New band The Velvet Sundown has already had thousands of listens on Spotify, but this streaming sensation may not be all it seems, says columnist NICK OVERALL.

Picture this. A friend has just discovered a new band that’s stormed on to the rock music scene. 

They’ve sent you a few songs from their debut album that’s already got thousands of listens on Spotify.

This band sounds pretty good. Nothing ground breaking but there’s certainly enough talent here to get feet tapping. Clearly the band has a lot of potential.

There’s just one thing that is a little different about them. They’re not real.

This was the experience I had in the week just gone when a friend shared a band with me, only to later reveal that the music, lyrics, album art, even the band members themselves are widely believed to have been entirely generated by artificial intelligence.

The band is called The Velvet Sundown and a search of them on Spotify right now will show they’ve amassed more than 400,000 monthly listeners.

At first glance, a picture of the band members seems like it could be any other modern, indie rock four-piece, but a closer examination reveals that uncanny fakeness that AI pictures always have. A plastic sheen that is just that little bit inhuman.

Then, a glance at the group’s biography on Spotify reveals writing that definitely feels like Chat GPT.

The Velvet Sundown is described as “quietly spellbinding”, with a sound that “doesn’t shout for your attention, it seeps in slowly, like a scent that suddenly takes you somewhere you didn’t expect”.

Perhaps most telling is the final two sentences of this bio, which are also the most creepy.

“They sound like the memory of a time that never actually happened… but somehow they make it feel real.”

Whether or not the band is definitely AI hasn’t been 100 per cent confirmed, but most listeners who have flocked to Spotify to check it out strongly suspect that is the case.

The scary thing here is that people simply can’t tell any more.

Other friends I have since sent the band to, didn’t even have it cross their minds that what they’re listening to could, and likely is, generated by artificial intelligence.

It’s a surreal experience, one that passes a musical version of the Turing test.

The band even has its own instagram page with AI images depicting them having dinner together and celebrating the launch of their first album. They’ve already got another album on the way very shortly.

The idea of a completely AI band raises confronting questions about what the future of entertainment looks like through streaming services such as Spotify.

Platforms like this could save millions of dollars if the content on them was generated by machines. We might be seeing the beginning of AI “artists” beginning to flood the market.

It’s already in the works at major movie and TV streaming companies.

Netflix reportedly has a series called Synthetic Dreams in production right now. It’s a show made using artificial intelligence.

Is it not so hard to imagine a Netflix or Disney Plus sub-category that soon features entirely AI-generated content. Further than that, what if these platforms allowed you to generate your own stories for entertainment? They’d no longer need to create endless spin offs with people’s favourite characters. They could simply allow fans to make their own.

Even more ominous, what if these platforms started seamlessly blending in AI films and television with their human-made content? At what point would we no longer know?

There are already other streaming platforms emerging online that are made up entirely of AI short films and they’re already charging people subscription fees to access the full catalogue.

Amazon is getting flooded with self-published AI books, in which the story, blurb even cover art is made by a robot.

It is clear that tougher regulations are going to be needed to preserve high-quality creativity.

On Spotify, The Velvet Sundown might be the first sign of what is to come as this rapidly evolving technology makes its way into everyday entertainment through a streaming pipeline. And the most scary thing? They sound pretty damn good.