AI-generated music is here to stay. Will streaming services like Spotify label it?

AI-generated music is here to stay. Will streaming services like Spotify label it?

Isabella Gomez Sarmiento

August 08, 2025 / 2:00 am

It sounds like a joke, or a bad episode of Black Mirror .

A band of four guys with shaggy hair released two albums' worth of generic psych-rock songs back-to-back. The songs ended up on Spotify users' Discover Weekly feeds, as well as on third-party playlists boasting hundreds of thousands of followers. Within a few weeks, the band's music had garnered millions of streams — except the band wasn't real. It was a "synthetic music project" created using artificial intelligence.

The controversy surrounding The Velvet Sundown spun out almost as quickly as it gained traction. A person falsely claiming to be part of the band spoke to media outlets, includi