The Velvet Sunset: A ghost band with no proof of life

Have you ever heard of The Velvet Sunset? It is type of like The Velvet Underground, besides The Velvet Underground is unquestionably actual, and the jury continues to be out for The Velvet Sunset.

The band’s photographs look remarkably AI-generated — too clear, not fairly textured sufficient, oddly inhuman, but it has racked up greater than 372,000 month-to-month listeners on Spotify. Their bio reads that they’re “quietly spellbinding” and makes use of these odd, unspecific metaphors so frequent in AI-generated textual content, like evaluating the band’s music to “a scent that abruptly takes you again someplace you did not count on.”

Their bio purports that it was fashioned by singer and mellotron participant Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, synth participant Milo Raines, and percussionist Orion “Rio” Del Mar. None of them has ever been interviewed. And, not {that a} social media account is essentially proof of life, however none of them have an Instagram, TikTok, or Fb account — and neither does the band itself. In truth, not one of the band members appears to have a single shred of an web presence.

The music credit on Spotify are additionally a bit suspicious. Most artists can have a number of folks within the credit, however the credit on Spotify for each single one in every of their songs are “Carried out by,” “Written by,” and “Supply” by The Velvet Sunset. There isn’t any producer listed.

“The Velvet Sunset aren’t making an attempt to revive the previous,” their Spotify bio reads. “They’re rewriting it. They sound just like the reminiscence of a time that by no means truly occurred… however by some means they make it really feel actual.”

Are they enjoying with us? Listening to the band myself, it does sound AI-generated — the lyrics lack specificity, and the music itself lacks depth. However it’s additionally type of… high-quality music? Suno and Udio, two of the most-used AI-powered music mills, have been “churning out soulless slop” for about two years, as Music Radar reported, and if The Velvet Sunset is utilizing these instruments to create music, it is likely to be one of many first extra profitable makes use of of the platforms’ capacity to “seize the general public’s creativeness in the way in which that most of the expertise’s critics had feared.”

On YouTube, there’s a whole ecosystem of AI-generated music. One standout is AI For The Tradition, a channel that reimagines rap and R&B tracks as classic Motown or blues cuts — full with fictional artists and AI-generated bios to match. One significantly notable instance: an AI-rendered cowl of Future’s “Flip On the Lights,” which was later sampled by rapper JPEGMAFIA on his newest album.

Whereas the band hasn’t confirmed that it is AI-generated, it has additionally achieved little to show folks unsuitable. Music Radar says it “bears the unmistakably lo-fi veneer of a Suno creation.” One Reddit submit says there is not a “shred of proof on the web that this band has ever existed.”

However, ultimately, there is not any precise proof that the band is generated by AI, and therein lies the battle. When AI music turns into this troublesome to catch, whose job is it to catch it? The difficulty has led some customers to submit their disappointment in Spotify for not informing listeners that the band is or isn’t AI-generated. “We needs to be boycotting Spotify by now,” one particular person stated on Reddit, and one other particular person responded by mentioning that the band can also be on Apple Music and Amazon Music.

Spotify didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark from Mashable.