Perhaps you, too, have had the displeasure of stumbling across the Velvet Sundown on Spotify or social media. The psych-rock “band” made headlines last month after they’d amassed hundreds of thousands of streams on the platform, despite existing for only a few weeks. They currently have 750,000 Spotify listeners. The only problem is that they don’t actually exist. Their press “photos” are comically unnatural-looking, their Spotify bio is a boilerplate nothing burger, and the music is just as bland as you’d expect. They have social media accounts where they’ve noticeably pushed back against AI accusations: “They said we’re not real. Maybe you aren’t either.” Now, a spokesperson for the Velvet Sundown has confirmed to Rolling Stone that they are, in fact, not real.
The statement comes from pseudonymous “adjunct” Velvet Sundown member Andrew Frelon, who admitted that the music was made with the AI music generator Suno, the same program that Timbaland used recently to create the fake artist TaTa. “It’s marketing,” Frelon told Rolling Stone over the phone. “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?’” Well!
Initially, Frelon told Rolling Stone that AI was only used for brainstorming for the project, but he eventually conceded that some songs (“I don’t want to say which ones”) were generated with Suno. “Personally, I’m interested in art hoaxes,” he said. “The Leeds 13, a group of art students in the UK, 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?’”
As for those Spotify numbers — their top song “Dust On The Wind” has garnered over half a million plays — Frelon gave little explanation. “I’m not running the Spotify backend stuff, so I can’t super speak to exactly how that happened,” he said. “I know we got on some playlists that just have like tons of followers, and it seems to have spiraled from there.”
When asked by Rolling Stone if Frelon’s cohorts use their own playlists to boost streams, he said: “I don’t have an answer that I can give to you for that because I’m not involved… And I don’t want to say something that’s not true.”
So making fake music is kosher, but saying something that’s not true is where this guy draws the line. Got it. Apparently, the Velvet Sundown have an album coming out in a couple of weeks called Paper Sun Rebellion, their third in two months. See that announcement below.
