"This is exactly what artists have been worried about – it's theft dressed up as competition": Who is behind The Velvet Sundown, the AI-generated band that blew up the internet?

Ai band.

On June 26, Music Ally reported that a seemingly fictional, AI-generated band named The Velvet Sundown had accrued hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify after appearing in several prominent playlists.

Over the following week, the band went viral, more than doubling their monthly listener count (a figure that's now bordering on a million) and provoking heated debate surrounding the group's identity, the authenticity of their music, and the broader implications of AI-generated music's growing popularity.