What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: ‘Velvet Sunset’ and AI Music
Have you heard of The Velvet Sundown? Me neither. But the indie rock band has been heating up the Spotify charts this week, with nearly 600,000 monthly listeners apparently rocking out to the band’s languid country-rock hum. “Dust on the Wind” (not the Kansas cover of “Dust in the Wind”) has racked up more than 500,000 plays on the world’s most popular streaming service. So the band’s career is taking off, as the kids said. But The Velvet Sundown doesn’t seem to exist . All signs point to everything attributed to the band being created entirely by artificial intelligence: the music, the band photos, the album covers. All of it created by computers.
The fake band’s story has been covered by PC Gamer , our friends at Mashable , Tech Radar , and countless other outlets. But The Velvet Sundown aren’t alone. They’re one of an army of fake artists posing as themselves on music streaming services, and they’re not even the most successful.
How to find out if a group exists
It’s impossible to tell for sure whether music was created by computers just by listening to it, so the best you can do is make assumptions, but I strongly suspect that the music of Velvet Sundown was created by artificial intelligence.
Exhibit One: Music
Their music is so relentlessly mediocre, so devoid of personality, that it couldn’t possibly have come from humans. Everything from the lyrics to the song structures to the instrumentation is formulaic. It’s not even a good AI suggestion . It’s not that The Velvet Sundown’s music is bad; it’s that it’s nothing . There’s a difference between the sound of, say, an electric guitar and a sound wave created by digitally melting, combining, and imitating the sounds of countless other electric guitars. It’s hard to describe the difference exactly, but it’s there. Also: For what it’s worth, the French music streaming platform Deezer’s AI detection tool has declared that Velvet Sundown’s music is “ AI-generated content .”
Exhibit two: photography
The photo above is from the header of the X account associated with The Velvet Sundown . While there are no extra fingers or other obvious “this is AI” signs in the image, it feels like AI. As in music, it’s hard to explain the difference between a human face and an amalgamation of millions of human faces, and it’s hard to explain the deadness in the eyes of AI “people,” but it’s there. More tellingly, though, this is one of only two images of the band I could find online. How many guys do you know in bands who don’t like having their photos taken?
Exhibit Three: Context
Until the X account was created this week, Velvet Sundown’s entire online presence consisted of a few songs on streaming services. No website, no TikTok, no Instagram, no SoundCloud, no fan forum, no upcoming shows, nothing . That’s just not how real bands operate in 2025, when they’re expected to exist online. Only fake bands suddenly appear on streaming services, especially bands polished enough to be as mediocre as The Velvet Sundown. According to their Spotify bio, Velvet Sunset’s members include Gabe Farrow, Lenny West, Milo Raines, and Orion “Rio” Del Mar. I can’t find any evidence that these people were in other bands or even existed.
Appendix Four: The Law of Averages
Spotify doesn’t announce how much of the music on its service is AI-generated, but at this point, I think the answer is “most of it.” It’s just a lot easier to create an AI-generated song than to create your own. Getting into a real band requires spending years practicing music, then finding other people who want to play music with you, renting a studio, writing a song, etc. It takes years to go from nothing to “here’s my first song.” It took Leonard Cohen five years to record “Hallelujah.” It took me eight minutes (I timed it) to create a radio-ready country hit, “ Waiting to Die,” using Claude.ai and Suno .
Music Invasion with Artificial Intelligence
The Velvet Sunset aren’t alone. There are entire genres of music online that sound like they were created by machines. The Velvets (as their fans call them) aren’t even the most successful fake band on Spotify. Listen to the Jazz for Study playlist . The first “artist” listed, The Super Smart Trio, has no online presence outside of music streaming services, has released only 12 songs, and its biggest hit, “Ease Up,” has been played more than three million times. Or the Tate Jackson Trio. They have more than 12 million streams of “ It’s in the Middle of the Night,” but they have no website and no evidence that they’ve ever performed. Check out lofi chill , a Spotify playlist where “artists” like Mellow Mirror rack up millions of streams despite only releasing 12 songs and showing no sign of existing. I can’t say for sure if it’s fully artificial intelligence, but it walks like a duck and quacks very loudly.
Why should we care?
If someone is enjoying “Dust on the Wind” while studying or plotting murder, what difference does it make that Orion “Rio” Del Mar (the weirdo) is a fake? There’s no point shaking a fist at a thunderstorm; what’s happening is the hijacking of everything good and human, no matter how you or I feel about it. But (as illustrated by my country-hip-hop masterpiece “ Waiting to Die ”) we don’t have eternity in this life, and I’d like to choose whether or not to participate in an AI-generated art experience. When I press play on a song, I’m entering into an unspoken agreement that somewhere, somehow, a human being sat down and tried to express something. That’s why I love music.
In the 1970s, when Kraftwerk imagined the machine-generated music of the future, it was at least cool : robotic, precise, cold, hypnotic, and undeniably futuristic. The AI music flooding Spotify today isn’t visionary; it’s just mediocre human music, generated by computers trained to be boring. Can we just get a cancel button? This whole thing pisses me off so much that I made an AI write a KROQ-ready pop-punk song about it.