Is The Velvet Sundown Real? | The AI Music Hoax That Infiltrated Spotify & Shook the Industry 🎸🤖
A Synthetic Sensation that's Forcing us to Confront the Future of Human Creativity
Last month, music fans scrolling through their Spotify Discover Weekly playlists encountered something peculiar! A band called “The Velvet Sundown,” whose dreamy indie rock tracks like "Dust on the Wind," "Drift Beyond the Flame," and "End the Pain" seemed to emerge from nowhere, yet somehow felt hauntingly familiar. Within weeks, this mysterious group had amassed over 470,000 monthly listeners and climbed onto major playlists alongside established artists. There was just one problem:
“The Velvet Sundown” DOESN'T EXIST.
What unfolded next became one of the most fascinating controversies in modern music history; a story that reveals not just the power of algorithmic music & artificial intelligence, but the fragility of our relationship with authenticity itself.
The Rapid Rise of a Phantom Band
The Velvet Sundown's meteoric ascent defied every convention of the music industry. In less than a month, they went from complete obscurity to over 850,000 monthly Spotify listeners at one point, releasing two full albums with a third on the way. Their bio described four band members; singer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, synth player Milo Raines, and drummer Orion "Rio" Del Mar. Yet none of these individuals could be found anywhere online.
The band's Instagram account, created just days before their viral moment, featured AI-generated photos of the supposed members celebrating album releases with suspiciously perfect burgers arranged without plates. Their press photos bore the telltale signs of AI generation:
Yellow-tinted, hyper-realistic faces with an uncanny valley perfection that made viewers uncomfortable without quite knowing why.
But it was the music that truly raised eyebrows. While pleasant enough for some to slip unnoticed into a playlist, the tracks revealed their artificial nature under closer scrutiny. Music producer Rick Beato, with over 5 million YouTube subscribers, identified what he called "artifacts" in the guitar and keyboard segments. These are the digital fingerprints that exposed the songs' AI origins.
The Smoking Gun | AI Detection Tools Reveal the Truth
The mystery deepened when Deezer, the only major streaming platform currently flagging AI-generated content, ran The Velvet Sundown's music through its detection systems. The results were unambiguous: 100% AI-generated.
French tech company Ircam Amplify later confirmed that at least 12 of the 13 tracks on their "Dust and Silence" album were created using Suno 4.5, an AI music model.
"We can see that all their tracks are one hundred percent AI-generated,"
confirmed Alexis Lanternier, CEO of Deezer. This revelation came as Deezer reported that approximately 18% of tracks uploaded to their platform weekly; around 180,000 songs are now flagged as AI-generated, a figure that has tripled in just two years.
Meanwhile, Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music remained silent, offering no indication to listeners that they were consuming synthetic music.
The Official Confirmation
In July 2025, The Velvet Sundown finally ended the speculation. Their updated Spotify bio now reads:
"The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence."
They describe themselves as
"an ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music in the AI era."
The bio continues:
"Not entirely human. Not entirely machine. The Velvet Sundown exists in a space between."
The Economics of Artificial Authenticity
The financial implications of The Velvet Sundown's success are staggering. With Spotify's per-stream payouts ranging from $0.003 to $0.005, their monthly streams could generate up to $2,400 per month; a significant income for what amounts to algorithmic (& illegal) amalgamation of music.
This success comes at a time when Spotify has made it even harder for human artists to earn money. The platform recently demonetized all tracks with fewer than 1,000 streams annually, affecting approximately 60% of all music on the platform. While Spotify claims this policy targets "functional genres" like white noise, critics argue it further marginalizes emerging artists struggling to build audiences.
"It's theft dressed up as competition! AI companies appropriate artists' work to construct their products, then inundate the market with imitations, resulting in diminished earnings for human musicians."
said Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, an organization defending creator rights against AI.
The Bot Farm Conspiracy
Perhaps most troubling are allegations that The Velvet Sundown's popularity itself is artificial. Music industry observers suggest the band's rapid growth resulted from bot farms; automated systems that stream songs repeatedly to game Spotify's algorithms. These bots allegedly play dedicated farming playlists until tracks achieve enough perceived popularity to appear on legitimate playlists.
"For those wondering how The Velvet Sundown grew from 0 to 500k monthly listeners on Spotify in less than 1 month... They used bots,"
noted one industry analyst on Reddit.
Glenn McDonald, a former data scientist at Spotify, suggested the band's rise might be attributed to the platform's current practice of accepting payments for enhanced playlist visibility, combined with a shift toward algorithm-driven recommendations that select songs based on audio characteristics rather than human curation.
Spotify's Silent Complicity
Critics argue that Spotify itself bears responsibility for the controversy. Unlike Deezer, which proactively flags AI-generated content, Spotify has remained conspicuously silent on the issue. While CEO Daniel Ek has stated that AI music isn't banned from the platform, he has expressed concerns about using such technology to mimic real artists (while secretly funding many AI music platforms & projects.)
However, some observers see a more calculated motive. As our previous analysis noted:
"It will be immensely profitable for Record Labels & streaming services like Spotify to have AI artists & pay them nothing, instead of human artists."
The platform's apparent willingness to promote AI-generated content without disclosure suggests they may be testing public reaction to synthetic music.
The Broader Implications
The Velvet Sundown phenomenon represents more than just a clever hoax; it's a mirror reflecting our deepest anxieties about authenticity, creativity, and human value in an AI-dominated future. Professor Gina Neff from the University of Cambridge's Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy warned that such incidents highlight a broader societal challenge:
"Our collective grip on reality seems shaky."
The controversy has reignited industry fears about AI's impact on musicians. High-profile artists like Sir Elton John and Dua Lipa have advocated for stronger government regulation of AI in music, while advocacy groups argue that AI companies are undermining creativity by training on human-made songs without permission.
The Velvet Sundown's Dark Warning
As The Velvet Sundown continues to evolve, they have even announced upcoming tour dates, raising questions about how an AI band might perform live?! They force us to confront uncomfortable questions about the future of human creativity.
Some people ask that
“If listeners can't distinguish between human and AI-generated music, does the distinction matter?”
This question misses a more urgent reality:
We are already drowning in a sea of algorithmic mediocrity, and AI music threatens to push us completely underwater.
The current music industry, dominated by streaming platforms that pay artists fractions of pennies per stream, has already created a nightmarish landscape where genuine artistry struggles to survive. The market is catastrophically overcrowded; with over 100,000 tracks uploaded to Spotify daily, human musicians are fighting for scraps of attention in an increasingly impossible ecosystem.
Platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels have already been training an entire generation to consume bite-sized, algorithmically-optimized content designed for delivering instant gratification & maximum engagement rather than a meaningful connection & lasting emotional resonance.
AI music doesn't just enter this landscape; it weaponizes it. When algorithms can create songs that move (some of) us emotionally, what we are really witnessing is the perfection of manipulation. These systems are trained (illegally) on decades of human creativity, learning to push our psychological buttons with surgical precision.
They don't create art; they manufacture emotional responses optimized for maximum addictive potential.
The Future of Music
The Velvet Sundown's success reveals how easily people can be deceived, but more troubling is what happens when we are no longer being deceived.
When AI music becomes so normalized that we stop caring about its origins, we risk entering a world where authentic human expression is not just economically unviable, but culturally irrelevant.The Velvet Sundown may be artificial, but the questions they raise about authenticity, creativity, and the future of human expression are devastatingly real. As their bio states, The Velvet Sundown exists "in a space between;" but that liminal space isn't where the future of music should be decided. It's where we risk losing our humanity entirely.
The choice is still ours, but the window for meaningful action is rapidly closing.
The future of music isn't being decided by algorithms; it's being decided by us, right now, with every stream, every purchase, and every moment we choose authentic human expression over synthetic perfection.
🫵🏼 What do YOU think about AI-generated music? Should streaming platforms be required to disclose when content is artificially created? What are you doing to support human artists in your own listening habits?
💬 Share YOUR thoughts in the comments below because this fight requires all of us.
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Whether or not AI needs to be identified or segregated in music streaming platforms, the intent to deceive the consumer consumer was clear: AI created audio content with AI visual imagery of band members that don’t exist and the use of bots to inflate the numbers in the algorithm to infiltrate listener streams. It would be more interesting if the project was identified as AI with visual personas like pen names…maybe a perceived band history designed by AI. But this attempt was clearly just designed to make money from nothing ( and your chicks for free,). MTV, meet 1984. 1984, this is the 21st century.
Thank you Chinmaya for blowing the whistle on this farago, it’s something I couldn’t have dreamed or had a nightmare of! Yeah, just what we need, an AI band made up of non-existent people and computer created music. I’m so glad I had a life where I saw, heard, and sometimes played with some of the greatest Blues, Rock and Roll and Folk artists of the 20th century. I’m retired now, but this kind of shit makes me want to start recording and, doing something no AI generated band can do, (yet…) PLAY LIVE! GO TO SHOWS! KEEP MUSIC LIVE AND HUMAN! FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR VERY SOULS. WHAT’S NEXT,AI GROUPIES? MAY THE GODS SAVE US.