July 2025

It's Sad, But This AI-Generated Band Will Make Some Musicians Give Up
The music is actually pretty good.
Article By Bobby Owsinski

  Artist and bands face so much natural competition these days that it's a wonder why anyone even does it all. Not only do you have to worry about the other 120,000 tracks that are uploaded every day, but you now have to worry about AI-generated music as well. Case in point, a presumably AI-generated band called The Velvet Sundown, as outlined by Musically.

Velvet Sundown has 325,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and 1,500 followers. Everything about this band screams AI. For instance, their bio states, "This four-piece band bends time, fusing 1970s psychedelic textures with cinematic alt-pop and dreamy analog soul"  

Okay, maybe that's the writing of a clever publicist, but the bio goes on, ""Formed by vocalist and mellotron sorcerer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, bassist-synth alchemist Milo Rains, and free-spirited percussionist Orion ‘Rio' Del Mar, the band feels like a hallucination you want to stay lost in."

Hmmm, those names don't sound real at all. It's not uncommon to for some musicians to adopt a stage name, but these are just a bit too staged. Not only that, Milo Rains and Orion Del Mar have zero social or online presence. Is that even possible for a young musician these days?

The Quote That Never Was
It gets better. The bio goes on to include this quote from Billboard – "They sound like the memory of something you never lived, and somehow make it feel real." Again, suspiciously AI-sounding.

The problem is that this was never printed in Billboard, as a Google search for the quote turns up nothing.

Let's couple that with the band picture (above), which looks like it was, you guessed it, AI-generated, and what you have is a fake band that is taking royalties from every real artist and band that's out there trying hard to break through.

The evidence actually goes a lot deeper than what I've mentioned above, but you can read about it here.

The sad part is that the music is actually pretty good and probably took a lot of time and skill for the "composer" to get whatever AI music generator that was used to create this AI slop.

I've recently written about young men refusing to get involved in music, and when you have competition like this, who can blame them?

Enjoy the Music.com highly recommends reading Bobby Owsinski's blog. Great info!