Success came quickly for the Velvet Sundown. On June 5, they released their debut album, Floating on Echoes, and in fewer than two weeks, it ended up on Spotify playlists with hundreds of thousands of saves. Dust on the Wind, a pro-peace folk rock song on Floating on Echoes, secured the No. 1 spot for Spotify’s daily Viral 50 chart in Britain, Norway and Sweden between June 29 and July 1. In just over a month, the Velvet Sundown had over 1 million monthly streams on Spotify.
There was one only problem: It didn’t seem like the Velvet Sundown was really a band at all. There was no evidence online that any of the listed band members were real people. The photos the band shared were uncannily smooth, the vocals mechanically soulful and the lyrics a grab bag of anti-war clichés. To many of those following the band’s quick popularity - it released two albums, Floating on Echoes and Dust and Silence, in June alone, with a third coming in mid-July - the Velvet Sundown seemed like classic-rock snake oil.
On Saturday, the group confirmed through its Spotify bio that the music was created using artificial intelligence “guided by human creative direction”. “This isn’t a trick - it’s a mirror,” the statement reads. “An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”
The admission capped nearly three weeks of speculation - and confusion. Shortly after the Velvet Sundown began to garner media attention, someone using the pseudonym Andrew Frelon claimed to be a spokesperson for the band, providing conflicting information to Rolling Stone about its use of AI. The Washington Post spoke to Frelon - which translates to hornet in French - last week but could not verify his involvement with the Velvet Sundown. The next morning, Frelon, who described himself as a Quebec-based web safety expert, revealed in a lengthy Medium post that he was not behind the Velvet Sundown’s music. He had falsely claimed to be the band on Twitter to troll those outraged by the band’s use of AI.