With catchy, mellow psychedelic rock songs and glossy promotional images of four smiling band members, the Velvet Sundown shot to popularity in recent months. They have now released three albums: Floating on Echoes and Dust and Silence in June 2025 and Paper Sun Rebellion in July 2025. Their music has been compared to classic bands like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Bad Company, The Eagles, Kansas, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Velvet Sundown songs have been featured on Spotify playlists such as “Vietnam War Music” and have garnered millions of streams.
Though many listeners assumed that the Velvet Sundown were simply another band drawing musical and lyrical inspiration from classic rock and anti-war folk songs of the 1960s and 1970s, others questioned the band’s authenticity, especially after seeing “photos” of the band with the smooth, filtered look common to AI-generated images. All of the album covers have been surreal yet oddly formulaic. The complete lack of online presence, interviews, and live footage of the band members was also an indication that they weren’t real people.
The band’s official social media channels initially denied that the Velvet Sundown had been created by artificial intelligence before eventually admitting it. Nevertheless, the posts were coy, describing the band as “Not quite human. Not quite machine.” While the identity of the band's creator remains anonymous, the Velvet Sundown's Spotify bio insists that the goal was never to trick people but rather to be “an ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”
The success of the Velvet Sundown—and the fact that listeners were kept in the dark about the band’s AI origins—could signal the start of a complicated new era for the music industry. AI bands are likely to proliferate and continually improve the quality of their creative output, yet streaming sites aren’t required to disclose whether the music on the platform is made by humans or artificial intelligence.
Though on an individual level, AI can help musicians and songwriters with their creative process, the presence of artificial intelligence models trained on existing music puts AI bands in direct competition with the artists whose creativity trained them, often without their consent or any compensation. Shockingly, many artists who accumulate millions of streams on Spotify find that they aren’t able to financially support themselves with their music—and that’s without the threat of non-existent bands suddenly flooding streaming sites with AI-generated content.
The band that doesn’t exist:
- The Velvet Sundown’s Spotify bio describes them as a “synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.” The bio previously listed the band members as singer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, bassist Milo Raines, and percussionist Orion “Rio” Del Mar, though these names now appear to have been removed.
- In April 2025, the music streaming platform Deezer, which uses a robust AI detection tool, reported that roughly 18% of new songs uploaded to the platform were completely AI-generated.
- Generative AI platforms like Suno and Udio allow users to quickly create songs with minimal effort and few inputs. These platforms can be used for free or around $30 per month for premium use.
