A psych-rock musical project has racked up 400,000 listens since it started dropping music on Spotify a little under a month ago. So why am I, a girlypop with a penchant for German metal and videogame soundtracks, talking about them? Called The Velvet Sundown (not to be confused with either 2014’s Velvet Sundown or Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground), there’s more than a few tell-tale clues that everything from the band’s Instagram to the music itself is AI-generated.
According to the band’s Spotify blurb, members include “singer and mellotron player Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, Milo Rains, who crafts the band’s textured synth sounds, and free-spirited percussionist Orion ‘Rio’ Del Mar.” The waffly blurb also features both hyperbole that ultimately tells you nothing and badly deployed simile, which feels deeply reminiscent of the textbook shortcomings of LLM output. Furthermore, this up-and-coming musical outfit is apparently made up entirely of technological hermits as I couldn’t track down a single scrap of social media for any of its named members.
Join me at my red-string corkboard, why don’t you? The ‘group’ began posting music to Spotify with their first album, Floating on Echoes, on June 5. Their third album is currently slated to drop on July 14. Besides the very obviously AI-generated album covers, that sort of timeline is suspiciously truncated to say the least. So far, so circumstantial but there’s more.
The band itself has an Instagram page that began posting very obviously AI-generated pictures—complete with self-aggrandising Abbey Road tribute—on June 27. Unlike a real band, no venues or gig dates are promoted in any of these posts, and looking at them via the phone app flags that the music featured on the band’s profile “may have been created with AI.” While false positives are entirely possible, Deezer offers the final nail in the coffin.
Musicradar spotted that The Velvet Sundown were sharing music in a number of places outside of Spotify, with each of the ‘band’s’ three albums on Deezer accompanied by the note “Some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence.” I couldn’t find a similar disclaimer on the band’s Spotify, Amazon Music, or Apple Music pages.
Though The Velvet Sundown’s one-note blandness is a dead giveaway for its AI-generated origins, it offers little comfort. Besides the lack of AI-content disclosures, or the fact Spotify continues to pay pennies to human artists getting 1 million listens, there’s the matter of the 400,000 listens. These could be bots, though Spotify is explicitly against this, stating, “Paid 3rd-party services that guarantee streams aren’t legitimate.”
What’s more likely is that The Velvet Sundown has enjoyed an algorithmic nudge as it so closely mimics popular artists in the genre. The band has also appeared in some anonymous user-generated playlists that have been popular largely because of the ‘real’ songs in the listings, pulling in listens off the back of other artists’ work. Whatever the case, driving an AI wedge between human listeners and human artists is still pretty bleak.
To approach this from a slightly different angle, I make no secret of the fact that I’m a Miku Hatsune fan, and I can imagine some may be scratching their heads over how I reconcile that musical interest with my clearly stated, deep cynicism about AI’s creative applications.
For those that don’t know, Miku Hatsune is a fictional character that acts as the visually striking mascot for the Vocaloid voice synthesiser software (though she’s popped up in all sorts of other places too, including Fortnite and our Kara’s desktop). She’s marketed as a virtual idol, sans any pretense that she’s a real person—unlike The Velvet Sundown which is not exactly being upfront about its use of AI generated content.
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I would also argue that this is not such a tricky square to circle once you remember that Miku Hatsune is a character designed by human artist Kei Garō, voiced by human actress Saki Fujita, and cast as the virtual protagonist of many a human music producer’s story. While the voice software Miku Hatsune represents is owned by Crypton Future Media, the artists that contributed to her creation signed contracts and were paid for their work—not scrubbed from the record by a black box that can only amalgamate.
Bottom line, Miku Hatsune is an adaptable creative tool… or, the case could be made, something closer to a community art project rather than anything AI—but maybe I ought to save that for a future opinion piece. Anyway, instead of giving The Velvet Sundown any more listens, maybe give my favourite Vocaloid music producer, DECO*27, a go instead?
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