Stop Listening To AI Generated Music
It's not that hard to do
Let me clarify. Everyone doesn’t suck. You, the great person reading this, certainly do not suck. The Velvet Sundown, the AI hoax “band” and any real follower (at the time of this writing, they have 751.2K monthly listeners), the shills at Spotify who both create and allow this sort of activity to exist, most definitely do suck.
By now, if you’re a music fan and have at least one social media account, you’ve at the very least heard of this controversy that appeared about a week ago. I was turned onto it by a friend in the AI world, and I’ve been following it since.
Before I continue, I want to let you know that I am not the old man yelling at the clouds or some anti-tech curmudgeon. I embrace technology, and I know that AI is not only here to stay but that it hasn’t even scratched the surface of what it will become.
And I’m here for it all.
That being said, as a writer, a former record label owner, and a creative person in general, I am NOT here for AI to create art. I want it to help artists with just about all the tasks we need that surround our work, while drawing a very hard line at creating the work itself.
In an impossibly crowded existence that is life in 2025, we all struggle to be seen and heard. That’s true in most walks of life, and it’s especially true in creative spaces. The last thing we need now is to have to compete with fake bands, books, movies, etc. I’m not naive, I know it exists and will only become more of a threat. As a matter of fact, over a year ago, I released a YouTube video on the matter. I created two 60-second shorts, here and here, discussing the topic.
Just looking at that picture makes me cringe, but listening to the “music” is nearly impossible. Not only do the songs suck, they are as lifeless and soulless as one might expect using AI. It’s brutal.
Once you get past the gigantic suckiness of this travesty, you begin to realize that AI-generated music isn’t really about music at all. It’s about the dumbing down of entertainment for the sole benefit of making billions of dollars off lazy consumers who couldn’t care less where music or other art forms come from.
The “band” knows this as well.
"It’s marketing. It’s trolling. People before, they didn’t care about what we did, and now suddenly, we’re talking to Rolling Stone, so it’s like, ‘Is that wrong?'" - Andrew Frelon of The Velvet Sundown in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine
It gets worse…
“Personally, I’m interested in art hoaxes,” Frelon continues. "We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real...Should we ignore these things that kind of exist on a continuum of real versus fake or kind of a blend between the two? Or should we dive into it and just let it be the emerging native language of the internet?'”
This guy is clueless.
Here comes the best part - “I know we got on some playlists that just have like tons of followers, and it seems to have spiraled from there.” Did Frelon and his associates use playlists of their own to boost the process? “I don’t have an answer that I can give to you for that because I’m not involved,” he says. “And I don’t want to say something that’s not true.”
Ummm, dude, EVERYTHING about you is untrue.
You can find the full RS interview here.
So now what? Do I have faith in young music fans from a generation that will grow up with AI as the norm for all (or most) things entertainment, to shun this type of tomfoolery? I do not.
What I do believe to be possible, however, is that any person, any artist, with a living soul, who cares about true artistic integrity and is at least 30 years old and up, will reject AI music and possibly even turn the kiddos against it somehow. Is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? I’m not so sure.
Only time will tell.
I discovered this just the other day through Rick Beato's YouTube channel. Crazy! (Like yourself, I am okay with AI doing the tasks we don't enjoy but not the art itself.)
I think the true test will be if they keep gaining listeners, or if after the initial hype dies down people become less curious and the monthly listeners go back down.
That said, you can never really know if the streams are legit in the first place. Not only could it be bots streaming their tracks, it could also be complete hoax that the entire industry is in on.
Everyone likes to point fingers at Spotify (even though this band is on several platforms, if not all), but everyone seems to have forgotten that TIDAL got caught faking streams for their preferred artists back in 2018. You'd have to be extremely naive to think that platforms and labels wouldn't have some kind of shady deals involving reported streams... simply because they can — it's just a number on a screen.
But worse that all that would be the realization that most listeners don't actually care as long as it's marketed properly, and I think that's the elephant in the room no one is talking about. The music industry can do whatever it wants, but happens to real musicians when it becomes clear that the audience doesn't care if you're actually human?