With the fake spokesperson and their ChatGPT-written tweets denying that the band was AI-generated consigned to history, The Velvet Sundown’s rapid rise continues. The band’s Spotify bio has been updated with an honest description of what the project is, while their listener count continues to grow.
“The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence,” is how the bio now begins.
“This isn’t a trick – it’s a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”
“All characters, stories, music, voices and lyrics are original creations generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools employed as creative instruments,” it continues.
There’s also a new single release on the project’s profile called ‘Rite of the Dawn’, with a generic ’9871648 Records DK’ DistroKid auto-assigned identifier as the label.
But just to add to the ongoing confusion, a different track called ‘Cardboard Sky’ has popped up with the same identifier, but from a different The Velvet Sundown profile that has, er, zero monthly listeners.
It does have some human names attached though: ‘Cardboard Sky’ is listed as being written by Jake Harrow and produced by Miles Calder, while its YouTube version credits them as well as Theo Jackson and Marcus Ellison.
While some of these names correspond with human musicians with public profiles online, well, we’re loath to make assumptions about anything in this story. Human musicians pretending to be the AI band that recently had a fake spokesperson would be a fitting twist though.
What we can say with confidence is that the official, verified The Velvet Sundown account now has more than 1.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone – up from 325,000 when we first covered the story a week and a half ago.
What does this mean? Well, it means that more than a million people have read or watched media coverage and social-media posts and clicked through to listen to a track or two out of curiosity. It’s a metric reflecting the story, not the music.
The real measure will come in a couple of months, when anyone who listened briefly then never came back will fall out of the public listeners count. So far, just under 35,000 people have actually chosen to follow the profile.
They’ll have new releases injected into their ‘Release Radar’ playlists on Spotify, and this month’s spike of listening will also filter into its algorithms – unless, of course, Spotify adopts a Deezer-style policy of booting GenAI music out of its recommendations.
(All of this is also true of rival DSPs, of course. It’s worth repeating that Spotify is the focus for this story only because it has the most public stats that can be followed over time.)
The Velvet Sundown story – and the stats being posted by other AI artists like Nick Hustles and Aventhis – certainly feels like A Moment for the music business. As we said, wait a month or two before making any judgements about whether there’s really a sustainable audience for this music.
But you can be sure that many more of these artists will be following as the technology behind them continues to improve. How DSPs and distributors handle that is now the burning topic of 2025 for the music industry.
