AI-Generated Band with Millions of Spotify Streams – But Is It Real?

If you're a devoted fan of Velvet Sundown, catching their live show in your area may prove difficult.

After releasing two albums, Floating On Echoes and Dust And Silence that have made the group successful 1.2 million fans on Spotify The folk-country music group was exposed as an artificial intelligence project—everything from their songs to their photos and history.

On an update posted by Velvet Sundown’s official page on X, the message stated, “Velvet Sundown is a digital musical endeavor led by human creativity, developed, sung, and visually represented using artificial intelligence assistance. This is not deception — it's reflection. A continuous artful challenge aimed at testing the limits of ownership, selfhood, and the evolving landscape of music within the era of AI.”

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The statement continued, "Every character, narrative, melody, voice, and lyric was created originally using artificial intelligence technologies as artistic aids. Any similarity to real locations, occurrences, or individuals—whether alive or passed away—is entirely accidental and not meant. Neither fully human nor completely mechanical."

As The Guardian notes, Spotify and other music streaming platforms have no legal requirement to label content created using artificial intelligence. Experts interviewed in the study express worries about clarity for listeners and potential violations against the original works of human musicians used to train the AI. Sophie Jones, the Chief Strategy Officer at the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), stated The Guardian that the organization urged lawmakers to "safeguard intellectual property and implement additional disclosure requirements for artificial intelligence firms, ensuring that musical copyrights can be properly licensed and upheld, along with advocating for explicit labeling of material entirely created by AI."

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Jones stated, "The emergence of AI-created bands and musical content flooding the marketplace indicates that technology firms have been developing artificial intelligence systems by utilizing artistic creations—mostly without permission or compensation for artists and copyright holders—to openly challenge human creativity."

Velvet Sundown is not the initial artificial intelligence-created musical group to achieve popularity. In 2023, the song "Heart on My Sleeve" was produced with AI-generated vocals imitating The Weeknd and Drake, and Variety states that the person who wrote the song entered it for Grammy nomination.