By Colin 
The Velvet Sundown has appeared across every major streaming platform. Listeners can find their music on Spotify, Deezer, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. Two full-length albums dropped within weeks, and a third already looms. Despite the sudden surge in popularity, this band does not exist.
The first suspicions emerged on Reddit, where users spotted that the band’s Discover Weekly tracks felt eerily hollow and formulaic. The only images associated with the act were clearly AI-generated and entirely emotionless. Soon after, Music Ally published the first formal report investigating the phenomenon. Their research linked The Velvet Sundown to generative AI platforms such as Suno. Deezer responded by applying “AI-generated” content labels. However, Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube Music have remained completely silent. They continue to promote The Velvet Sundown as if it were a legitimate psych-rock discovery.
Streaming platforms prefer synthetic content over real music
This isn’t an isolated mistake. Instead, it highlights how streaming systems now reward speed, quantity and genre mimicry. Generative AI thrives in that environment. It can flood playlists with endless mood-based music without emotion, artistry or truth.
Meanwhile, real musicians lose ground. While they write, rehearse, record and promote their work, faceless AI projects pump out dozens of songs in a fraction of the time. These synthetic tracks meet every algorithmic condition. They hit all the right tags, run at the ideal length and sound just convincing enough to pass. Authenticity no longer matters.
Moreover, the playlist ecosystem encourages this deception. Discovery feeds don’t ask whether a human made the music. They simply promote what performs. That means real musicians, already struggling to survive, now face competition from content that was designed specifically to replace them.
The silence from streaming platforms protects their profits
The streaming companies know exactly what’s happening. Metadata reveals AI-generated structures. Deezer acknowledged the problem directly. Yet Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube Music have not labelled this music or even spoken about it. Their silence enables the deception, because fake music costs nothing, causes no licensing disputes and never complains.
Every play of The Velvet Sundown steals income and visibility from someone who has devoted years to their craft. That is not abstract harm – it is a direct hit to working musicians already on the edge. Most listeners remain unaware of what they’re hearing, and the platforms have taken zero steps to inform them.
This is not progress. It is betrayal. Streaming giants built their empires on the backs of real artists. Now, they are quietly phasing those artists out in favour of artificial placeholders. These decisions are not accidental. They are calculated.
If musicians, listeners and the broader industry do not fight back now, they may lose the music ecosystem entirely. Every day of silence gives these companies more time to bury human voices under synthetic ones. Real music deserves better – and it’s up to us to demand it.