As many of you know, my background before web3 was in music media. I founded Billboard Dance and served as editor-in-chief at SPIN, covering artists from the underground to the mainstage and watching up close as technology reshaped the way music is made, shared, and sold.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of shifts: the rise of streaming, the democratization of digital tools, the TikTok takeover. But none of it feels as quietly seismic as what’s happening right now with AI-generated music. In a guest piece I recently wrote for Billboard Dance’s 10th anniversary, I called it the biggest shift no one’s really ready for.

I also unpacked the ripple effects in a recent Now Media deep dive, tackling questions around artistry, policy, and the value of music in an age when anyone can generate it.

The AI space moves at a relentless pace. Most stories barely register outside the bubble. But every so often, a story escapes the echo chamber and sparks debate (and backlash) beyond the tech world.

This time, the main character was a rock band that doesn’t exist. In just a few weeks last month, a mysterious four-piece called The Velvet Sundown racked up 550,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, all without interviews, tour dates, or any traceable members.

I did what no sane music lover should be expected to do in 2025: I listened to both of their albums. Why? So you don’t have to. Consider it a public service. The story behind these suspiciously popular songs includes viral playlists, AI detection tools, public denials, a half-hearted confession, and a growing debate over what counts as real music in the streaming era. Buckle up, because the saga is every bit as strange as it sounds (unlike the music itself, which is about as edgy as white toast).

Music journalists were quick to pounce on the story, parsing through the act’s discography for synthetic signs. There was no shortage of red flags. The band’s Spotify bio was filled with vague slop in obvious ChatGPT-style negation (“You don’t just listen to them, you drift into them” … “They’re not reviving the past. They’re rewriting it”), topped off with a fake Billboard quote.

The band’s press images weren’t any better: eerily blemish-free faces, vacant expressions, and all the telltale hallmarks of AI image generation. Even the album covers — Dust and Silence and Floating on Echoes, dropped just two weeks apart — looked like generic DALL-E psych-rock outputs, all disembodied eyes and washed-out dreamscapes.

As their music surfaced in Spotify’s user playlists and algorithmic Discover Weekly — with no requirement to disclose AI involvement — Deezer quietly tagged their artist page: “Some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence.” A French firm, Ircam Amplify, ran Dust and Silence through its AI detector. Ten of thirteen tracks came back 100% AI, two more at 98%. Internet sleuths even found a public Suno account under the name “Velvet Sundown,” likely used to generate the songs.

The music itself is the uncanny valley of rock: oddly familiar and creatively hollow. For the most part, The Velvet Sundown is pleasantly generic: polished production, clean guitar licks, steady drum grooves, and a forgettable vocalist who variably recalls Neil Young and The Eagles’ Don Henley. The song names are painfully derivative, from “Dust on the Wind” to “Rebel Shout,” clearly assembled by an algorithm with no sense of irony.

As a songwriter myself, I always pay close attention to lyrics. While nothing here is outright offensive, it’s almost impressive how thoroughly the band exposes the formulaic backbone of classic rock. Vague imagery, overused metaphors, and empty signifiers abound: dust, fire, rivers, shadows, open skies. Time-worn rhymes like “sleep” and “keep.” It’s the kind of language that feels deceptively comfortable, the lyrical equivalent of muscle memory, until you realize it’s been reused so often it barely holds any meaning at all. At some point, one album ended and the next began, and I didn’t notice for at least four songs.

Despite the abundance of evidence, the band’s account initially denied any AI involvement, brushing off the accusations as “lazy” and “baseless.” In another post, the “band” declared: “This is not a joke. This is our music, written in long, sweaty nights in a cramped bungalow in California with real instruments, real minds, and real soul. Every chord, every lyric, every mistake — HUMAN.” Meanwhile, their Instagram was posting increasingly AI-generated images, including half-baked homages to classic covers like Abbey Road and Queen II, complete with extra fingers and other common AI tropes.

Finally, they came clean to Rolling Stone today. A reporter reached Andrew Frelon, a pseudonymous “adjunct member” or spokesperson for The Velvet Sundown, who initially claimed AI was used only as a brainstorming tool before conceding that parts of the songs were fully AI-generated in Suno, though he refused to say which ones. Frelon spun the whole thing as intentional provocation, calling The Velvet Sundown an “art hoax” meant to spark debate about reality. “It’s marketing. It’s trolling,” he said, refusing to comment on whether they’d manipulated playlists in aiding their viral ascent.

Does it matter? I remember speaking to the Head of Amazon Music a few years back. He told me the most common query to Alexa is “Play some music.” Blasphemy to a music head like me, but most people just want an inoffensive background soundtrack. The truth is, most classic rock radio listeners wouldn’t know the difference between The Velvet Sundown and the Steve Miller Band. Since the news broke, their monthly streams have climbed to 750,000.

As a Suno user, I knew this day would come. The tools are still improving, but it’s already clear that AI-generated music can pass for human. But what The Velvet Sundown exposed is that the streaming ecosystem is built to reward anything that blends in. The algorithm doesn’t care if a song was written in a studio or generated on a laptop. It only cares if you don’t skip.

So what does this mean for the music industry? I explored the rise of generative AI music and its implications in our recent deep dive. From authorship and attribution to streaming economics and artistic credibility, we’re entering a new era with no easy answers.

Velvet Sundown might be a hoax. But the reaction to them? That’s very real.

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