Though they’re not yet dominating the charts, disturbingly realistic AI songs are slowly but surely creeping into our headphones - and you may even be listening to them without realizing what you’re hearing. Smuggled into popular playlists and hidden in plain sight among authentic, well-known tracks, AI-generated artists with fake photos, ChatGPT-generated biographies and no genuine fans to speak of are picking up hundreds of thousands of streams.
One such artist is The Velvet Sundown, a band with almost 350,000 monthly Spotify listeners but no discernible online presence or social media accounts. (“There’s not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed,” as one Redditor put it.) While we can’t confirm that the band’s music is AI-generated, a glance at their artist image and bio should be enough to persuade even the least skeptical observer.
“The Velvet Sundown don’t just play music — they conjure worlds,” reads the group’s Spotify profile, which we’re about 99% certain has been authored by ChatGPT. “Somewhere between the ghost of Laurel Canyon and the echo of a Berlin warehouse, this four-piece band bends time, fusing 1970s psychedelic textures with cinematic alt-pop and dreamy analog soul.”
The biography tellingly states that the band’s music “feels like a hallucination you want to stay lost in,” their live shows playing like “lucid dreams” and their albums “unfolding like lost soundtracks to films that were never made”. There’s even a seemingly bogus quote from Billboard rounding things off, claiming that the band “sound like the memory of something you never lived, and somehow make it feel real”.
@alyaza
Those 350,000 “listeners” are probably AI too.
I thought Spotify would load up a bunch of AI tracks into their generic playlists (think Chill Easy Listening Jazz) so they won’t have to pay any royalties on those plays, thus keeping higher margins for themselves.
@slauraure
They are bringing in an AI song mixing feature and there have been rumours about them starting to use AI to create tracks. Spotify are all about the money, they don’t give a hoot about artists or music.
Didn’t they have a problem like that before, but with bots? Like, some obscure artists who suddenly started getting massive listening hours by setting up a bot network to just keep repeating?
@Rose_Thorne
They did, I’m pretty sure.
At least in the case I remember it wasn’t a bot network. They would just put them on popular playlists so it’d end up with tons of listens. They were basically fake bands created as a way to get around paying licensing fees. If there’s no real band there’s no royalties to pay.