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.