The Truth Behind Viral AI Band The Velvet Sundown
The Velvet Sundown, a band that has amassed over 900,000 monthly Spotify listeners, has officially put an end to the speculation. In a recent update to their Spotify bio, they have confirmed what many experts and fans already suspected: their music is generated by artificial intelligence.
An Artistic Provocation
The revised bio directly addresses their synthetic origins, stating, “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.”
The project frames itself not as a deception but as a thoughtful experiment. The bio continues, “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.”
It further clarifies the nature of their creation: “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 lives somewhere in between.”
The Hoax That Tested the Media
The band’s sudden emergence in June, which saw them land on popular Spotify playlists, led to significant media attention and a peculiar side story. An individual named Andrew Frelon created an elaborate hoax, impersonating the band on X (formerly Twitter). Frelon even conducted a phone interview with Rolling Stone, falsely claiming to be a spokesperson for the project. In a detailed Medium post, he later claimed his days-long deception was an experiment designed to test the media's verification processes.
The Spotify Algorithm's Role
How does an entirely AI-generated band achieve such massive listenership seemingly overnight? Glenn McDonald, a former “data alchemist” at Spotify, offered some potential insight to Rolling Stone. He suggests The Velvet Sundown's popularity is likely a result of two key factors on the streaming platform. First, Spotify now accepts payments to boost placement on playlists. Second, the service is increasingly relying on algorithms, rather than human curators, to populate playlists and make recommendations based on a song's audio characteristics.
