Guess who has over 600,000 fans on Spotify? Velvet Sunset. If you reacted by asking, “Who?”, I wouldn’t blame you.
the band is released two albums So far, “Floating on Echoes” and “Dust and Silence”, a third album is being released in a couple of weeks. Velvet Sundown was formed by Gabe Farrow, Lenny West, Milo Reigns and Orion “Rio” Del Mar. so what? What’s the big deal if a music band is popular? Yes, this would be perfectly normal if the band existed.
You read that right, The Velvet Sundown is an AI band. their newly created social media account Say “Yes, we’re a real band and we never use AI”. That’s not very reassuring, friends. Neither are the images the band shared on their official instagram page. They sound really weird, and scream AI. You can’t find interviews, or live shows of the bands.
So, how are people reacting to it? It’s happening exactly as you would imagine it would. Spotify users are angry, as are many musicians, and people in general are upset that it’s so easy to make an AI slop and fool everyone. Did you know that streaming services don’t require a listing to state that a song was created by AI? The entire point of this article is to explain why any music streaming service would allow such content on their platform. Isn’t this a harmful trend that can harm real artists? AI stuff is trained on other people’s hard work, and then misused, rebranded, and possibly sold.
By the way, band’s album on deezer It is marked as “AI-generated content”. Some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence. The band apparently contacted Deezer to resolve this misunderstanding. Well, it’s bad that Deezer allows AI-generated content, but at least it marks them as such, and it prevents such media from being monetized. according to Deezer18% of the music uploaded each day is fake, that is more than 20,000 tracks.
music partner reports that Ircam Amplify, a French company that launched an AI-generated music detector, ran both of The Velvet Sundown’s albums through its tests, and the results showed that 10 of the album’s 13 tracks were AI-generated, and its ‘confidence’ score was 100 out of 100.
You know, I think the whole premise would make a good thriller movie. A band is so popular, their music is trendy, but no one knows where the band members are. That would be scary, mysterious. On the other hand, what if the band is real? This could be a good marketing technique or a social experiment.
What do you think about AI-generated music, videos? Would you watch them and pay for such media?
