AI ‘Band’ Velvet Sundown Are an ‘Art Hoax,’ Spokesperson Admits

The Velvet Sundown, an obviously fictional “band” that’s gone viral after somehow racking up more than 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify out of nowhere, used the generative-AI platform Suno in the creation of their songs, and consider themselves an “art hoax,” a band spokesperson reveals to Rolling Stone.  On their X account, the “band” fervently and repeatedly denied any AI usage after multiple media outlets reported on their mysterious popularity — but pseudonymous band spokesperson and “adjunct” member Andrew Frelon now admits, “It’s marketing. It’s trolling. People before, they didn’t care about what we did, and now suddenly, we’re talking to Rolling Stone, so it’s like, ‘Is that wrong?’”  

“Personally, I’m interested in art hoaxes,” Frelon continues. “The Leeds 13, a group of art students in the U.K., made, like, fake photos of themselves spending scholarship money at a beach or something like that, and it became a huge scandal. I think that stuff’s really interesting.… We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real. And that’s messed up, but that’s the reality that we face now. So it’s like, ‘Should we ignore that reality? Should we ignore these things that kind of exist on a continuum of real versus fake or kind of a blend between the two? Or should we dive into it and just let it be the emerging native language of the internet?’”

In the phone conversation Tuesday morning, Frelon originally maintained that AI was used only in brainstorming for the music, then admitted to the use of Suno but “not in the final product,” and finally came to acknowledge that at least some songs (“I don’t want to say which ones”) are Suno-generated. “I haven’t admitted that to anyone else,” Frelon says. He also acknowledged employing Suno’s “Persona” feature — the same one Timbaland is using with his controversial AI artist TaTa — to maintain a consistent singer’s voice across songs, although he continues to claim that’s not the case on every track.

Some observers have wondered whether some kind of playlist manipulation was used to build Velvet Sundown’s Spotify listenership, but Frelon dodged that question. “ I’m not running the Spotify backend stuff, so I can’t super speak to exactly how that happened,” he says. “I know we got on some playlists that just have like tons of followers, and it seems to have spiraled from there.” Did Frelon and his associates use playlists of their own to boost the process? “I don’t have an answer that I can give to you for that because I’m not involved,” he says. “And I don’t want to say something that’s not true.”

The Velvet Sundown enigma began in June, when two of the band’s albums suddenly appeared on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and other streaming services. A band that no one had ever heard of, and didn’t seem to have any sort of digital footprint, suddenly had hundreds of thousands of listeners for music that the band described as “fusing Seventies psychedelic textures with cinematic alt-pop and dreamy analog soul.” 

But how real was it? The songs, like “Dust on the Wind,” felt like generic reproductions of Seventies rock, and “photographs” of the group obviously had the amber-encased glow of AI-generated content. On Reddit, two posters called out what one poster called “a completely fake band”; musician and writer Chris Dalla Riva questioned their existence on TikTok; and the streaming service Deezer noted that “some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence.” The site Music Ally determined that most of the Spotify playlists which featured the band came from just four Spotify accounts — and no one could explain how the band’s catalog ended up on a playlist of songs evoking the Vietnam War. 

Early this week, the “band” pushed back on its X account, claiming it was “absolutely crazy that so-called ‘journalists’ keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that the Velvet Sundown is ‘AI-generated’ with zero evidence.… This is not a joke. This is our music, written in long, sweaty nights in a cramped bungalow in California with real instruments, real minds and real soul.” (“Then make an appearance on live TV,” responded one person on X. “Proof [sic] it make a real video,” replied another.)

Spotify, for one, has no rules against AI music. In the past, says Glenn McDonald, a former data alchemist at Spotify, “fake listeners were a larger problem than fake music. It might have flipped.” McDonald feels the Velvet Sundown’s prominence on that platform is the result of several factors: Artists and content creators are able to pay for more exposure on playlists, he says, and the company’s recommendations systems have moved “away from understandable algorithms with strong grounding in actual human listening and communities” and toward AI-driven systems that “can pick songs for recommendations based on characteristics of their audio.” 

Added together, McDonald says, these factors “increase the lottery-like dynamics of the system so that there are fewer reasons why a fake band couldn’t be successful. Most fake bands still won’t be successful, and of course nobody notices when an AI band gets no listeners, but there are no protections against it happening, and probably from Spotify’s business point of view it’s not even clear that this is a bad thing to be ‘protected’ against.” (A spokesperson for Spotify declined to comment.)

As for the viral attention Velvet Sundown has garnered, “it’s because they’re AI, not because the music’s great,” says one veteran A&R executive, who asked for anonymity. “It doesn’t feel authentic. That said, it’s clearly just a matter of time before AI creates a genuine hit song. Not convinced yet it will create a sustainable hit artist. My prediction is that a hit song will appear that the public loves. At that point, someone will reveal it to be AI. No one will care because they love the song.”

The Velvet Sundown’s Frelon, meanwhile, says that music fans need to learn to accept AI tools, calling the fear of them “super overwrought.” “I respect that people have really strong emotions about this,” he says. “But I think it’s important that we allow artists to experiment with new technologies and new tools,  try things out, and not freak out at people just because they’re using a program or not using a program. People have this idea that you have to please everybody and you have to follow the rules. And that’s not how music and culture progress. Music and culture progressed by people doing weird experiments and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. And that’s kind of the spirit that we’re [embracing].”