NPR’s Isabella Gomez Sarimento published the story, AI-generated music is here to stay. Will streaming services like Spotify label it? – It revolved around the band Velvet Sundown. In a few short weeks on Spotify, Velvet Sundown had almost a million followers and its popularity only increased throughout the Summer. The release of two “studio” albums in a month combined with social media photos that look artificial, and an absence of a history, live performances, or any other in-person promotional activities, fueled suspicion that the band was fake. To add to the confusion, In July a person using the name Andrew Frelon created a fake X account claiming to be a spokesperson for the band. He was even interviewed by Rolling Stone claiming the content was made using AI. He later admitted to having nothing to do with the band, but was himself, perpetrating a hoax on the media. Velvet Sundown - Official, whatever that means in this case, has since admitted to being a “synthetic music project.” Andrew Frelon, it turns out, is a Canadian web policy expert named Tim Boucher.
As kids, our vision of AI was Rosey from The Jetsons or C3PO, and of course, HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. We wanted robots to do the work we didn’t want to do so we had more time for relaxation, creative pursuits, and more stimulating work. It seems that tech companies have provided the opposite. Now we consume AI generated art, sometimes without our knowledge, in our limited leisure time, all while doing those jobs we hoped the machines would do.
The music industry and fans have long fought and usually accepted advances to technology. In the 1980 song Spirit of Radio, Neal Peart of Rush lamented about “all this machinery making modern music” calling it a question of honesty and later saying “glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity.” Well, flash forward, and music has survived over the years, though more machinery now goes into creating it. We’ve survived sampling and changed laws governing its use, ensuring that credit and royalties are given to the original artists. Even us old school rockers have come to appreciate the appropriate use of a sampled track. I’ve written before about the evolution of electronic percussion instruments. I’m not even sure if you can officially count it as “percussion” as there is nothing being struck. It has however become something that used creatively, can reproduce the sound of natural percussion and take it from there into new sounds and wildly imaginative rhythms. Just because it isn’t a natural instrument, doesn’t mean that it can’t be beautiful in the right hands. On the low-tech end of the spectrum, we accept washboards and washtub bass, brooms, spoons, saws, and other tools and household items to create music. The genre skiffle, popularized in the early/mid 20th century by people playing whatever they had available, was born from this. Prior to AI, someone had to compose music, no matter what medium they used. AI threatens human involvement in the creative process.
As with all technological advances in music, there is room for AI in the right context. The Beatles won a Grammy for the 2023 single Now and Then which, by using AI, reunited The Beatles. The song came from a ‘70s era Lennon demo. The surviving Beatles worked on it in the ‘90s but never completed it. With help from Peter Jackson, they later used AI to isolate Lennon’s vocals and clean up the recording. Using George Harrison’s guitar tracks from the ‘90s, Paul and Ringo played the rest of the track. In this case, AI was used to enhance rather than create music. I have no doubt that in the right hands, AI can be used like any other tool to help make good music in the same way AI and CGI have been used in movies to create scenes we can’t create in an analog world. Like all art, the quality and value are in the creativity used to compose it.
To be fair, Velvet Sundown’s biggest hit Dust on the Wind is a passible pop song, if not a little generic and bland. Had I heard it prior to knowing about them, I likely would have been fooled. Therein lies the problem. Record executives and streaming platforms are already paying real musicians much less than their efforts deserve while raking in record profits. Now the competition for ears and paychecks, will include music created by machines that, without paying royalties or giving credit, rely on mimicking the work of past musicians to manufacture a product, and many listeners won’t know the difference.
For the music purist, the idea that music isn’t just being created on machines, but by them, is disappointing. For musicians doing the hard work of trying to survive while being an artist, Velvet Sundown represents a serious threat to what makes them tick. From my perspective, as a music director in radio with a focus on authenticity and genuine artistry, using adaptive AI to manufacture music based on the works of others, and algorithms to predict hits, threatens to homogenize music even more than streaming platforms have already done. It is antithetical to our mission at Jefferson Public Radio of celebrating the creative work of real musicians.
