AI Horizon

The Velvet Sundown burst onto the music scene in early June and in the space of just a few weeks gained an astonishing 400,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. 

But its bland music style, hyper-realistic band images, and lack of a digital footprint quickly led many people to suspect that the The Velvet Sundown was AI-generated. And it turns out they were right.

After weeks of speculation, a new message posted on its Spotify page over the weekend finally admitting that the band and its music are the work of generative AI.

“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 message says.

It 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.

“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.”

Finally, it says: “Not quite human. Not quite machine. The Velvet Sundown lives somewhere in between.”

In another bizarre twist that came just before the weekend admission, an individual going under the pseudonym “Andrew Frelon” contacted CBC News and Rolling Stone to claim that he was the person behind the “art hoax,” while at the same time apologizing to anyone upset by the experiment. 

Frelon said he created The Velvet Sundown tracks using the generative-AI tool Suno before posting them on Spotify, where the band now has more than a million monthly listeners.

Case settled, then. But apparently not.

The Velvet Sundown then posted a message on its Instagram page saying that Frelon “is attempting to hijack the identity of The Velvet Sundown by releasing unauthorized interviews, publishing unrelated photos, and creating fake profiles claiming to represent us — none of which are legitimate, accurate, or connected in any way to us.”

On the same day, Frelon popped up again to say that actually he had nothing to do with the band and that he’d made everything up. So, Frelon was a hoaxer, even if the band wasn’t. Though was it?

Finally (are you still with us at the back?), someone … not Frelon, presumably … posted another message on The Velvet Sundown’s Instagram page and also its Spotify page, which we included at the start of this article, about the band being a “synthetic music project.”

Commenting on the latest message, Instagram user justminmusic highlighted the controversial issue of AI-based music generators like the one used to create The Velvet Sundown’s tracks: “They are trying to steal your ‘identity’ which your ai music stole from other real artist … just stop this already.”

It’s not clear where The Velvet Sundown will go from here. Will there be an acrimonious breakup, perhaps? Or will it drop its third album in the coming days?

While many people following the fortunes of The Velvet Sundown will no doubt be saying, “Well, we knew that from the start,” the bizarre episode has shone a spotlight on how AI can rapidly and convincingly generate not just music, but entire artist identities, blurring the line between authentic human creativity and AI-generated imitation.

And as generative-AI improves, it will only become harder for music fans to tell the difference. Although arranging a live tour may prove somewhat tricky …