The “spokesman” of the virus’ AI band confirmed that Velvet’s Sundown is running a hoax aimed at “media.”
Following a shared report last week, it is that the seemingly AI-generated band has gained hundreds of thousands of Spotify listeners in a very short period.
Little was known about the group, but within a month, two albums, “Floating on Echoes” (released June 5th) and “Dust and Silence” (released June 20th) were able to accumulate over 700,000 listeners on Spotify alone.
Their Spotify-Verified Page claimed that they were four pieces consisting of singer “Gabe Farrow”, guitarist “Lennie West”, bassist “Milo Rains” and percussionist “Orion ‘Rio’ Del Mar.” Shortly after people realized their names were thriving on the weekly playlists where they were discovered, questions arise about their legitimacy, and followers began to realize how it all seemed to stem from AI.
Deeser’s description then outlined that music could have been “made using artificial intelligence,” and he nodded further to the fake quote from Billboard being artificial intelligence, reading the music as “memory of something you never lived in, and somehow makes it feel real.”
Now, pseudonym Andrew Freron shares in a medium post that it’s all media-targeted hoax.
Freron spoke with Rolling Stone earlier this week as an AI band’s “spokesman” and ran a page to “represent” the group on X/Twitter. He also argued that artificial intelligence technology is only used for brainstorming projects.
Now, he has admitted that two albums on the streaming platform were made by AI Music generator Suno. This is the same program that Stereogum Highlights used by Timbaland to create fake artist Tata.
Freron added the whole ordeal. “It’s marketing. It’s trolling. Previously, they didn’t care what we did, and now all of a sudden we’re talking to Rolling Stone, so it’s like, ‘Is that wrong?’
“Personally, I’m interested in art hoaxes,” he added. “Leeds 13, a group of British art students, used scholarships on beaches and other places to create fake photos of themselves, which became a huge scandal.
“We now live in a world where fake things can have even more impact than real ones. That’s the reality we’re facing right now. So, should we ignore that reality?
As for the way the band gained so many listeners on Spotify, Freron suggested it could have come as a result of riding so many different playlists, which directed their music to thousands of accounts.
“I’m not running Spotify BackEnd’s stuff so I can’t speak exactly how it happened,” he said. “I know we were on playlists like a lot of followers, but it seems to have spiraled from there.”
Last year, Nick Cave joined many artists who warned of the dangers of music’s rise to AI, saying that its use within the industry was “incredibly unsettling” and would have a “humiliating effect” on creatives.
Earlier this year, Elton John, Coldplay, Doa Lipa, Paul McCartney, Florence Welch, Kate Bush and Robbie Williams were among those who called on the UK government to change copyright law amidst the threat from AI.
