(Credit: The Velvet Sundown)
It's tough as a band to record, release, and market two new albums in under 30 days, but it's much easier if all of the music is artificially generated. That's confirmed to be the case with The Velvet Sundown, which has risen through the ranks on Spotify over the last month since the release of its first album.
Listeners to The Velvet Sundown have grown since the early June debut, and after a week of accusations that the band were an AI-generated project, the owners of the Spotify account have now confirmed its use of AI.
The band's social media and promotion has used hyper-realistic visuals that suggested to listeners the people pictured weren't real and that the music was also AI-generated. Now, the band's owners have updated its Spotify bio to confirm its use of AI alongside some human controlled elements.
“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 band’s bio now reads. “This isn’t a trick - it’s a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the music of music itself in the age of AI.”
The statement was posted soon after someone faked ownership of the band in interviews with mainstream press. Andrew Frelon spoke to Rolling Stone claiming to have ownership over the AI-generated band. Since then, Frelon has admitted to lying in the interview and confirmed he isn't affiliated with the band.
Within 24 hours of Frelon's own blog post, the band's owners updated the Spotify bio to confirm it is an AI-project for the first time. So far, the real owners have remained anonymous. We've yet to learn exactly which AI tools are being used for The Velvet Sundown.
The band doubled its monthly listeners in the last week alone after outlets began covering the controversy and speculation ramped up on whether the band were AI-generated.