Let me introduce ‘The Velve Sundown’. Today, this ‘band’ defines itself in Spotify as “a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence”. It was not always this way: the artist reached more than 1M monthly listeners in Spotify by posing as a real rock band inspired by southern-rock bands of the 70s such as Eagles or Fleetwood Mac. The band released two albums and published AI-generated images of the supposed members. After the hoax was discovered and announced in July 2025, the artist changed the image and the description in the platform. Still, their hit, ‘Dust on the wind’ accounts for more than 3MM plays in Spotify as of today. A timeline of Velvet Sundown story can be found in this article, too.
It is hard to say how many of the 400k monthly listeners of the Velvet Sundown are genuinely interested in the music and how many of them are just curious about AI applied to music. However, this is one of many AI-generated bands that are populating music streaming platforms. The case raises many ethical questions such as whether massive processing of copyrighted material is fair use or violates copyright law, about the need to identify AI-generated material over the Internet, and about the future of the music industry, in general. If streaming platforms, and particularly Spotify and its playlists were powerful disruptors that transformed the way we discover, purchase and listen to music, what will be the impact of tools like Suno, Udio or AIVA which dramatically lower the barriers to create music leveraging artificial intelligence?
I recently listened to a very interesting series of podcasts in Financial Times on this topic. There are opposite opinions, with some artists embracing AI and considering it as an opportunity, and others that feel more pessimistic about its negative impact on human creativity and the music industry in general. This is another example of the disruptive impact of AI in the industry and the different ethical questions it poses to society.
And, yes, I used ChatGPT to proofread this text 😉 But the text is mine and I am not always following its advice.
About Santiago Andrés Azcoitia
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