Controversy in Spotify: The Velvet Slown, a band generated by the accumulates almost one million listeners

A “spokesman” of the artificial intelligence viral band in Spotify, The Velvet Sundown, He admitted that he was carrying out a farce aimed at “the media.”

Little was known about the group, but in less than a month they managed to accumulate almost one million monthly listeners only in Spotify with their two two albums “Floating on echoes” (launched on June 5) and “Dust and Silence” (launched on June 20).

Its page, verified by Spotify, claimed to be a quartet composed of the singer “Gabe Farrow”, the guitarist “Lennie West”, the bassist “Milo Rains” and the percussionist “Orion ‘Rio’ del Mar”. Shortly after people noticed their name appearing in their Discover Weekly reproduction listsdoubts arose about their legitimacy, and the followers began to notice that everything seemed to come from AI.

Then, a description of Deezer stressed that music could have been “created using artificial intelligence”, and a false appointment of Billboard made a wink more that it was artificial intelligence, reading that music looked like “to the memory of something you never lived, and somehow made it feel real.”

The Velvet Sundown, a hoax “aimed at the media”

Now, the pseudonym Andrew Frelon He has shared in a medium publication that the whole matter was a hoax aimed at the media.

Frelon spoke with Rolling Stone magazine earlier this week as a spokesman for the AI ​​band and manages a page in X/Twitter that “represents” the group. He also said that artificial intelligence technology was only used to generate ideas for the project.

Now, he admitted that The two albums on streaming platforms were made with the Ai Suno music generatorthat Stereogum highlights that it is the same program that Timbaland used to create the artist False Tata.

Frelon added the Calvary above all: “It’s marketing. It’s trolley. Before, people didn’t care what we were doing, and now, suddenly, we are talking to Rolling Stone magazine, so we ask ourselves: ‘Is it wrong?'”

“Personally, I am interested in artistic deceptions,” he added. “The 13 of Leeds, a group of art students from the United Kingdom, took false photos of themselves by spending the money from a scholarship on a beach or something, and became a huge scandal. I think it is very interesting …

We live in a world where false things sometimes have even more impact than real. And that is a disaster, but it is the reality we face. So we ask ourselves: “Should we ignore that reality? Should we ignore these things that exist in a continuum of the real against the false, or a kind of mixture between them? Or should we immerse ourselves in it and let it be the emerging native language of the Internet?”

Regarding how the band got so many listeners in Spotify, Frelon suggested that it may have been the result of being in so many different reproduction lists, which promoted their music towards thousands of accounts.

“I don’t manage the Spotify system, so I can’t explain exactly how it happened,” he said. “I know we enter some reproduction lists that have many followersand it seems that the thing has gone stern from there. “