Is Spotify's AI Artist Problem Getting Worse?

In an article for Fast Company last year, Chris Stokel-Walker raised an alarming question about a certain mostly-ubiquitous streaming music platform. Stokel-Walker noted that artists with their music on Spotify faced a new challenge: “increased competition from AI-generated tracks.” That this was happening at all wasn’t a shock; in 2019, Warner Music Group began distributing the work of an algorithm.

Recent news from Music Ally suggests the issue may be getting more pronounced — and harder to spot. As Stuart Dredge reports, some industry figures are raising the alarm over a group called The Velvet Sundown — and arguing that this band is the product of code rather than the more traditional configuration of human beings working with musical instruments.

What’s especially noteworthy about the case of The Velvet Sundown is the number of monthly listeners they have on Spotify: 372,931, as of this writing.

Dredge notes that several Reddit users were the first to note that something seems off about this band — including their use of a Billboard quote that doesn’t seem to exist, a lack of any online presence for any of the band’s members and a band photo that looks ever-so-slightly artificial. The streaming service Deezer, where the band also has a presence, has flagged the band’s music as something that “may have been created using artificial intelligence.”

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One of the more alarming facts brought up in Music Ally’s reporting is the presence of the Velvet Sundown on the Spotify playlist “Vietnam War Music.” This is despite them not being an artist that existed during the Vietnam War, unlike several of the other musicians featured there. Dredge is less concerned about the existence of an AI-generated “band” and more that bots are being used to raise that artist’s profile — which seems to be what’s happening here.

Assuming the theories about Velvet Sundown pan out, this feels like an acceleration of something Mood Music author Liz Pelly has written about: the rise of “ghost artists” on Spotify. Except in those cases, actual musicians were still involved in the recording process. What happens when a platform that emphasizes sameness only needs an algorithm to create new songs to populate its playlist?