In June 2025, a band called The Velvet Sundown suddenly appeared on Spotify. Their dreamy, lo-fi rock track Dust on the Wind exploded in popularity, racking up over 1.2 million monthly listeners. They climbed viral charts in Europe and flooded social media playlists. But something didn’t add up.
No live shows, interviews or known musicians. Just smooth, eerily perfect images and music that felt… oddly machine-like.
As curiosity grew, the mystery unraveled. It turns out The Velvet Sundown wasn’t a band at all. It was entirely AI-generated from the music and lyrics to the band members and their backstories. Created using powerful AI tools like Suno, it became one of the first fully synthetic music acts to dominate real charts.
A person calling himself “Andrew Frelon” claimed credit for the project and even fooled some major media outlets. But later, in a twist, he admitted it was all a hoax to expose how easy it is to manipulate streaming algorithms and media narratives.
The creators later updated the band’s Spotify bio to admit it was an AI-generated music project. “Not quite human, not quite machine,” it read. Even the song titles, names, and photos had been stitched together with code.
Musicians and listeners were stunned and divided. Some saw it as an exciting experiment. Others called it a dangerous threat to real artists.
Artists like Velvet Meadow’s Kristian Heironimus hit back with protest songs. His garage-rock track The Velvet Sundown takes a swing at the fake band “Pick a real guitar to play, not a damn mouse.”
It wasn’t just a diss, it was a warning. With AI content flooding Spotify, many musicians fear they’re competing with machines for exposure and already-low royalties.
According to Deezer, over 20,000 AI-generated songs are uploaded daily. Spotify doesn’t even label them. That means artists trained for years are now losing streams and revenue to algorithms that mimic their sound.
Pop artist and vlogger Hadji Gaviota summed it up:
“Streaming was never a goldmine, but now real artists get an even smaller slice.”
Legal experts say copyright law has not caught up with generative AI. Mira Sundara Rajan, an intellectual property scholar, says scraping artists’ work to train AI without permission is neither “fair use” in the U.S. nor “fair dealing” in Canada.
She believes urgent regulation is needed or creative industries could be gutted from the inside out.
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The Velvet Sundown’s rise is more than a viral moment it is a warning shot. It shows how fast AI can blur the lines between real and artificial. And unless streaming platforms and lawmakers step in, artists could be left behind while code climbs the charts.
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