Fully AI-generated music is only accounting for a tiny proportion of streams on services like Spotify and Deezer at the moment, and there’s an assumption in many parts of the music industry that GenAI music won’t have mainstream appeal.
Which is why it’s so interesting that a band who seem to be AI-generated have more than 325,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. And the longer you spend down the rabbit-hole of The Velvet Sundown, the more interesting it gets.
Credit where it’s due: this story begins on Reddit, with two threads this week calling attention to the band – here and here – after the music appeared in people’s Discover Weekly playlists. It was then picked up on TikTok by musician and author Chris Dalla Riva.
The facts: The Velvet Sundown have 1,533 followers on Spotify but 325,388 monthly listeners at the time of writing. “This four-piece band bends time, fusing 1970s psychedelic textures with cinematic alt-pop and dreamy analog soul,” explains their bio.
“Formed by vocalist and mellotron sorcerer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, bassist-synth alchemist Milo Rains, and free-spirited percussionist Orion ‘Rio’ Del Mar, the band feels like a hallucination you want to stay lost in.”
The bio includes an approving quote from Billboard – “They sound like the memory of something you never lived, and somehow make it feel real” – which a Google search suggests has never been published by that trade publication.
Redditors reckon that the band photo is obviously AI, although in 2025 that could be an aesthetic decision, and have noted the lack of any online footprint for the band or its members.
No results for names as characterful as Milo Rains and Orion Del Mar – assuming Milo isn’t this cat – is another red flag. So Music Ally went digging.
First, this isn’t just a Spotify thing: The Velvet Sundown have music available on Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube, Deezer and other streaming services, although the lack of public metrics there mean we can’t tell how many listeners the band has.
However, the music being on Deezer is helpful, because that service has been developing technology to identify AI-generated music and tag it publicly. “Some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence,” is its verdict on both of the band’s albums.
The music being on YouTube is also helpful, because each video’s listing reveals that the music was “provided to YouTube by DistroKid” – meaning that this is the distributor being used by whoever’s uploading the tracks to streaming services. DistroKid’s HyperFollow tool is also being used for smart-links to The Velvet Sundown’s music.
So, how is the band reaching so many Spotify listeners? In his TikTok video, Dalla Riva followed the trail from the ‘Discovered On’ section of their profile, which lists the playlists where they are being found by listeners.
We’ve done that too. 25 of the top 30 playlists listed come from just four Spotify accounts: Extra Music, Solitude Collective, KULTPOP!, In-between and Lost Records. And this is where the rabbit-hole gets ever deeper.
Take Extra Music for example. Its profile has just under 3,000 followers, but its ‘Vietnam War Music‘ playlist has 629,311 saves (accounts adding it to their libraries). The 330-song playlist has tracks from a host of Vietnam War-era artists: Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Rolling Stones, Buffalo Springfield, Jimi Hendrix.
Oh, and The Velvet Sundown, whose tracks are nestled at numbers 24, 34, 43, 52, 61, 70, 79, 88, 97, 106, 115, 124, 133, 142, 151, 160, 169, 178, 187, 196, 205, 214, 223, 232, 241 and 250 in its running order. 26 tracks in all – 7.9% of the entire playlist for a band with no obvious ties to the war.
It’s a similar story for Solitude Collective. 2,002 followers but 112,609 saves for its ‘The OC Soundtrack [All Seasons]‘ playlist, which includes famous musical moments from the US TV show from the likes of Phantom Planet, Imogen Heap, Jeff Buckley, Oasis… and 22 tracks from The Velvet Sundown.
An impressive 13.3% of the entire playlist. Doubly impressive given that The O.C ran from 2003 to 2007, while both of The Velvet Sundown’s albums to date came out in 2025.
Like we said, it’s a rabbit-hole. A network of playlists with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, from mysterious curator accounts, stuffed with tracks from a band who don’t appear to exist. And now that band is appearing in people’s Discover Weekly playlists.
(Yes, there is an account called Velvet Sundown on AI-music service Suno, but its public tracks’ titles don’t match the ones for the band on streaming services, so it’s not a proven link.)
It’s not illegal to create a virtual band, make some AI-generated music for them, upload it to streaming services via a recognised distributor, and then stuff loads of those tracks into playlists purporting to be film/TV soundtracks – or in other cases, mood/activity playlists.
The trouble comes if you then use bots to artificially inflate streams of that music in order to earn fraudulent royalties. There are already high-profile legal cases around that. There is no evidence to suggest that’s what’s happening with The Velvet Sundown. It seems to be more about playlisting tactics that have tripped the recommentation algorithms.
It’s just a very interesting snapshot of where we’re at in 2025, at this moment in the evolution of GenAI music.
The music industry is still figuring out how to treat it when it sits alongside human work on streaming services – not to mention wondering what kind of appeal AI-generated music from AI-generated artists may have for human listeners. And this is just one example: there already are many more, and there are going to be many, many more ahead.
Of course, it would be fun if Gabe, Lennie, Milo and Orion suddenly broke cover and turned out to be flesh-and-blood human musicians who just have a fondness for over-filtering their promo shots.
“Their live shows play like lucid dreams,” claims their streaming profile, although alas with no concerts of festival dates listed anywhere, we can’t go and enjoy that experience just yet. Instead, we’ll leave you with two other things we discovered while hunting for the band.
First, comedian and TV host John Oliver’s recent bit on AI slop, in which he played a song by a band called The Devil Inside and noted that clues to their AI-dentity included “the fact that they complain about ‘wicked dust’ twice in the same chorus, and two of their top five songs on Spotify are also dust-related — which makes this feel less like a dark country band and more like a secret ad for Swiffer”.
The Velvet Sundown, who followed up ‘Dust on the Wind’ on their debut album with a sophomore record called ‘Dust and Silence’, may feel seen.
Second and finally, there’s the phrase ‘Velvet Sundown’ itself, which was originally the title of a game back in 2014 set on a luxury yacht. “A journey full of conspiracies, trickery and secrets where you can never tell a friend from foe,” according to its Steam listing. Isn’t it just?
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