Last year, the AI-generated band The Velvet Sundown went viral, with the “band” racking up millions of streams in mere months.
Their three albums, Floating On Echoes, Dust And Silence, and Paper Sun Rebellion – complete with AI-generated album covers – sounded so uncannily real that they left music fans scratching their heads and questioning whether they were fully AI-generated.
According to an investigation by The Guardian, it’s still unclear what music The Velvet Sundown’s albums were trained on.
Furthermore, when an alleged spokesperson for the band, operating under the pseudonym Andrew Frelon, spoke to Rolling Stone, claiming that the music was created using the AI tool Suno, a Velvet Sundown X account clarified that, “We understand the intrigue our project inspires – and we’re not here to dispel mystery.
“But we are here to correct the record….The Velvet Sundown is a multidisciplinary artistic project blending music, analog aesthetics, and speculative storytelling. While we embrace ambiguity as part of our narrative design, we ask that reporting on us be based on verifiable sources – not fabricated accounts or synthetic media.”
Now, a real, human band is attempting to fight back against AI-generated music by forming a Velvet Sundown tribute band – aptly named Bootleg Velvet Sundown.
“I formed a tribute band of the most famous AI group of all, Velvet Sundown,” says Simon Balch, the progenitor of this project.
“Instead of giving any money to the Velvet Sundown, I’m giving all the profits to real musicians, whose work AI [has] stolen in the first place. This is humans versus machines, and today, the humans are rising.”
So what’s Balch’s master plan? “First up, we're re-recording some of their tracks in studios [featuring “real musicians” Leo Walrus, Enzo Allen, Milo Garland and Luke McQueen],” he details. “I want to be the first tribute band to get more streams than the original band.
“I've not heard a whisper from The Velvet Sundown themselves, but if you are listening, here's a message to you: I'm not giving you a penny,” he insists.
“All the profits that we make will be going to real musicians. Am I a musical Robin Hood?... But in this case, my arrows are tribute bands, and my target, AI music.”
And while we’re all waiting to see what Balch and co.'s next step is, you can follow the “real” tribute band’s exploits on Bootleg Velvet Sundown’s official Instagram.
In more recent news, influential players, including Sophie Burrell and Sophie Lloyd, have spoken about how their work is being manipulated by bad actors who are using AI to defraud guitar fans.
