The Velvet Sundown: viral band that doesn't actually exist

The Velvet Sundown, apparently a four-piece band of "shaggy-haired rockers", arrived on the music scene seemingly out of nowhere in June with a blend of "laid-back 1970s-inspired rock and modern indie pop", said CBC.

Now the group are racking up a million streams per month on Spotify, featuring in several of the platform's popular playlists.

So far, so good. But "savvy listeners" quickly realised "something was off". The Velvet Sundown had never performed in person, gave no interviews, and their album artwork bears the "hallmarks of generative AI". Were they even real?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

'Soulless lacklustre'

After internet sleuths got to work, the "band" was forced to confirm its existence as a "synthetic music project", created with the help of artificial intelligence tools, said Rolling Stone.

Music critics and technology experts began to piece together the "technical quilt" that could make an AI-generated album possible, said The Atlantic. ChatGPT can create "plausible" lyrics: "Dust in the Wind", the Velvet Sundown's most popular track, regales the listener with lines such as "dust on the wind / boots on the ground / smoke in the sky / no peace found". Meanwhile, software such as Suno can generate "instrumentation and vocals" with just a few prompts.

But the Velvet Sundown's "soulless lacklustre" and "milquetoast moodiness" may actually hold the secret to the band's success. Its monotony appears ideal in an era where listeners are simply looking for music to "drown out everything else".

'Theft dressed up as competition'

A "rising tide" of generative AI is seeping into popular playlists used for studying or relaxing, interspersing real tracks with "gobs of computer-generated slop", said Futurism.

Whether hoax or experiment, "paying punters" do "deserve to know if the band we are listening to is fake", said TechRadar, but many streaming platforms refuse to label music as generated by AI.

With this information, and the knowledge that AI music is now such an "easy way to generate revenue", an "absolute deluge" of generated content is "on the way" to our streaming platforms.

Musicians are alarmed. The Velvet Sundown is "theft dressed up as competition", Ed Newton-Rex told the BBC. Newton-Rex, a composer and founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights, warned this technology has the potential to impact livelihoods, and is "exactly what artists have been worried about".