Apple and Spotify are sleepwalking into an AI music crisis – and The Velvet Sundown mess shows they need to act fast

The first time I heard The Velvet Sundown’s album Dust and Silence on Spotify, I thought to myself, hmm, that’s not too bad. It hits a lot of the notes I look for in music I can listen to in the background while I work: acoustic guitar, nice vocals, chill beats, and a mellow 60s psychedelic vibe. There’s only one problem: this band might not exist.

The Velvet Sundown is suspected of being an entirely AI-generated band. Despite posting pictures of its band members on its Instagram and X.com accounts, the pictures look very fake. In fact, they look exactly like they were created by AI.

It’s very hard to prove definitively if the band is fake, but the evidence mounts up: The pictures look fake, there’s no evidence that the band members really exist, and the music sounds ...