The web is ablaze with the latest AI-generated band, The Velvet Sundown, ranking up hundreds of thousands of listeners and streams in a way that seems fishy itself. The people behind The Velvet Sundown seem to have felt the heat increasing and changed the Spotify bio, now confirming that it’s AI-generated.
However, this fake band is neither the first instance—Negative White reported on the phenomenon of Obscurest Vinyl in April 2024—nor the real story.
Organised Crime
Since the beginning of 2024, AI-generated music has been used to grift and defraud. We’ve reported on several instances where Swiss artists have had their Spotify profiles pirated with quickly generated trash.
GEMA’s CEO, Tobias Holzmüller, offered a glaring example at SXSW London this year: Entering Alphaville’s lyrics to Forever Young into Suno AI resulted in a track that sounded basically the same as the original track. Om GEMA‘s website, you can listen to another example with Boney M.‘s Daddy Cool. GEMA is currently suing Suno AI for copyright infringement. As Holzmüller explained at SXSW London, the issue is that AI-generated music—trained without consent on copyrighted material—can substitute for the original.
The most prominent generative LLMs are deeply unethical, trained on petabytes of stolen and copyrighted data. It’s organised crime.
It’s Only About Money
However, what is now becoming undeniably apparent with generative AI is that companies, especially Spotify, don’t give the slightest fuck about music. CEO Daniel Ek could have used his hundreds of millions to establish a funding foundation for up-and-coming musicians or a label instead of investing it in AI technology for the military. No, it’s all about the money.
Even if they always come out with fluffy PR about how important music is, the streaming platforms couldn’t care less whether the streams are generated by an artist who has spent years practising and refining their craft, or whether it's dirt that's just been talentlessly drummed up in a matter of minutes. They earn either way. It’s their business model, and business models incentivise behaviour.
After all, Deezer has now introduced an AI label. In their press release, they state what we all already felt to be true:
„Deezer has found that up to 70% of the streams generated by fully AI-generated tracks are, in fact, fraudulent.“
It’s A Feature, Not A Bug
Streaming has made the entire world of music accessible to us, anytime and almost free of charge. What seems practical has had foreseeable consequences. A thought crept into the collective subconscious: „If it costs nothing, it’s worth nothing.“
Music became a consumable commodity. Piece by piece, platforms changed the behaviour of listeners and the music industry. Albums? Gone. Single after single, attention must be kept constantly high. Those who withdraw lose the data game.
When recorded music becomes a consumable product, it’s all about efficiency. The Velvet Sundown and all the other AI-generated ‚artists‘ are not a glitch—they’re a feature. They’re the logical conclusion of a system that rewards quantity over quality.
And the horrifying thing about all of this: We’re only witnessing the beginnings now. When AI-generated slop hallucinates some facts, we’re (hopefully) still able to fact-check independently. But with AI-generated music, there’s nothing to fact-check. It’s just littering the world, speeding up the transfer of money from many to a few.
Yes, I’m Angry
The devaluation of music itself also led to rising concert costs, further accelerated by ‚small‘ events such as the COVID pandemic. Music can be listened to for free, but those who want to experience it truly must be wealthy enough and willing to spend hundreds of dollars. If we’re heading towards a dystopia where you can only verify a human artist by the visceral experience of a live performance, music could become as segregated as access to proper healthcare. A privilege for the rich.
Yes, I’m angry because AI-generated music is stealing from struggling artists. But also because it’s stealing something personal. As people, we already have to waste time verifying too much ‚information‘ out there. Now, I also have to analyse the music for its originality and human touch, so as not to reward some lazy and uncreative grifter. How did we end up here?! I want to appreciate and discover music made by humans without having to go through a strict due diligence process. But today, that’s the reality.
Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.
—Nick Cave on AI-written music
Part of my anger is also rooted in frustration at my own inability to act in the face of these powerful economic mechanisms. And also in the frustration that Spotify, for example, continues to be promoted free of charge by countless indie bands and labels, with additional efforts such as playlists. Although I am well aware of their reality: without Spotify, you don’t exist. And the self-awareness that I, too, maintain Spotify playlists for Negative White. It was already a helpless situation before generative AI became an issue.
We live in a time when everything is done to exploit the emotional power of music for financial gain—through efficiency, cost pressure and, paradoxically, dehumanisation. Musicians become “creators” and the music becomes an undefined grey mass of “content”, as Sean Adams aptly described it:
It's much like my least favourite c-word "content" that spans from a brain fart tweet to a ten part Netflix Original, a Radiolab episode to a TikTok about eating a kiwi with the skin on, from a makeup tutorial to a video clip from a war zone shared in the public interest, a Super Bowl halftime ad to a 'buy my course' CTA, a Pulitzer Prize winning piece of investigative journalism to a three word Letterboxd review, the complete works of Shakespeare to 'Baby Shark'.
Content is everything and nothing, devoid of meaning and any reference of value. If you take a shit, you are a content creator for the local sewege system. Congrats!
And so, AI not only steals the hard work of artists and our time by pumping out a flood of sewege-level "content", and in the process also attempts to grift the invaluable, somehow magical connection between people that is created through art forms like music; at least, AI continues to pull it further into an already precarious existence.
The only glimmer of hope is that this relationship requires precisely this human experience and cannot be artificially replicated in order to be perceived as such.
Action Is Needed
Yes, the last chapter was written with rage-quivering hands and a despairing mind. I had to get it out of the system at some point.
A couple of years ago, I’d said: Yeah, that’s just a new reality we have to deal with. Inspect and adapt accordingly. But today, I’m taking a firmer stand because I feel we’re heading in a perilous direction. How do we value artistic expression as a society? What does it say about us if music is simply another convenience? I fear: nothing too good.
Politics’ track record in addressing these challenges through effective regulation is, let’s call it, meagre. Furthermore, the damage has already been done, and we are only now litigating and debating the implications of generative AI. GEMA’s Tobias Holzmüller wished at SXSW: „There must be a way to train AI without throwing the creative industry under the bus.“
In the meantime, I hope to see more artists actively raising awareness and encouraging their fans, like Pamela Mendez and Hilke recently did regarding Spotify. Or the collective pushbacks by creatives, like in the UK. We need to take a stand together—the industry, the artists, and the fans of the human experience of music.
