Synthetic soul: Music’s AI deception

Hot new band Velvet Sundown gains 1 million Spotify listeners before admitting they're entirely AI, sparking fierce debate about authenticity in music.

The music might fool some, but ironically the band art is clearly AI generated; from the disappearing microphone cable to the guitarist’s weird fingers and his missing tuning peg.

Meet the modern-day Milli Vanilli

The Velvet Sundown may have pulled off modern music's most audacious heist.

Emerging from nowhere in June 2025, ‘they’ quickly gained over a million Spotify listeners with their hazy, folk-rock sound.

Check out the number one hit “Dust on the Wind” here 

Leaning into an iconic '70s rocker image and sound, complete with long, unkempt hair and sepia-toned album artwork, ironically it was the look and not the sound that first gave the game away.

As you can see below, their imagery contained the classic hallmarks of AI-generated content.

The Sundown double-down

The ’down aggressively denied early suspicions.

Their official account bellowed, "This is our music, written in long, sweaty nights in a cramped bungalow in California."

Things got spicier. Andrew Frelon was interviewed in Rolling Stone as the band spokesperson, only to soon admit he was trolling them while using a fake name, all in the spirit of 'art hoaxes'.

Then the band came clean, updating their Spotify bio to call themselves "an ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship".

To be honest, to my ears this music is clearly AI. It is passable, but crushingly bland. Note perfect, but cliched and soulless. I mean “Guitars cry out, bullets fly, mama prays while young men die” … please!

But compare this to the music we could make on platforms like Suno, say, 18 months ago, and the improvement is frightening. This raises deep questions.

A bigger, scarier picture

This controversy arrives as AI music floods streaming platforms.

Deezer admits that over 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks are uploaded daily to its platform.

That’s 18% of all daily uploads, nearly double the 10% reported in January 2025.

While critics argue AI music threatens genuine artists' livelihoods, supporters claim it's simply another creative tool that democratises art, making everyone now a musician.

I’d love to know your thoughts.

Adam, you ARE rock and roll – what do you think?

I spoke about AI at a recent corporate event and during the Q&A a woman asked, “So should my 13-year-old son continue to learn to play the guitar?'

My answer was a resounding 'yes'.

Even if we get to the point where AI can do it better than all of us, the visceral human experience of playing, of making music, of making mistakes will still nourish us.

I love playing terrible quality chess, against equally average humans, even though my phone could beat the greatest players of all time.

At the same time, will there be as many jobs for professional musicians a decade from now?

There's a very good chance the answer is a resounding 'no'.

The creative arts are at the vanguard of many of the most provocative debates around job security, copyright, the definition of creativity itself.

Yours in rock 'n roll ... (which we humans still do best!)

Adam S