A “spokesperson” for the viral AI band The Velvet Sundown has admitted that he was running a hoax aimed at “the media”.
It follows reports being shared last week that a seemingly AI-generated band had managed to rack up hundreds of thousands of monthly Spotify listeners in a very short period.
Little was known about the group, but in less than a month, they managed to accumulate over 700,000 monthly listeners on Spotify alone with their two albums ‘Floating On Echoes’ (released June 5) and ‘Dust And Silence’ (released June 20).
Their Spotify-verified page claimed that they were a four-piece comprising singer “Gabe Farrow”, guitarist “Lennie West”, bassist “Milo Rains” and percussionist “Orion ‘Rio’ Del Mar”. Soon after people noticed their name cropping up in their Discover Weekly playlists, questions arose about their legitimacy, and followers started to notice how it all seemed to be stemming from AI.
Then, a Deezer description outlined that the music may have been “created using artificial intelligence”, and a fake quote from Billboard made a further nod to it being artificial intelligence, reading that the music resembled “the memory of something you never lived, and somehow make it feel real”.
Now, the pseudonymous Andrew Frelon has shared in a Medium post that the whole thing was a hoax aimed at the media.
Frelon spoke to Rolling Stone earlier this week as a “spokesperson” for the AI band, and runs a page on X/Twitter that “represents” the group. He also claimed that artificial intelligence technology was only used for brainstorming the project.
Now, he admitted that the two albums on streaming platforms were made with AI music generator Suno, which Stereogum highlights is the same programme that Timbaland used to create the fake artist TaTa.
Frelon added of the whole ordeal: “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?’”
“Personally, I’m interested in art hoaxes,” he added. “The Leeds 13, a group of art students in the UK, made, like, fake photos of themselves spending scholarship money at a beach or something like that, and it became a huge scandal. I think that stuff’s really interesting…
“We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real. And that’s messed up, but that’s the reality that we face now. So it’s like, ‘Should we ignore that reality? 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?’”
Regarding how the band got so many listeners on Spotify, Frelon suggested that it may have come as a result of getting on so many different playlists, which pushed their music towards thousands of accounts.
“I’m not running the Spotify backend stuff, so I can’t super speak to exactly how that happened,” he said. “I know we got on some playlists that just have like tons of followers, and it seems to have spiralled from there.”
Last year, Nick Cave joined the many artists who warned of the dangers of the rise of AI in music, saying that its usage within the industry is “unbelievably disturbing” and will have a “humiliating effect” on creatives.
Earlier this year, Elton John, Coldplay, Dua Lipa, Paul McCartney, Florence Welch, Kate Bush and Robbie Williams were among those who called on the UK government to change copyright laws amid the threat from AI.
