Is it art or just one big hoax? This rising AI band could be both

Boston Globe

7 days ago

Of this year.
How is it possible that one group of musicians could be so prolific? That's easy. The Velvet Sundown isn't a band at all; it's a cryptic product of artificial intelligence that has amassed nearly 1.4 million monthly Spotify listeners.
When the band's brocade-wallpaper music first materialized on streaming services little more than a month ago, many listeners were intrigued. Who were these guys? Judging by a playlist image of the group on Spotify, four air-brushed looking dudes with middle parts in their hair and mellow vibes in their genes. Where did they come from? (Clearly a mythical, middle-of-the-road California from the era of the Ford Pinto.)
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After a brief online campaign insisting that this was a real band, a man calling himself Andrew Frelon appeared to come clean, claiming that the Velvet Sundown phenomenon is an 'art hoax.'
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'We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real,' Frelon, who called himself the band's spokesperson,
Ironically, it turns out, we have to ask if Frelon himself was for real.
After Rolling Stone interviewed the 'spokesperson,' the X account that claims to speak for the 'real' Velvet Sundown
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'Someone is attempting to hijack the identity of The Velvet Sundown by releasing unauthorized interviews, publishing unrelated photos, and creating fake profiles claiming to represent us,' the post read in part.
It gets weirder. The self-professed spokesperson with the assumed name recently published a piece on
Whoever is behind the band and whatever their intent,
for Berklee College of Music professor Jonathan Wyner, the music is forgettable. 'My initial thought was, I don't really understand what the big deal is, because it's really not very good,' he told the Globe. A
'I generally approach this technology as a way to workshop an idea or create a demo,' Wyner said. 'I'm not so interested in representing that as the final version of something.'
'But I don't necessarily have a hard ethical or moral stance on that,' Wyner added. 'I'm not going to say that people shouldn't enjoy it.'
So far it's likely the curiosity factor, more than any deep enthusiasm for the music, that has driven the kind of streaming numbers feeding the buzz about this 'band.' The project's most popular song, 'Dust on the Wind,' is typical of the plug-and-play Mad Libs quality of the lyrics: 'Smoke will clear/ Truth won't bend/ Let the song fight/ 'Til the end,' sings the band's gently drawling 'frontman,' credited as Mellotron player Gabe Farrow.
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This is certainly not the first time the music industry has grappled with deception. Wyner said he was disappointed as a kid when he learned that
Musician Nathan Richer is a member of the Lowell-based band Burp. and studied sound recording technology at UMass Lowell. In one class, he learned about the
Like a lot of his friends, Richer listened to the Velvet Sundown's music when he first heard about it a few weeks ago.
'I feel like there's so much generic rock music already out there,' he said. 'The difference [between that and the Velvet Sundown] is pretty much nothing.'
He said he has no problem with an AI user prompting a music creation platform such as
There should be a disclaimer, he said: 'Hey, this is an experiment I'm doing.'
In the studio, Richer sometimes uses AI-driven stem splitters to separate the components of an audio file. (That's the technology that was used to isolate the late John Lennon's vocals from a rough demo tape
'If you're using AI to influence your own creativity, then I feel there's almost zero wrong with that,' Richer said. 'But I do have a lot of worries about the sanctity of art. If you're convoluting what is truth, that's what I'm most scared about.'
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The Boston-based musician and author Damon Krukowski has studiously avoided engaging with the Velvet Sundown's fast-growing catalog. But as an avowed critic of streaming services and their impact on working musicians, he sees the inevitability of computer-produced music as one more example of the mounting impediments to the creative sector's livelihood.
'AI is the least of it, in many ways — or anyway it's consistent with the anti-artist, pro-capital way that these platforms function as a whole,' Krukowski wrote in an email. 'I am very engaged with trying to establish regulation for these platforms through the Living Wage for Musicians Act, which would create a direct payment to human recording artists from streaming for the first time. It's insane that we don't have that already.'
Richer said he recently listened to a podcast episode in which the hosts discussed a sitcom that was created by feeding an AI tool with thousands of hours of classic TV shows. The hosts, he said, were exasperated with the result, 'because it was good.'
Previous attempts, he said, had been funny 'because they were bad. But when it has the ability to analyze millions of hours of human content, it can be so close that it's frightening.'
That explains plenty about how the Velvet Sundown 'kerfuffle' (as Krukowski called it) has inspired such an outpouring of commentary. The music is not good… but it is also not altogether bad.
'The fire that Napster and then Spotify created has been building,' said Wyner, the Berklee professor. 'And AI-generated music is about to pour gas on that fire. In terms of flooding the market with quasi-listenable music, fast — from that perspective, I'm alarmed.'
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