An Exploration Against AI In The Music Scene: Will the sun go down on The Velvet Sundown?

In a world turning more and more toward artificial intelligence, computer generation seeps into grey area of disingenuity. A rise in AI art is forcing its way into creative spaces, serving soulless imitations of human art, and meeting no resistance.

Recently, I have noticed an uptake in the amount of streaming services pushing and promoting music created by AI, adding them to people’s playlists and minimising the impact of real-life musicians, and smaller artists’ recognition. Take for example, The Velvet Sundown. Everything to do with this ‘band’ is computer generated; all promotional images, album covers, their backstory, and their music.

AI generated material to support the image of The Velvet Sundown

''The rise of AI already proves to be difficult to navigate in creative fields, with people ignoring actual human talent in favour of the the quick and easy route of using AI''

Their biography on Spotify even led people to believe they were a real band - giving names and history to the faux-members. Since then, they have seen pressure online to establish and clearly outline how heavily computer generation has contributed to their sound, luckily meaning their current description on Spotify states “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualised with the support of artificial intelligence... An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”

The rise of AI already proves to be difficult to navigate in creative fields, with people ignoring actual human talent in favour for the quick and easy route of using AI, and invading creative spaces with generated art. However, within the music scene, this proves even more nuanced, as with The Velvet Sundown’s description it appears they are trying to promote people to use AI to create music. This is emphasised in the last sentence of their bio; “the future of music itself in the age of AI.”

Even The Velvet Sundown’s visuals in of themselves are almost caricatures of other bands. Their album covers look like attempts to copy already widely popular artwork, with an example of this being their Dust and Silence album looking similar to Tame Impala’s album, The Slow Rush. There are countless other albums that they appear to mimic, though in my research I instantly made the connection with the art-style of the Tame Impala album. Even The Velvet Sundown’s supposed ‘band images’ give off an uncanny-valley feeling, with the members almost looking human but still feeling a little off.

''The impact of AI music on the music world as a whole is one shrouded in mystery.''

It appears not only the indie music scene has been affected by an influx of AI artists. In the Blues sphere, there are AI bands such as ‘Flaherty Brotherhood’ who still claim to be real people despite having no background and only having a handful of EPs and singles all having been released this year alone. It is getting increasingly difficult to determine which artists are genuine people creating music and just using AI for their album covers, and who are actually AI-generated artists with the only human input being a prompt entered into ChatGPT.

The impact of AI music on the music world as a whole is one shrouded in mystery. With it still being early days of an AI epidemic across all platforms, it is unknown whether this will decrease the effect that real music will have on its audience reach, and whether or not we will witness a decrease in live music or whether people will simply ignore the AI artists. All we can do is try to speak out against fake music, and try to convince people to listen to actual musicians rather than computer generated ones. But beyond that, we can only play a waiting game, watching to see how the music scene pans out from here on out.

With a growing social awareness of AI’s impact on the environment and climate change, perhaps the industry will undergo a moral realisation for whoever vouches for AI artists to avoid filling creative spaces with artificial art, even if their reasoning is for the environment rather than for the sake of real people whose livelihoods are affected by AI artists.

Charlotte Turner

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Edited by Max Durno

All images courtesy of The Velvet Sundown, all videos courtesy of The Velvet Sundown