It’s finally happened, or so it may seem: an AI-generated rock band have a fanbase. As observed by such publications as Classic Rock and MusicRadar over the past week, an artist on Spotify called ‘The Velvet Sundown’ has amassed upwards of half a million monthly listeners, despite everything from their music to their pictures and even their written bio appearing to have been generated by artificial intelligence.
Ever since the proliferation of AI a couple of years ago, and its worryingly rapid development afterwards, this has been a notion keeping people up at night. Even our industry’s biggest players have been shitting themselves over it. Look no further than labels as monolithic as Universal and Sony, who are currently smacking ‘music’ generation companies Suno and Udio with infringement suits containing more zeroes than Slayer tablature.
By itself, the sentence ‘Robot band is popular’ should be enough to make any decent person shiver. Music is inherently a human medium. Although it can be relayed through such machines as an electric guitar, a synthesiser or even a laptop, it’s created by human hands to offer artists comfort and/or community, and its lyrics convey personal experiences or outlooks or stories. Strip that away and it doesn’t matter how ‘good’ or ‘competent’ or ‘convincing’ a song sounds – it means nothing.
However, there’s more than one (alleged) soulless machine involved in the Velvet Sundown story. The other one is Spotify itself. How did a ‘band’ more than likely conjured up on a whim by one person or party – with no footprints regarding live shows, management, promotion or press – suddenly corral 500,000 fans? The short answer is… it didn’t.
As best as I can tell, and this is a sentiment shared by the writer of the above-mentioned MusicRadar report, The Velvet Sundown took off because of their placements on playlists. The two primary ones seem to be ‘Vietnam War Music’ and ‘Good Mornings’, which have been ‘saved’ to the profiles of almost 850,000 people altogether. On these playlists – both created by the same user, by the way – The Velvet Sundown’s songs are sandwiched between tracks by actual artists, including such giants as the Beatles, Taylor Swift, the Rolling Stones, Maroon 5 and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Safe to say, The Velvet Sundown’s music was not sought out by an engaged following, but stumbled upon by people craving 70s nostalgia and/or some easy songs to start the day. There’s nothing wrong with wanting those things, nor passively listening to them as you go about your job, routines or hobbies, which is how many of us consume playlists. But Spotify numbers don’t communicate the difference between an active fan and someone who happens upon a song then keeps it on because they’re not paying attention.
In May, US rapper Russ put out a revelatory tweet that started with, “Monthly listeners is essentially monthly impressions.” He added: “It’s a catalyst for unhealthy comparisons. It creates misleading metrics like ‘monthly listeners’ and incentivises people to cheat so they can inflate the perception of popularity” – which, by the look of it, is precisely what is happening with The Velvet Sundown.
Craig Reynolds, drummer of rap metal crew Stray From The Path, offered a similar observation in a 2023 YouTube video. He explained: “A monthly listener is any single person that listened to any single song from an artist, whether they clicked on it or it came as part of a playlist or Spotify’s new ‘Discovery’ mode.”
The drummer then spoke further about ‘Discovery’ mode, saying that it was introduced in 2020 as a method for rights owners to sacrifice a percentage of Spotify’s already measly royalty payouts in exchange for preferential treatment: popping up on auto-generated playlists, playing when the song or album people put on has finished, and so on.
The monthly listener stat ultimately means next to nothing about real-world influence, given how open to manipulation it is, and it’s easy to prove. Genuinely, how many people had heard the name ‘The Velvet Sundown’ before the story of them likely being AI-generated broke? Spotify’s numbers insist they’re more popular than the likes of Deafheaven, King Diamond, Paradise Lost, Creeper, Bleed From Within and Napalm Death, but stick them in any city (on the slim chance they do happen to exist) and every one of those bands would out-sell them.
As a result, bookings based on unsubstantiated ‘online fame’ in the past have yielded mixed returns at best – anyone else remember Threatin? Plus, they only serve to spit in the eye of hard-working, talented musicians who don’t have record label money or songs that can be dropped onto a big genre playlist.
A band likely drummed up by AI and attaining big numbers is dreadful, but the harsh reality is that it’s a symptom of a much wider problem – a much wider problem that doesn’t have anything to do with AI. Spotify’s statistics of ‘success’ are taken seriously by onlookers but are more a measurement of the number of eyes on a product than the sales of one. Just because 100 people have licked a cake on a bakery shelf doesn’t mean 100 people enjoyed the taste of it and want to keep coming back.
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