How An AI Band Fooled Spotify’s Charts

More than half a million Spotify users are unknowingly listening to music made entirely by artificial intelligence.

The Velvet Sundown released two albums this month, called Floating On Echoes and Dust and Silence, which quickly gained popularity. But there’s one catch: the band members don’t exist. The music was created by AI.

ArsTechnica, who first reported the story, reports that some listeners suspected something was off. The band members were exposed as non-existent through discussions on Reddit and X. The group members appeared only in the album bios and social media, but numerous inconsistencies revealed the truth about the band. Their Instagram account, launched on June 27, displays strange AI-produced images.

Spotify doesn’t require artists to disclose AI use, unlike platforms such as Deezer. There, the band’s bio includes a disclaimer: “Some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence.” Initially, their Spotify bio even claimed praise from Billboard, but the source has since been removed, as reported by ArsTechnica.

AI-generated bands aren’t new. John Oliver recently highlighted The Devil Inside as an AI musical group, which has released 10 albums. The lyrics of both bands contain repeated references to “dust” and “wind,” which sparks doubts about the training methods of machine models, as noted by ArsTechnica.

Meanwhile, the controversy around AI in the creative world continues to grow. Over 13,500 artists, including Julianne Moore, Thom Yorke, and Kazuo Ishiguro, have signed a petition organized by composer Ed Newton-Rex, calling for a stop to AI companies scraping their work for training.

The petition warns that “the unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works.” As AI music becomes harder to detect, experts are calling for better labeling.