In an update to their Spotify bio, the viral AI ‘band’ call themselves ‘an ongoing artistic provocation’
The AI band The Velvet Sundown, who currently have over 900,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, have officially admitted — in a new revision to their Spotify bio — what was obvious to experts and non-experts alike: their music is, in fact, AI-generated.
“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 band bio now reads. “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.”
The “band” went viral and attracted extensive media coverage after emerging out of nowhere in June and appearing on popular Spotify playlists. They also inspired an apparent hoaxer, using the name Andrew Frelon, who now says he impersonated the band on X and falsely claimed to be a spokesperson for the band in interactions with the media, including a phone interview with Rolling Stone. His elaborate, days-long hoax was aimed at testing the media, he claimed in a lengthy Medium post.
The Spotify bio goes on to say, “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.”
Glenn McDonald, a former “data alchemist” for Spotify, told Rolling Stone earlier this week that The Velvet Sundown’s popularity there is likely because the streaming service now accepts payments to boost playlist placement, while also increasingly moving away from human-driven playlist selections toward algorithms that “can pick songs for recommendations based on characteristics of their audio.”
