Recommendations of the Editorial team
The AI band The Velvet Sundown, which currently has over 900,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, has now officially confirmed in a revised version of her Spotify biography, which has long been obvious to experts and laypeople. Your music is actually ki-generated.
AI, hype and identity question
“The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project. One that is controlled by human creative management and composed, sung and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence,” says the band’s biography. “This is not a trick. It is a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation. One that aims to question the limits of authorship, identity and the future of music in the AI age.”
The “band” went viral in June after it appeared out of nowhere. And on popular Spotify playlists, which resulted in extensive media reports. She also apparently inspired a Hoaxer who appeared under the name Andrew Frelon. The latter now claimed that he had pretended to be spokesman for the band on X (formerly Twitter). And among other things, in a telephone interview with Rolling Stone as such appeared to the media. In a detailed article on medium, he said that his days of elaborate deception was a test for the media.
Playlist placements by algorithms
The Spotify biography continues. “All characters, stories, pieces of music, voices and lyrics are original creations that were generated with the support of AI systems used as creative tools. Any similarity with real places, events or people-alive or died-is purely accidental. Not intended. Not entirely human. The Velvet Sundown exist somewhere in between.”
Glenn McDonald, former “Data Alchemist” at Spotify, told Rolling Stone at the beginning of this week that The Velvet Sundown’s popularity on the platform is probably due to the fact that Spotify has now accepted payments for playlist placements. At the same time, the streaming service is increasingly removing human -curated playlists. And towards algorithms that “can select songs based on their acoustic characteristics for recommendations”.