There are two schools of thought when it comes to AI. It’s either taking over or it’s a useful tool to help people do things more efficiently. Some of both can be true, as AI is considered in many technical processes and is used by many industries. So how much AI is too much? That’s the question that is going to be pondered for a long time until it may be too late (depending on your viewpoint.)

Some have embraced AI while others are leery of it. Those who aren’t for it have probably watched a lot of movies or TV series where the robot rise up and becomes sentient. But, at a base level, things like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini can be big time savers for people doing research or just looking for a good recipe for dinner. While these large language models and chatbots aren’t the only AI out there, they are the most public-facing options that people use daily.

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This brings us back to the question of how much AI is too much? If you’re The Velvet Sundown, a band that has over 1.1M monthly listeners on Spotify, that’s all that you have. It’s because this up-and-coming band is not a band at all, but rather an AI-generated music project that didn’t really come clean until recently — it really isn’t four guys playing instruments and singing. Is this the future of the music industry and Spotify? It very well might be a portion of it.

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How did people figure it out?

The sound and titles gave it away

The Velvet Sundown released its debut album on June 5 this year and the listens began to grow on Spotify shortly after. With a sound that harkens back to the 1960s, the classic rock vibes often heavily feature guitar and some vocals that feel like they’re playing about something more meaningful than comes across. With song titles like “Dust on the Wind,” “The Wind Still Knows Our Name,” “Back Home Never Came,” and “Smoke and Silence,” there was an ambiguity that couldn’t be denied. The title of the album is “Floating on Echoes,” which is just an artistic expression that means nothing.

Shortly after the band started to gain more listens and more notoriety, people started to scrutinize the sound, as many of the songs on the album sound eerily similar. Similar in the way that they might if you typed into a chatbot: “write me an album with a classic rock sound that sounds like bands from the 1960s.” Plus, the images that the band used and, quite frankly, the band’s name are just off enough that it raised suspicion that something wasn’t quite right. Rumors started swirling that the band was using AI to create their music. As it turned out, people were right.

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Is it ethical to release music like this?

Music made by a computer is still music

The owners of The Velvet Sundown Spotify account changed the group’s bio to read like this:

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.

All characters, stories, music, voices and lyrics are original creations generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools employed as creative instruments. Any resemblance to actual places, events or persons – living or deceased – is purely coincidental and unintentional. Not quite human. Not quite machine. The Velvet Sundown lives somewhere in between.

Obviously, the ruse was up. The sound wasn’t authentically made by humans, and it wasn’t from a group that people would be able to see. But does that matter?

There is something that feels a bit wrong about trying to play off your music as “your own” when you actually aren’t producing it yourself. It’s why plagiarism is looked down upon so much in the journalism community. You shouldn’t take credit for something that you didn’t do. But The Velvet Sundown just released music, put a band name on it, generated some images of guys that look kind of like an indie rock band (this was probably the prompt) and told the world to deal with it. Is it moral? It’s a gray area. Is it legal? Yes. Should Spotify have given them a verified artist stamp on their page? That’s an issue.

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What Spotify needs to do going forward

There needs to be a change to protect artists

The Velvet Sundown

It shouldn’t be up to the fan to read the band’s bio to understand whether it’s an AI-generated group. Spotify’s Verified Artist label should have an asterisk on it that makes it clear that this is not music made by a hard-working artist trying to make a name for themselves. This isn’t a band you can buy tickets to go see. It was music made by a computer program, prompted by humans to do so.

Is it a huge deal that the music was made by AI? At the end of the day, no. But to pass it off as a real band is the bigger sticking point. Having to be called out for it by the public is the bigger issue. At the end of the day, music is music. But the larger artist community should take issue with how Spotify handled this. It’s likely that Spotify didn’t know it was an AI-generated artist before it let the music stand on its platform. But now that it’s out in the open, the label needs to be changed.

If you think this is not a big deal and there’s a lot of people probably doing this, you’re probably right. People used to be outraged by sampling, and that’s been going on for over a hundred years. It’s the practice and the standard that needs changing because, if we’re being honest with ourselves, this is only going to continue more and more. What you think about The Velvet Sundown’s music is your own opinion. But this kind of music creation is likely just the beginning of how AI is going to affect the music industry.