Posted on 07/01/2025 5:39:56 PM PDT by DoodleBob
…Smuggled into popular playlists and hidden in plain sight among authentic, well-known tracks, AI-generated artists with fake photos, ChatGPT-generated biographies and no genuine fans to speak of are picking up hundreds of thousands of streams.
One such artist is The Velvet Sundown, a band with almost 350,000 monthly Spotify listeners but no discernible online presence or social media accounts. ("There's not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed," as one Redditor put it.) While we can't confirm that the band's music is AI-generated, a glance at their artist image and bio should be enough to persuade even the least skeptical observer.
"The Velvet Sundown don’t just play music — they conjure worlds," reads the group's Spotify profile, which we're about 99% certain has been authored by ChatGPT. "Somewhere between the ghost of Laurel Canyon and the echo of a Berlin warehouse, this four-piece band bends time, fusing 1970s psychedelic textures with cinematic alt-pop and dreamy analog soul."
The biography tellingly states that the band's music "feels like a hallucination you want to stay lost in," their live shows playing like "lucid dreams" and their albums "unfolding like lost soundtracks to films that were never made". There's even a seemingly bogus quote from Billboard rounding things off, claiming that the band "sound like the memory of something you never lived, and somehow make it feel real”.
…
Velvet Sundown tracks have been identified in more than 30 popular playlists created by anonymous curator accounts, and have even begun popping up in Spotify users' Discover Weekly, personalized playlists generated by the platform's recommendation algorithm. The band's music has also been uploaded to Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube and Deezer, the latter's AI detection tool flagging The Velvet Sundown's music as potentially AI-generated.
(Excerpt) Read more at musicradar.com ...
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Also "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies.
Really?
The Archies weren’t real?
Seriously, the Archies were of course planned as a fake band. In the case of Steam, if I recall, the singer didn’t want his name on the record , and it was released as a flip-side, and took off because it was different and catchy.
Heh... there were some bands that recorded a single or more on the producer’s dime (often recruited and hired by the producer) and just who was in the studio remains a mystery to this day. Some of that is due to not wanting to be associated with something for which they never rec’d any royalties.
If memory serves, Tommy James and the Shondells plugged out their cover of “Hanky Panky”, but on release it went nowhere, and they all drifted off to real-world jobs. Some prominent DJ plucked a copy from a bargain bin, played it, loved it, put it on the air, and Tommy James had to form a different set of Shondells.
The main guy from that band (I’m too lazy to look it up) that recorded “Tighter, Tighter” (a one-hit-wonder classic, IMHO) was as of a few years ago still taking bookings as either a solo performer or several iterations of other sizes.
I’m not sure about The Grass Roots or The Rascals, one or the other or both were, like Steely Dan, one or a pair of guys who hired people for the sessions and/or the tours.
Andy White — most people haven’t heard of him (I had to look up his name just now) was the drummer on “Love Me Do” by the Beatles. Ringo was on tambourine.😊
People used to think the Monkees weren’t real.
[snip] According to the band’s Spotify blurb, members include “singer and mellotron player Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, Milo Rains, who crafts the band’s textured synth sounds, and free-spirited percussionist Orion ‘Rio’ Del Mar.” The waffly blurb also features both hyperbole that ultimately tells you nothing and badly deployed simile, which feels deeply reminiscent of the textbook shortcomings of LLM output. Furthermore, this up-and-coming musical outfit is apparently made up entirely of technological hermits as I couldn’t track down a single scrap of social media for any of its named members. [/snip]
Looks like Gabe’s a teen?
https://www.instagram.com/gabe_farrow/
https://www.tiktok.com/discover/gabe-farrow-productions-first-gen
Lennie West playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/@lenniewest7239
Milo Rains is a kid who makes YT shorts:
https://www.youtube.com/@MiloRains45
and ya can’t beat this:
Orion is a brand of drum, apparently.
(nearly eleven years ago)
Velvet Sundown - Launch Trailer
1:21
GameSpot Trailers
1.16M subscribers
7,571 views
July 22, 2014
Velvet Sundown is now available on Steam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGM8zCUUnNs
Transcript: [Music] to know your destiny you must first know yourself but if you don’t know who you are you’re going to have to improvise welcome aboard the Velvet Sundown a luxury yacht a drift in an ocean of intrigue deception romance and Revenge you’ll use your wits to uncover secret plots and Dabble in the dark arts of sabotage and sub auge [? subterfuge?] but don’t let your guard down for a second because an opportunity missed is an opportunity lost and because every character in every game is played by an actual person you’ll need to be careful whom you trust we all have secrets here we just don’t know what they are yet dive into the intense contemporary gaming experience as each unique story unfolds in real time your action your rules your story velvet sundown
I was about to say much the same thing. Mass market pop may as well be AI-generated, it's just the formulaic hook, loop and beat ad nauseam. If generative AI algorithms studied the songs, voices, and physical appearance of every flavor of the month pop singer from the past 20-30 years, they would probably generate something that looks and sounds very much like Taylor Swift.
It’s not AI. But the Ohio Express weren’t really a rock group, they were made up of studio singers from Super K Productions, a division of Buddha Records, where other “bubblegum” hits came from. I remember when Yummy Yummy Yummy was a hit. WOW! I’m getting old 🙄🙂
The Milo Rains is also weird in that the voice over is an adult and the video is a small child and dog, so is the child, the adult, or the dog Milo ?
None of this adds up at all!
And there's NO way, with 89 followers on SPOTIFY, they wracked up that many "hits" to hear the song.
They don’t exist. But if they did, they’d be a bunch of homos.
That’s funny and two of the characters look like two of the boys in the band. LOL
I have heard it said that many of the "models" on "that website that starts with 'only'" are entirely CGI, and that the people running them are fat men with cheeto-stained fingers living in their mothers' basements.
When Beato broke down Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times Bad Times”, it really makes you appreciate just how talented Page, Bonzo and JPJ were. They created it from nothing, there was no blueprint, it was all original then.
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