this is music and a band entirely generated by AI (with a human behind it, though). Their music is rather sanitized, with ultra-smooth mixing, mechanical and slightly stereotypical verses and choruses, and lyrics full of clichés.

No human imperfections, no tempo, no breathing, no accents. It's all very clean, but soulless. The band's visuals, super smooth and clearly AI-generated. The fact that we can't find any information on the band or any of its members (whose names we have) before this meteoric rise to fame. They have no social media profiles, have never given an interview... or a concert.

The band's highly prolific nature, releasing two albums, and soon three, in the space of a few weeks. After weeks of speculation, the band, or rather the humans behind the band, admitted that Velvet Sundown didn't exist, that it was "an artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of creation, identity, and the future of music in the age of AI." It's safe to say they've done quite well.

It must be said that it has become child's play to create hyper-effective songs with tools like Suno. Anyone can prompt a request. In fact, everything is optimized to please the algorithms of streaming platforms: a very identifiable retro rock sound that never shocks the ear, which will enter many playlists for example "to listen to while driving" or "while working", a soft voice and catchy choruses, pieces formatted around 2 or 3 minutes.

The band may also have helped with bot networks, fake listeners who generate streams on platforms and artificially boost a band's popularity. And once the press started to pick up on it, the viral effect did the rest. Spotify's competitor, Deezer , recently launched a tool that detects AI-generated tracks, a sort of authenticity score, precisely to avoid being invaded by artificial music.

He estimates that more than 10% of all tracks uploaded right now are generated by AI, a real threat to the income of real artists. They aren't removed from the platform, but algorithmic recommendations, to favor human creators. Beyond the financial issue, this raises a real philosophical question about the notion of art: does there necessarily have to be a human intention? If I listen to a track, I like it, it moves me, and then I learn that it was generated by AI, does that change anything?

A large part of the songs we listen to on the radio or on platforms could clearly be replaced by AI, which will offer me hyper-personalized songs based on my tastes, themes that interest me or that touch me... Knowing that when you make fans listen to songs generated by an AI and those of a real artist, very few are able to tell the difference.