In mid-2025, a band called The Velvet Sundown appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Their debut album, Floating on Echoes, was steeped in hazy, ‘60s-style psychedelia and quickly amassed more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify.
With tracks like Dust on the Wind climbing viral charts and captivating streaming audiences around the world, the project looked like the start of a new underground breakout.
But for all the attention, something didn’t add up.
There were no live shows, no artist interviews, and no traceable identity behind the music. Promo photos looked oddly synthetic. The songs, though immersive, felt algorithmically smooth.
Eventually, the band confirmed what many had begun to suspect: The Velvet Sundown was the product of generative artificial intelligence, guided only lightly by human hands.
After spotting Digital Music News’s coverage of Velvet Sundown hitting one million monthly Spotify listeners, the team at Vinyl Group recognised a gap, and an opportunity.
They quickly snapped up the domain, not to extend the band, but to turn the moment into something bigger: a platform designed to decode culture, dissect AI-generated content, and spotlight what’s real. The site now serves as a space to explore the evolving boundary between machine and maker.
The story of The Velvet Sundown is about more than a single band. It reveals how simple it has become to use AI to generate music that’s convincing, commercially viable, and, depending on your perspective, creatively disruptive.
New tools make AI music creation accessible
While AI has been part of the music production process for years, in everything from mastering software to drum pattern generators, the newest crop of tools has moved the conversation from enhancement to authorship.
Platforms like Suno and Udio can now generate full-length tracks, including lyrics, instrumentation, and vocals, from a handful of user prompts. The learning curve is minimal; users don’t need formal music training, just an idea and an internet connection.
Projects like The Velvet Sundown demonstrate how seamless the process can be. According to their Spotify bio, the music is “composed, voiced, and visualised with the support of artificial intelligence,” under human creative direction. The group adds:
“This isn’t a trick, it’s a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”
It’s not just one act. Another fast-growing AI artist, Aventhis, creates dark, brooding country tracks using similar methods and now boasts over 600,000 monthly Spotify listeners.
AI music group, ‘The Velvet Sundown’
Industry questions grow louder
The success of AI-generated acts is starting to influence how musicians and producers think about their work. From a technical perspective, the barrier to entry for creating professional-sounding music has all but collapsed.
But it raises new questions: What defines a “real” artist? Where does human creativity end and machine composition begin? Will it drive a push of human artists to creative music that more definitively human?
Some industry figures have raised concerns about copyright, transparency, and fairness, especially if synthetic projects compete for the same streams, awards, or festival slots as traditional artists. But others see AI as just another evolution in music-making, akin to synthesisers or sampling.
The AI music wave is also influencing media coverage and commentary. One response came in the form of a website acquisition: following The Velvet Sundown’s reveal, velvetsundown.com was acquired not to extend the project but to document it. The site is now a hub for conversations about generative art, algorithmic storytelling, and the meaning of authorship in a synthetic age.
Its mission: “To decode culture, dissect AI-generated content, and spotlight what’s real… and why that still matters.”
Where music goes next
As platforms evolve and user access expands, AI-generated music is poised to become more common, not as novelty, but as norm.
Whether listeners embrace, reject, or ignore its rise remains to be seen. But the tools are already here, and the results are increasingly hard to distinguish from the real thing.
With projects like The Velvet Sundown and Aventhis making their way onto playlists alongside human performers, the distinction between artist and algorithm is no longer theoretical. It’’s already reshaping the business, the culture, and the creative process behind music itself.
What happens next may depend less on the technology, and more on how willing we are to listen, and ask: Who’s really playing?
*Mediaweek is owned by Vinyl Group