
What does AI band The Velvet Sundown's rise mean for the future of music?
Advertisement
In the space of just six weeks, the band has pumped out three albums containing 13 songs each and had close to 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify as of July 22.
But The Velvet Sundown – or rather, its makers – do not hide behind the fact that it has been relying on artificial intelligence to do so.
'Not quite human. Not quite machine. The Velvet Sundown lives somewhere in between,' it says on the band's social media accounts and its Spotify site.
It is said to be a band of four, but the members have not been seen in public so far. Images of the group have evidently been created by AI.
Advertisement
Music by The Velvet Sundown started making the rounds across streaming platforms in early June. Combining rock, country and folk elements, most of the songs are interchangeable, mellow and tame – as long as you ignore lines like 'March for peace, not for pride' in the group's most played song, 'Dust on the Wind'.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


South China Morning Post
23 minutes ago
- South China Morning Post
This week in PostMag: Hello Kitty creator Sanrio and a South African safari
One of the first things I ever loved was a Hello Kitty diary. Yes, there were stuffed animals (Snuffy the bear, RIP), sticker books and an American Girl doll or two, but it's the red Sanrio diary from 1993 that's somehow become a core memory. The lock, shaped like Hello Kitty's head, was cute but flimsy at best. Inside? Kindergarten confessionals, scrawled in shaky handwriting and even shakier grammar. Seeing a vintage Hello Kitty diary brings back memories for PostMag editor Cat Nelson. Photo: Etsy Things escalated in Grade 2 when Miki moved from Japan to our sleepy California town. With her came a parallel universe of pencil cases, stickers and characters beyond anything our Lisa Frank-addled brains had seen. Keroppi erasers, Badtz-Maru mechanical pencils, pastel My Melody folders. Sanrio wasn't just cute, and it wasn't just a toy company. It was as aspirational and worldly as an eight-year-old could get. So it's no wonder I devoured Sumnima Kandangwa's cover story this week, which explores Sanrio's staying power across generations . She charts the company's shape-shifting fandom, from a collector with a 1,000-piece Hello Kitty stash to Zoomers swearing allegiance to Kuromi's soft-punk aesthetic. And these characters aren't just merch. I was struck by this as our photographer, Jocelyn Tam, and I worked on the images for this piece. One young woman we photographed felt compelled to tell us, unprompted, that it might be a Hello Kitty charm hanging off her bag, but only because it was limited edition and her friends convinced her. Her real favourite is Kuromi. They may be cartoons, but loyalties run deep. Elsewhere, Bernice Chan profiles Aqua founder David Yeo, who started out cooking for friends in his Hong Kong flat and somehow ended up with a 25-year-old international restaurant empire. He's the kind of obsessive who can, apparently, taste the seasonal shift in a bag of rice. I'm impressed. And then there's the Karoo. Mark Eveleigh heads to South Africa's semi-arid desert for a walking safari, which is not something I plan to do any time soon but greatly enjoyed reading about. It's part travelogue, part nature thriller – lions, rewilding, the return of springbok. I thought of our Yellowstone feature from a few issues back and how the park has brought back nearly extinct wolves. Both reminders that not everything that disappears stays gone. While you might not find me on the Karoo any time soon, you may run into me at Montana. Associate editor Gavin Yeung chats with bartenders Lorenzo Antinori (Bar Leone) and Simone Caporale (Barcelona's Sips) about their new cocktail outpost on Hollywood Road. It's a throwback to 1970s and 80s Cuban culture – and it sounds delightful. See you there for a drink? Finally, August looms. Hong Kong might not stage a full European-style exodus, but the city does slip into silent mode and we're pausing issues on August 3, 17 and 31. That said, we're not very good at staying away. You can always find us online, and we'll be back on August 10 and 24 in print. I'm looking forward to it already.


South China Morning Post
18 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
How Olympian Jeff Galloway is still running marathons at 80 as he trains for his 237th
Jeff Galloway tends to be pretty low-key about birthdays, but on July 12 this year, things were decidedly different: the inspirational American Olympian runner turned 80. 'I guess this year, because it had a zero on the end, I got a lot of nice messages – a few thousand actually,' he laughs from his home in Florida, where he lives with his wife of 50 years, Barb, who shares his passion for running. To say Galloway has had a positive impact on the take-up of competitive running would be an understatement. He pioneered the Run-Walk-Run method in 1974 – known informally as 'Jeffing' – a training style that involves strategic, small walk breaks to allow runners to manage fatigue and avoid injury. The method has made finishing a distance event accessible to almost everyone. More than a million runners and walkers have read Galloway's books, attended his retreats and running schools, or had online coaching. Jeff Galloway introduces a group of runners to his Run-Walk-Run method. Photo: Jeff Galloway Anyone can start endurance training with this method, whatever their age, Galloway believes. One of his proudest achievements was getting his then heavily overweight father, Elliott, into running using this method.


South China Morning Post
a day ago
- South China Morning Post
Firm in Coldplay drama hires Chris Martin's ex-wife Gwyneth Paltrow to ‘answer questions'
Astronomer – the company whose CEO resigned after being caught on a KissCam at a Coldplay rock concert embracing a woman who was not his wife – is trying to move on from the drama with someone who knows the band pretty well. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who was married to Coldplay's frontman Chris Martin for 13 years, announced on Friday on social media that she has been hired by Astronomer as a spokeswoman. Astronomer, a tech company based in New York, found itself in an uncomfortable spotlight when two of its executives were caught on camera in an intimate embrace at a Coldplay concert – a moment that was then flashed on a giant screen in the stadium. CEO Andy Byron and human resource executive Kristin Cabot were caught by surprise when Martin asked the cameras to scan the crowd during a concert earlier this month. 'Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy,' Martin joked when the couple appeared on screen and quickly tried to hide their faces. Chris Martin of Coldplay performs in Pasadena, California, in September 2023. Photo: AP In a short video, the Shakespeare in Love and Ironman star said she had been hired as a 'very temporary' spokeswoman for Astronomer.