It is a sudden rise to fame, by any requirements.
Two weeks in the past, breezy psychedelic rockers The Velvet Sunset did not exist. And now they’ve launched two albums and picked up greater than half 1,000,000 month-to-month listeners on Spotify.
It is nearly too good to be true, and it in all probability is not. All of the proof (or lack, thereof) factors to The Velvet Sunset being an AI-generated outfit. There is not any discernible real-world footprint, and many to counsel that they are a figment of somebody’s digital creativeness.
All the pictures shared by the “band” on social media bear the hallmarks of AI: the hyperrealistic colors, the inconceivable shadows. And the band’s music bears the sonic hallmarks of Suno, the music creation app that permits customers to generate as much as 500 songs a month for simply $8: the skinny, unimaginative percussion, the truth that the vocalist sounds barely completely different on every music.
“There’s one thing quietly spellbinding about The Velvet Sunset,” claims the band’s Spotify bio. “You don’t simply take heed to them, you drift into them. Their music doesn’t shout on your consideration; it seeps in slowly, like a scent that instantly takes you again someplace you didn’t anticipate.
“Their sound mixes textures of ’70s psychedelic alt-rock and people rock, but it blends effortlessly with trendy alt-pop and indie constructions. Shimmering tremolos, heat tape reverbs, and the mild swirl of organs give every part a way of historical past with out it ever feeling pressured.”
The bio goes on to say that the band was shaped by singer and mellotron participant Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, keyboardist Milo Rains, and drummer Orion “Rio” Del Mar, 4 musicians who solely seem to exist inside the context of the band.
So what is going on on? The Velvet Sunset have already made their approach onto some distinguished Spotify playlists, prompting allegations that the corporate is padding playlists with “ghost artists” to lower royalty payouts to the actual ones. It is also potential that The Velvet Sunset’s listener spikes are because of bots (Spotify take steps to stop this), a situation wherein faux listeners take heed to faux music and who is aware of what to imagine anymore.
Extra probably, given the emergence of a band Instagram account which contains a rising variety of clearly AI-generated pictures – together with photos spoofing the covers of Abbey Street and Queen II – is that The Velvet Sunset’s “creator” cannot imagine the success of the challenge and is milking it for all it is price, delighted in any respect the column inches the “band” have generated. And we have simply joined the throng. Sorry.
In the meantime, streaming platform Deezer, which has flagged The Velvet Sunset’s music as presumably being “created utilizing synthetic intelligence”, reviews that almost 20% of music uploaded to their platform has been artificially created, a quantity that is almost doubled in three months.
It is solely going to worsen.