Half a million Spotify users are unknowingly grooving to an AI-generated band

Makeing art was a only human business, but the machines learned to distill human creativity with a generative AI. That this content counts as “art” depends on who you ask, but Spotify does not discriminate. A new group called The Velvet Sundown made its debut on Spotify this month and has already accumulated more than half a million listeners. But by all appearances, sunset in velvet is not a real group – it is AI.

While many artists are vehemently opposed to using AI, some have relied on the trend to help musical production. However, it does not seem that there is an artist behind this group. In less than a month, The Velvet Sundown released two albums on Spotify, entitled “Floating on Echoes” and “Dust and Silence”. A third album is released in two weeks. The tracks have a classic rock atmosphere with a cacophony of Echoey instruments and a pinch of autotune. If one of these songs appeared in a mix, you may not notice anything. Listen to one after the other, however, and the bland mud exposes them as a machine creation.

Some listeners began to have doubts about the existence of Velvet Sundown in last week, with several sons Reddit and X highlighting the lack of verifiable information on the group. The biography lists four members, none of whom seems to exist outside the album lists of the Velvet Sundown and social media. The group’s songs were mysteriously added to a large number of reading lists created by the user, which helped inflate their auditor in a few weeks. When Spotify users have started to notice the apparent use of AI by Velvet Sundown, the profile had around 300,000 listeners. It is now more than 500,000 in less than a week.

When the Sundown Velvet created an Instagram account on June 27, all doubts were put to rest – these “people” are obviously AI. We may have exceeded the era to be able to identify AI by counting the fingers, but there are a lot of strange inconsistencies in these photos. In an Instagram post, the group claims to have made sure that the burgers celebrate the success of the first two albums, but there are too many burgers and too few plates, and the food and the drink are apparently placed at random around the table. The members of the group themselves also have this unrealistic and symmetrical look that we see in the images generated by AI.