Apple and Spotify are sleepwalking into an AI music crisis and The Velvet Sundown mess shows they need to act fast

Date:
Wed, 02 Jul 2025 14:36:45 +0000

Description:
Spotify and Apples AI blind spot: The Velvet Sundown is a warning on the dangers of AI music.

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The first time I heard The Velvet Sundowns album Dust and Silence on Spotify, I thought to myself, hmm, thats not too bad. It hits a lot of the notes I
look for in music I can listen to in the background while I work: acoustic guitar, nice vocals, chill beats, and a mellow 60s psychedelic vibe. Theres only one problem: this band might not exist .

The Velvet Sundown is suspected of being an entirely AI-generated band. Despite posting pictures of its band members on its Instagram and X.com accounts, the pictures look very fake. In fact, they look exactly like they were created by AI.

Its very hard to prove definitively if the band is fake, but the evidence mounts up: The pictures look fake, theres no evidence that the band members really exist, and the music sounds like it could have been generated in an AI music tool, like Suno .

Famous YouTube musician Rick Beato even released an episode about the band , breaking down its songs into individual tracks to see if he could tell if it was AI-generated. His opinion? Yes, it is. Upcoming tour

The bands account on X.com is adamant that the band is real and makes its own music, even promising an upcoming live tour! A post from the band says, 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.

Ive reached out to the band, and theyve emailed me back, saying theyre happy to answer questions, except that as soon as I suggest a video interview, they immediately ghost me. It feels like whoever is behind The Velvet Sundown is very much trolling the rest of us for publicity by pretending to be a real band, and as this article shows, its working.

Yesterday, The Velvet Sundown had 470,000 monthly listens on Spotify. When I look at its page today, they have gone up to 634,000. Thats a lot of revenue being diverted away from real bands who actually made their own music and towards a band whose music is created by AI from being trained on other peoples material, usually without attribution. Dust and Silence from The Velvet Sundown, playing on Apple Music. (Image credit: The Velvet Sundown) Apple and Spotify

Whats interesting is that both Apple and Spotify are happily streaming the bands music while not flagging it as AI. Dont we, the paying punters, deserve to know if the band we are listening to is fake?

In fact, The Velvet Sundown is one of a number of recent bands that have exposed a massive loophole in the big music streaming services like Apple, Spotify, and Amazon Music: They have absolutely no requirement that AI music be flagged as AI-generated.

Interestingly, the smaller-sized streaming service Deezer does, and it has used its own technology to identify The Velvet Sundowns music as
AI-generated, and it flags it as such. Deezer flags Dust and Silence as "Ai-generated content". (Image credit: Deezer)

The Velvet Sundown isnt the only band suspected of being AI-generated (other suspected bands include Stellar Cruise and The Luna Lounge), but were only at the start of this problem. Music streaming services are about to be overrun
by AI-generated content, and they need to act fast.

I dont want to be sending whatever meagre cents that music streams generate these days to a band that doesn't exist when there are plenty of struggling artists who need genuine support. Perhaps this whole mess will lead Apple and Spotify to rethink their policies on flagging AI music and take a leaf out of Deezers book, because I think it should be their responsibility to tell us, their paying customers, if the music we are listening to is AI-generated or not.

Whether they are real or not, after the success of The Velvet Sundown, an absolute deluge of AI music will be on the way now that people have realized its an easy way to generate revenue, and Apple and Spotify do not flag it as such. And the next generation of AI bands will probably be a bit cleverer about hiding the fact that they are AI-generated.

Weve reached out to both Apple and Spotify for comment on AI music on their streaming platforms and will update this article if we receive any. You might also like Apple is reportedly looking to power Siris AI with OpenAI or Anthropic, heres why I hope they do 3 reasons why I appreciate AI and maybe you should too I tried the incredible ChatGPT prompt that can help you learn everything about a topic and it's a game changer



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/apple-and-spotify- are-sleepwalking-into-an-ai-music-crisis-and-the-velvet-sundown-mess-shows-the y-need-to-act-fast


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