Artificially Intelligent: AI’s Latest Blunder

Major music publication, one million listeners get bamboozled by fake band on Spotify

“Frankenstein and Monster” published in the Birmingham Post-Herald / Wikimedia Commons

As an artist, I’ve been done with Spotify for a while. As a listener, I never really got on board in the first place. Once the company revealed earnings of independent artists can be withheld or can go towards payments to major label artists who have music on the platform, I swore it off completely. The CEO didn’t help much when he took a pro-AI stance regarding what he referred to as “content” (a.k.a “music”) on Spotify.

Given the company’s fickle history, I wasn’t surprised when news broke about the latest AI blunder and Spotify’s role in the gimmick.

In the last few days, news outlet The New York Post began covering a mysterious band laying down some serious dreamy California-folk sounds. Known as Velvet Sundown, the group has amassed over 1 million listeners on Spotify since the release of their debut album, Floating on Echoes.

The catch? The band doesn’t actually exist.

“Perfect Imperfection”

The band’s name alone gave me pause right away. It’s too similar, too obvious to Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground (a personal favorite from my angsty high school years at an arts school).

But their most popular song, “Dust on the Wind,” was a dead giveaway. It was a clear, AI-generated riff off of Kansas’ timeless hit, “Dust in the Wind.”

An inspection of one of the band’s photos making the rounds online shows clear signs the artificially intelligent is at work. The guitarist’s fingers look deformed while clutching the neck of his instrument, and there’s a tuning peg missing. The vocalist’s mic cable disappears into no man’s land. Plus, the image itself looks too perfect, even by today’s photoshopped, filtered standards. No real live band in their right mind would allow for this supposedly professional image to circulate.

While AI struggles to present a perfect image, one usually dressed in subtle layers of farcical imperfection, the history and beautiful struggle of artistry shows artists who aim for the perfectly imperfect—the cracking yodel behind Howlin’ Wolf’s bay, the unconventional revving of Bob Dylan’s vocal motor especially present in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” No AI robot could ever come close to the raw humanity in Johnny Cash’s baritone voice that makes his music haunting and transcendent of time itself.

To me, the “work” of these AI bands sounds highly neutered. As Tennessee Williams once put it, “There are no weak artists. Not for long.”

Sam Phillips, the man who discovered men like Howlin’ Wolf and Cash, was a bastion of artistic philosophy. In his book Sam Phillips, The man who invented rock ‘n’ roll, Peter Guralnick, who spent a lot of time with the late iconic producer, detailed Phillips’ philosophy:

“‘Perfect imperfection’ was the watchword—both in life and in art—in other words, take the hand you’re dealt and then make something of it. If Ike Turner's guitarist’s amp fell off the car on the way up to Mepmphis to cut “Rocket 88,” well, stuff some paper where the speaker cone was ruptured, and THEN YOU HAD AN ORIGINAL SOUND! If a telephone went off in the middle of a session, well, you kept that telephone in—just make sure it’s THE BEST-SOUNDING DAMN TELEPHONE IN THE WORLD.”

It’s a Trick, Not a Mirror

Even on Youtube, Velvet Sundown has racked up hundreds of thousands of streams. 

But as listeners searched for band members without names and discovered a questionable social media presence, people quickly realized they had been duped.

According to Guralnick, and as evidenced by Phillips’ legacy, the producer was after “hard, unvarnished truths” when it came to his artists. And once the truth came to light regarding Velvet Sundown, that the band and its music was AI-generated, their bio was updated on Spotify, offering the perfect mix of saying a lot without saying anything at all that AI often spits out:

“The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence. This isn’t a trick – it’s a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”

The Plot Thickens 

As news outlets clamored to find the mastermind behind the fake band gaining far more success than most human bands, the web of lies got even stickier.

Longtime music publication Rolling Stone thought they’d found the Velvet Sundown creator when they began communicating with someone named Andrew Frelon, who said he was the group’s spokesperson. After covering the story, the magazine had to release a glaring correction. It turns out, there’s no Frelon. It was simply a Canadian IT guy out to “troll” people caught up in the Velvet Sundown drama.

While covering the developing story, media outlet Newsweek featured a professor of “AI and Work” from the University of Oxford, who took an understandably measured approach to her responses.

“When an act like The Velvet Sundown racks up more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify, it punctures the long-held belief that writing songs that move people is a uniquely human talent. If algorithms can now evoke emotion, we have to (once again) rethink what truly separates human and machine creativity.”

However, for all of the intellectual crowd’s beating around the bush when it comes to matters of opinion, there is no question on the stance of listeners.

While a select number are taking a positive approach to realizing one of their new favorite bands doesn’t actually exist, the vast majority are critical of not only the optics, but of the music itself.

Youtubers have flooded the band’s “Dust on the Wind” video with witty comments like “My roomba came to a dead stop at the sound of this song, it was very unmoved by it. I had to finish the vacuuming myself…” and “My wife used to love this song, we [used] to listen to it while driving [on] the highway. She passed in 1998. She was a toaster, I'm a calculator.”

The song clearly espouses AI-generated, anti-war rhetoric, and listeners have been quick to pick up on the lack of emotion and authenticity behind the words and performance.

One user even riffed on the classic film Forrest Gump, which had a theme of war running throughout it.

“I used to listen to this song when I first returned from the Vietnam War. I was going through a tough time because my best friend had died in combat right by the river, and we were going to start a shrimp fishing company together. This song gave me the strength to buy my own boat by myself and try anyway. My former PO would later join my company, and we both loved this song even though he didn't have any legs.”

As writer and philosopher Ayn Rand once said, “To laugh at the contemptible is a virtue.”

The Crossroads of Art and Science

While listeners are understandably alarmed at the latest AI gaffe, from an artist’s perspective, the state of AI as it pertains to art of all kinds is alarming. I’ve had conversations with the scientifically-gifted who gushed about how much they love to “write” when they find out what I do. When they tell me their process, entering a few ideas into ChatGPT then waiting for the machine to assemble their article for them to “rearrange” a bit, I remind them that isn’t writing, and if they are publishing these “articles” they could be liable for theft of intellectual property down the road.

When I use a calculator to do my taxes I don’t tell my CPA to list my occupation as "mathematician" during our yearly meetings.

Right now, on sites with job boards like Pro Blogger, writers can apply for roles like “AI Trainer” at various companies. It is an interesting thought, the reality of writers, and artists of all kinds, being either conscious or unwitting puppets of their own demise.

An artist’s brain is highly different from a scientist’s brain, though I do believe these two seemingly opposing frameworks can be integrated together. Richard Feynman is one scientist who always struck me as artistically-minded when it came to his work. 

The artist’s chief driver is empathy and connection. But today’s scientifically successful are increasingly rationalist and geared towards power. 

While the artist’s brain is geared towards exploration, those in scientific fields today are often groomed for conquest (more on that in a future article).

What happens if the science of art overtakes art itself? 

What happens if those in the creator’s chair are more concerned with technological innovation rather than spiritual creativity?

What are the implications for budding musicians, who are taught to commoditize art at the expense of the integrity of it?

What are the implications for listeners, who often turn to music for human connection when all else fails? What happens when they find out the band who’s brought them joy and comfort is nothing more than a string of zeros and ones?

After the release of their debut album, Velvet Sundown accomplished something many artists never do over the course of their entire careers, they reached the number one spot on Spotify's daily "Viral 50" chart in several European countries.

Their next album was set for a July 14th, 2025 debut. Since the news broke about the truth behind their origin story, the album release has since been scrapped.

We’ll see what artistic mutant AI and powerful companies more concerned with profit over purpose come up with next. But, as the sun sets on the fallout from Velvet Sundown’s coming-out party, plenty of evidence shows listeners aren’t falling for it.

That gives this very human musician hope for the future.

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