The indie psychrock band has gained over 850,000 listeners on Spotify in a few weeks, creating buzz throughout the music industry, but no one is sure exactly whether it's real or not.
According to an Instagram account, Velvet Sundown, a band that bent over “Modern Rock's Saving Modern Rock,” is in turmoil even among veterans in the music industry. All of the images proposed by the band appear to have been created by artificial intelligence. music? It's difficult to say.
Rick Beato, a music producer with over 5 million subscribers to YouTube, has identified what is known as “Artifacts” especially one of the guitar and keyboard parts of the track. He said he could show that the song was created by AI.
“There are a lot of issues with this, maybe it's because it's an AI track,” Beato said in a YouTube video after running one of Velvet Sundown's songs on Apple's Logic Pro Track Splitter. “Every time you have an AI song, they're full of artifacts.”
Whether a band is genuine, fake, or in it, the emergence and broader debate about it adds to growing concerns about the future of art, culture and credibility in an age of highly produced artificial intelligence. While many major tech platforms already see a flood of AI-generated content, AI influencers are becoming more and more common on social media platforms.
According to social media profiles, Velvet's Sundown appears to have first appeared in June. On Spotify, the band has a “verified artist” badge, providing a certain sense of authority. On X, Velvet's Sundown teases his upcoming album, “Paper Sun Rebellion,” nodded to questions about doubts about the band's origins.
Apart from the rapid development of the song, the band members' incredibly plastic promotional images also spurred accusations of AI use.
In the video that announced the release of the album later this month, the band opposed the accusation that they stated in one video, “You believed the lies and just danced.”
“They said we weren't real,” the account posted. “Maybe you aren't either.”
Spotify's band Bio claims the group consists of four people that singer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, Milo Rains, “The One Who Makes Synth Sounds of the Band Textures,” and percussionist Orion “Del Mar Farrow's Purport is said to be Mellotron who plays Mellotron.
“There's something quietly appealing about velvet sunsets,” says their Spotify Bio. “You don't just listen to them, you drift towards them. Their music doesn't scream your attention. It slowly penetrates.
Questions about the band's origins were even more complicated after other social accounts intended to represent the band began to reject claims that the band used AI-generated images and music, and that they spoke to Rolling Stone, who claimed to be connected to the band they called “art hoaxes.” The person later admitted in Subsack Post that his claim to represent the band was a hoax.
Velvet's Sundown said the people quoted in the article “just about it” weren't affiliated with them.
“He's not representing us, talking for us or having anything to do with this project,” Velvet Sundown said in a statement to NBC News via Instagram.
On Thursday, a social media account tied to the band's Spotify account posted that “someone is trying to hijack the velvet sunset identity by releasing an unauthorized interview, publishing unrelated photos, and creating fake profiles claiming to represent us.”
Distrokid, the YouTube publisher of Velvet Sundown, did not respond to requests for comment. Spotify also did not respond to requests for comment.
The band's meteor rise highlights the contemporary issues around AI, and how difficult it is to examine anything that is not real on the Internet. Last year, Google researchers discovered that misinformation about AI images has been on the rise on the Internet since 2023. Consumer research found that major AI voice cloning programs do not have any meaningful barriers to prevent people from spoofing others.
According to Deezer, a music streaming app that uses its own tools to identify content generated by AI, 100% of Velvet Sundown tracks were created using AI. Deezer labels its content on the site, ensuring that AI-generated music doesn't appear in recommended playlists and that royalties are maximized to human artists.
“AI-generated music and AI bands can create some value for their users, so we want to see it,” said Alexis Lanter, CEO of Deezer. “We just want to make sure the rewards are done differently.”
Every week, around 18% of tracks uploaded to Deezer (approximately 180,000 songs) flag them as AI generated by platform tools. That number has tripled over the past two years, Lantanier said.
Both Suno and Udio generated AI music creation programs and refused to say whether Velvet Sundown's music was created using software.
“I think people are going far too far down the rabbit hole in the dissection. Is it ai, isn't it ai? And how did it feel, how did it feel? said Mikey Shulman, CEO and co-founder of Suno.
According to Suno's rights and ownership policy, songs created by users subscribed to the higher tier plan are covered by a commercial use license. This allows you to monetize and distribute songs on platforms like Spotify without being attributed to Suno.
“We have Grammy Award winners who use Snow. You know every day with their productions,” Shulman said.
Recently, Grammy-winning record producer Timbaland has launched an AI artist called Tata with his new entertainment company, Stage Zero. He told Billboard that Tata, who created a catalogue of music generated by AI via Snow, is neither an “avatar” nor a “character.”
Suno was one of two AI companies last year sued for major record labels, including Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. This claims to infringe on the recording copyright of the label in order to train the Music-forating model.
But about a year after the legal battle, Music Label began speaking to resolve the licensing agreement so that Snow and Woodio could use copyrighted recordings by indemnifying artists, according to a Bloomberg report released last month.
This is a worrying trend for artists like Kristian Heironimus, a member of the band Velvet Meadow (not to be confused with the current Velvet Sundown).
“I've been working like I've been constantly releasing music for six years and doing my day's work,” says Heironimus. “Just watching an AI band, like two weeks, it's kind of a bit of a disappointment. [have] Similarly, there are 500,000 listeners each month. ”
As many AI developers are known to rub data from the internet without the knowledge or consent of human creators, the creep of AI generated into music and other creative industries has sparked backlash from people worried about devaluing human work.
Beyond ethical debates about the consequences of AI's impact on human labor, some people worry online about the rise in low-quality AI slops as these tools allow them to replicate the voice, generate full-length songs, and create visuals from text prompts.
Heironimus said there are cross-name similarities between his bands, Velvet Meadow and Velvet Sundown. For example, one of the members depicted in the photo of Velvet Sundown's Spotify band is similar to the photo of Heironimus when he had long hair, he said. The band is also part of the same genre, but Heironimus describes the tracks on Velvet Sundown as “Soulless.”
Shulman of Suno said that most streaming music is already “algorithically driven.”
“People don't realize how depersonalized music has turned out and how little connections the average person has to with the artists behind the music,” he said. “It's a failure of imagination to think that's not that good in the future.”
But Deezer's Lantanier should be trying to ensure that as AI continues to evolve, streaming platforms can create enough royalties for artists to survive.
“People are interested not only in the sound, but in the overall story of the artist. “We believe it's about supporting real artists in order to continue creating the music that people love.”
