A band called The Velvet Sundown has made waves in the music industry over the last week due to allegations that the images and songs on its Spotify profile were AI-generated. Now, in a new conversation with Rolling Stone, a so-called “adjunct” member of the band, Andrew Frelon, admits to using AI music company Suno in the creation of some of its songs, calling the whole project an “art hoax.”
“It’s marketing. It’s trolling. People before, they didn’t care about what we did, and now suddenly we’re talking to Rolling Stone, so it’s like ‘Is that wrong?’” Frelon told the outlet.
Frelon reportedly changed his story multiple times during the interview. First, he said Suno’s tools were only used in the brainstorming of the writing process; later, he admitted to using Suno but “not in the final product.” Later in the interview, he again changed his position, saying at least some of the songs were generated by Suno, but that he didn’t “want to say which ones.” Of the tools in Suno’s suite, Frelon cited using Persona, a product released in October 2024 that allows users to remix songs on the Suno platform into new genres and styles.
The Persona tool was also recently employed by Timbaland in the creation of his controversial AI artist TaTa, which is part of the artist and producer’s new AI entertainment company Stage Zero. (Timbaland has been a strategic advisor for Suno since October 2024.)
“Personally, I’m interested in art hoaxes,” Frelon added in the interview. “The Leeds 13, a group of art students in the U.K., made, like, fake photos of themselves spending scholarship money at a beach or something like that, and it became a huge scandal. I think that stuff’s really interesting … We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real. And that’s messed up, but that’s the reality that we face now. So it’s like, ‘Should we ignore that reality? Should we ignore these things that kind of exist on a continuum of real versus fake or kind of a blend between the two? Or should we dive into it and just let it be the emerging native language of the internet?’”
The Velvet Sundown became a viral sensation last week after the band’s Spotify profile was posted to Reddit by a user who accused the band of being AI-generated. At the time, Sundown’s top song had just over 100,000 plays on the platform, but after the Reddit post spurred widespread discussion about the band — and AI music in general — listens for its top song have climbed to 675,000 and counting.
The band is just one example of many, however. French streamer Deezer reported this spring that 18% of songs delivered to them every day are now fully AI-generated, equating to about 20,000 new AI songs daily.
Last month, “A Million Colors” by Vinih Pray became the first-known AI-generated song to rank on the TikTok charts. The song, which has since been removed from TikTok, peaked at No. 44 on the TikTok Viral 50 and was used by hundreds of thousands of users on the platform, including Kylie Jenner, who used the song to soundtrack a makeup tutorial with 1.7 million likes. To date, it has over 1 million plays on Spotify.
So far, most streaming services, including Spotify, do not have policies specific to AI music on their platforms. Among the streamers, Deezer has taken the lead. Since January, the company has spoken out about how the company plans to regulate AI content on the platform. Now, anything that Deezer’s proprietary AI detection tool flags as fully AI-generated is removed from its algorithm and is ineligible for playlisting, although users can still listen to the tracks via search. All AI songs on the platform are also tagged to ensure that users know what they are listening to. The Velvet Sundown’s artist page on Deezer currently displays this tag.
