What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: 'The Velvet Sundown' and AI Music

Have you heard of The Velvet Sundown? Me neither. but the indie rock band has been heating up Spotify's charts this week, with nearly 600,000 monthly listeners presumably jamming out to the band's limp, country rock glurge. "Dust on the Wind" (not a cover of the Kansas song "Dust in the Wind") has over 500,000 plays on the world's most popular streaming service. So the band's career is blowing up, as the kids used to say. But The Velvet Sundown doesn't seem to exist. All signs suggest everything credited to the band is entirely AI generated: the music, the band photos, the album covers. All of it is created by computers.

The fake band's story has been covered by PC Gamer, our pals at Mashable, Tech Radar and countless other sources. But The Velvet Sundown is not alone. They are one of an army of fake-seeming musicians on music streaming services, and they aren't even the most successful.

How to tell whether a band exists

It's not possible to determine for sure whether music was made by computers just by listening to it, so the best you can do is speculate, but I strongly suspect Velvet Sundown's music is AI generated.

Exhibit one: The music

Their music is so relentlessly mediocre, so devoid of personality, that it couldn't have come from humans. Everything from the lyrics to the song structures to the instrumentation is boilerplate. It's not even good AI prompting. It's not that The Velvet Sundown's music is bad; it's that it's not anything. There's a difference between the sound of, say, an electric guitar and a soundwave made by digitally smelting, 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, French music streaming platform Deezer's AI detection tool has declared that Velvet Sundown's music is "AI-generated content."

Exhibit two: the photo

The photo above is on the header of the X account associated with The Velvet Sundown. While there aren't any extra fingers or other telltale "this is AI" signs in the image, it feels AI. Like the 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 the one of two images of the band I can find online. How many guys in bands do you know who don't like being photographed?

Exhibit three: the context

Until an X account was created this week, the 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 gigs, no nothing. It's just not how real bands do things in 2025, where an online existence is expected. Only fake bands suddenly appear on streaming services, especially bands polished enough to be as mediocre as The Velvet Sundown. According to the Spotify bio, Velvet Sunset's members are Gabe Farrow, Lennie West, Milo Raines, and Orion "Rio" Del Mar. I can find no evidence of these people having played with other bands, or existing.

Exhibit four: The law of averages

Spotify doesn't announce how much of the music on its service is made by AI, but at this point, I guess the answer is "most of it." It's just so much easier to create an AI-generated piece of music than make your own. To be in a real band, you have to spend years practicing music, then find other people who want to play music with you, rent a studio, write the 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 use Claude.ai and Suno to create radio-ready country hit "Waiting to Die."

The AI music invasion

The Velvet Sunset are not alone. There are entire genres of music online that sound like they were made by machines. The Velvets (as fans call them) are not even the most successful fake-seeming band on Spotify. Take a listen to the Jazz for Study playlist. The first "artist" listed, "The Super Smart Trio," has no presence online outside of music streaming services, has released a total of 12 songs, and its biggest hit, "Ease Up," has been played over three million times. Or the "Tate Jackson Trio." They have over 12 million plays for "It's in the Middle of the Night," but they don't have a website and there's no evidence they've ever played a show. Check out lofi chill, a Spotify-curated playlist where "artists" like "Mellow Mirror" rack up millions of plays, despite only having released 12 songs, and showing no sign of existing. I can't say for sure whether it's all AI, but it walks like a duck and it's quacking really loud.

Why we should care

If someone's enjoying "Dust on the Wind" while they're studying or planning a killing spree, what difference does it make if Orion "Rio" Del Mar (the wacky one) is fake? There's no use in shaking your fist at a thunderstorm; the takeover of everything good and human is happening, 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 forever in this life, and I'd like to choose whether or not to partake in AI-generated art experiences. When I hit 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 like music.

Back in the 1970s, when Kraftwerk imagined the machine-generated music of the future, at least it was cool: robotic, precise, cold, hypnotic, and undeniably futuristic. The AI music flooding Spotify today isn't visionary; it's just mediocre human music made by computers that were trained to be boring. Can we just get an opt-out button? The whole thing has me so mad I had AI write a KROQ-ready pop punk song about it.