An "Indie Rock Band" That Appears to Be Entirely AI-Generated Is Making Alarming Amounts of Money on Spotify

While real artists struggle to earn money on Spotify, a seemingly AI-generated "band" has garnered enough streams to actually make a buck.

As Music Ally reports, the act in question, The Velvet Sundown, recently appeared out of the blue on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, and even YouTube — despite having no digital footprint prior to this summer.

Despite being so seemingly young, The Velvet Sundown — whose name is a clear ripoff of Lou Reed's legendary psych-rock band The Velvet Underground, perhaps with a mix of Sunset Rubdown, a predecessor to indie freak band Wolf Parade — has racked up more than 550,000 listens this month (which, for perspective, is fewer than The Velvet Underground is pulling in, but vastly more than either Sunset Rubdown or Wolf Parade.)

With Spotify's per-stream payouts ranging from $0.003 to $0.005, those streams alone could be garnering thousands of dollars per month, and that's without getting into the band's presence on other streaming services (there's a non-zero chance that bots play a role in that "listenership," too.)

First flagged by Redditors perturbed by the band's appearance in their Discovery Weekly playlists on Spotify, it didn't take much surface-scratching to reveal the act's probable nature.

Apart from a flag from Spotify competitor Deezer that the band's tracks may be AI-generated — something the platform very recently began to detect — there are a ton of other glaring red flags surrounding The Velvet Sundown.

For one, none of its purported "members" — Gabe Farrow, Lennie West, Milo Rains, and Orion 'Rio' Del Mar — appear to exist. Save for a defunct Instagram account for a cat bearing the name "Milo Rains," neither Music Ally nor Futurism could find any digital footprint for any of those names prior to June 2025.

Were that complete lack of evidence not convincing, one need only peek at the phony musicians' Instagram account to tell that they are little more than an algorithmic creation. Each of the photos on the band's page bear the unmistakable sheen of AI, a creepy je ne sais quoi that suggests they are denizens of the uncanny valley. None of those posts are older than a few days, either.

Perhaps the greatest "tell" about the band, as Sterogum noted, is a rapturous blurb that previously appeared in its Spotify bio and was attributed to Billboard — but never appears to have actually run in the storied music publication.

"They sound like the memory of something you never lived, and somehow make it feel real," the faux Billboard review read. Since Music Ally and other sites began reporting on the band's fakeness, the reference to Billboard was removed from the band's bio, though the text itself remains.

We've reached out to Spotify and the other streaming platforms where The Velvet Sundown's music appears to ask whether they've looked into the AI allegations against the band.

Unfortunately, only Deezer and YouTube actually mark AI-generated content, so even if the platforms acknowledge that the band is fake as heck, users won't be warned.

More on AI music: YouTube Playlists Are Advertising "No AI" as Entire Site Gets Choked by AI Slop