music
"There's not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed": This apparently AI-generated artist is racking up hundreds of thousands of Spotify streams
In a chromatic scale, there are 12 notes within an octave. Each fret separates a note, so the 12th fret is marked with double pips to show it’s the octave.
The marker with the two dots should be at the 12th fret. That's where you get a note an octave higher than the open string so it's an important place on the guitar's neck.
Typically you get the markers at the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th and 12th frets, then at the 15th, 17th, 19th, 21st and 24th frets. There are guitars out there where there is a marker at the 10th fret instead of the 9th fret but to not have a marker at the 12th fret is unheard of (except on guitars that don't have fret markers at all).
The only way you'd get a real guitar with the fret markers at the 10th and 13th frets like that is if the luthier was smoking crack when he built it.
Some people can't count to one. I'd say they have no fingers, but then they wouldn't be playing a guitar, so that's not it. I don't know, it's a mystery to me.
I’m surprised this isn’t being mentioned more it’s very likely a high percentage is bots. Of course there’s probably a few actual people listening to them but not many
Eh it's not like it's a recent conspiracy that Spotify themselves have AI-generated artists and musics in their generated playlists, mainly in like instrumental songs, but still.
There are a lot in reggae playlists and daily mixes as well.
😢
Been with Spotify from the beginning, have a family/premium account (with a bunch of my kids on it) and am about to kill it altogether if they didn't give us an AI filter sooner-rather-than-later.
Yes the reggae thing totally bugged me out. Was in a semi-k-hole at 2 in the morning and I didn’t even realize I was listening to reggae until it started to break into a million pieces. Broke my brain for a minute, as it was relatively early in the current AI trajectory, and I was rather high so it was hard to understand what sounds and thoughts were “real”. I felt like I was being experimented on. Honestly it wasn’t until this post that I had any confirmation, people thought I was making it up.
AI Generated music has a LOT fewer obvious tells than visual or textual content. On top of that, most people listen to music casually, in the background, not actively. I'm sure there's bots in the playcount, but I'd be surprised if it was significantly higher or lower than average.
Why would bots be listening to the music? Feels like too easy of a cop out to the simply fact that people are listening to AI music without realizing it,
I read an article probably, a year ago or more now, about spotify who was suing someone who used AI to make a whole bunch of songs and then used an army of bots to "listen" to them all. He did that thing that stupid thieves do and got too greedy, goosing the numbers to such an anomalously high point that it drew attention of the company and they figured out his payout scam. If he'd just kept it low but steady, he might have gotten away with it.
As an advertiser: companies like Spotify don't really care about this. Part of the problem is that buying ads on Spotify and YouTube et cetera is often outsourced and automated.
The number of people who actually analyze the effectiveness of these ad campaigns is low, because the main selling point of advertising on these services is how easy it is, plus everyone is doing it, so it's low risk from the personal perspective of the employees making the decisions.
And you can always buy a dodgy market research report that states that brand awareness is up because of these ads.
Spotify really needs to get a grip with this. There are whole genres, especially in Electronica that are full of AI content. At the very least allow us to auto block AI generated music. The situation is just going to get worse and worse if they don’t.
I remember reading an article about generic lofi and such style music being generated by a single company , but recorded by a few different artists.
Basically Spotify pays said company to make 100 generic tracks that can then fill the most listened to playlists, allowing them to keep the royalties and just pay an upfront cost to the company.
One of the musicians got interviewed and was a jazz sessionist, he would come in for the day, record a dozen or so tracks all of similar nature and style then the company would sell them bulk to Spotify.
He said, he just needs to pay his bills, and will take the work but felt bad for doing it.
Spotify say, these playlists are put on as background music, no one is looking up these artists, saving them, and finding more. These people who use these playlist almost caused this, because they’ll put a playlist on and never look for more. So Spotify sees 100k people put on the piano chill playlist for dinner music. At no point did they look for more artists or music, they just want background music, they want it the same throughout and they want it non offensive without surprise.
I feel for all sides on this, but it’s only just going to get worse now with AI. That jazz musician who got paid for the day to make some background lobby music is no longer going to get that paycheque.
Yup, it's the latest iteration of the generic, non-offensive music that used to play in department stores and dentist offices. Used to call it "elevator music" but now it's rare to have music in elevators.
They can't wait to make the entire internet into a sanitized world of generic auto-generated pablum, with nothing offensive, dangerous, critical, or surprising anywhere in it. It's not just about doing something cheaper, it's about washing out human creativity in a sea of soulless crap, because real art and culture are unpredictable, uncontrolled, and prone to making people question things they've been led to believe. The oligarchs can't have that -- they need us all to stay docile unquestioning drones who work ourselves to death for others' profit and spend our limited free time consuming crap, also for corporate profit, then die as soon as we're not useful. Art reminds us of a life worth living, and the real life worth living isn't build around spending both your labor and your leisure making companies more powerful, so they want to drown out any messages about challenging that with mindless drivel they control.
Ok full stop I work for a college and have to lay music outside once a year for this walk around campus thing anyway I use those playlists for exactly that reason. All the same chill no surprises and no bad language. I’m part of the problem and didn’t even know it. That’s why we need to have transparency here
It was funny, I listen to all these types of playlists at work.
I was noticing that some of the playlists felt very generic, that I would listen and just feel nothing, while others would make me like the song, look at the artist and see what else they had done.
I started to look at song credits, and the playlists I was enjoying they would have a writer, composer and so forth, but the ones I was not actually enjoying (even though you would say fit the genre I was trying to listen to) had none of those most fields were just blank.
Then I found that article and it all started to become clear.
You're not part of the problem. There's nothing wrong with using a streaming service for background music. Spotify is just trying to spin a way to make this the customer's fault. They just want to pay less in royalties when they can get away with it.
Yeah, in the AI scenario, its bad because its taking art from an artist and re-selling it without permission. Here an artist is hired and paid to make the art.
There will come a point where either we are completely weighed down with AI music and are debating which AI model generates the best music or we just stop purchasing anything past a certain point
Spotify’s CEO just invested a bunch of money in AI weapons. I’m pretty positive they don’t give a shit, or are promoting these fake AI artists so they can pay real musicians even less.
Why would they? The ghouls look at art as content, and AI will be able to make so much content for them. The average person will simply consume and move on to the next AI slop. Fuck Spotify
I follow a lot of stuff on Spotify, and it seems to me one of the really common plays that AI electronica artists make is to steal the name of specifically bands with one word names. Sleep isn't releasing a 4 minute song with a dandelion on the cover. Tad, who haven't been a band for years, aren't releasing a song called like Sea Breeze with a picture of a watery sunset on the cover (I mean, these are the guys who have an album called God's Balls). Swans aren't releasing 3 minute one off singles of generative EDM. Like 9 times out of 10 when I catch an AI track in my new releases, it's a band with a one word name. You can pretty much always spot them based on the cover and song title not matching the band whose name they're using's vibe.
Just make it clearly labelled "this is AI," don't let them steal other band's names to try to get plays, and then I couldn't care less how much AI slop is thrown on there. If someone is knowingly choosing it, then they likely are looking for absolute background music, so I don't think it cannibalizes much from vital, non AI artists.
Spotify benefits from this. Fake band, fake copyright, this happens on a huge scale and they save millions on royalties. Spotify isn't coming to the rescue.
Spotify will just start to generate AI bands so they won't have to pay royalties to anyone. I imagine that whomever creates these AI bands and submits them to spotify, will get the rights for creating the "art" that produced the music.
Yeah jumping off this comment to say "AI music" is an absolute parasite on YouTube, there are several instrumental albums with millions of views already.
If any of you have seen these "Space Cowboy Funk [thumbnail of an astronaut with a cowboy hat]" or "Urban Ninja Groove [Ninja dressed in hip-hop clothing]" or "Morning Café Jazz [café table in Paris]" or "Hyperdrive Boogie [disco aliens]" or "2 Hours of Interstellar Highway Space Rock [truck spaceship]" type of videos, there's 90% chance they're AI generated music. And they never say anything about it. It's just obvious because there's no sense of artistic identity at all in their page.
Just search "Instrumental album" and you'll see hundreds of them with 1M+ views.
As a multi-instrumentalist who can barely get 10 listens on actual tracks I sweat for, this is really disheartening.
"Let people enjoy things" is how people felt about the ghibli ai art thing that was going around kinda recently. While the artists that spent time learning to draw feel differently.
They've been flooded with electronically manicured pop garbage for a long time. AI was the next logical step, and young people have been so desensitized by putting that trash in their ears, that they have difficulty differentiating between something that's 90% electronically generated noise, and the stuff that's 100%.
I listened to a few tracks. It's pretty cheesy but good enough that it would fool you if sandwiched into an authentic playlist as the article states. Listen to them in a row though and you would understand how poor and samey the lyrics are. Still pretty scary.
Maybe it was trained on lots of country, which has lots of lyrics about kicking up dust, dirt roads, getting their boots dirty, etc. So the model missed that dust = redneck metaphor and just assumed humans like dust in their songs?
Chat GPT doesn't understand that there's a line that crosses "promotion" and into "pretentious". Even if they were real, if I read that bio, I wouldn't listen to them out of principle, they sound like absolute wankers.
The virtual drummer will leave in 2 years to become an online AI Yogi on Twitch and the singer will be found dead after accepting a command from a catfished Tinder AI bot it hooked up with.
I mean it's reddit, you do something helpful and the terminals will get to it first and down vote it, eventually normal people will see it and up vote it for being helpful. Assuming it isn't buried by then.
"The Velvet Sundown don’t just play music — they conjure worlds," reads the group's Spotify profile, which we're about 99% certain has been authored by ChatGPT.
The misused em dash, the "not this but that" phrasing? It isn't just 99% certain — it's a guaranteed certainty.
There’s definitely a use case for different dashes.
A hyphen (dash) is meant to be used to connect prefixes to words, combine words, or compound adjectives (a multiple-meaning word, for example), en-dashes are meant to be used for ranges (“1–2 hours a day,” for example), while em-dashes are typically used to tack on an additional thought at the end of a sentence—like this one right here.
From my understanding the hyphen - is different from the em dash —. I personally don't know the "proper" use case for em dashes, but the fact that they started appearing substantially more after ChatGPT arrived certainly is evidence of AI generation. Most of us would use a hyphen probably 100% or the time and not even realize the em dash existed. On android you have to long press the hyphen to even find the em dash.
Exactly. Type two hyphens in a row in Word, iOS, etc. and you get an em dash. It is not some exotic punctuation that you have to go into special character mode to access.
I think that's evidence further that what we see on social media, Spotify, and elsewhere is quite possibly AI generated when there's overuse of the em dash. If word processors were coded to auto change hyphens to em dashes, that's evident that we still and always have preferred to use hyphens. It just doesn't make sense that people would suddenly switch to proper em dashes, and use them very frequently at that.
A lot of rich text editors (think Word, or Google docs, Apple programs etc) will automatically convert them in text. I've also seen 3 dots turned into a single ellipses character often too.
The issues isn’t how it’s used. It’s that is used them so much it’s become a cliche for AI. Writers are having a problem with this, because there’s nothing wrong with using em dashes. But, now they’re getting called AI when they’re not just because people see an em dash.
If you listen to “Dust on the Wind”, the lyrics are clearly an example of the artist working with the hottest music producer in the industry, Chet Gipetti.
“Write a generic protest song for war that sounds like it was written in the 60’s”
There needs to be a big shame list of these AI “acts”. That way at the least I can find them on Spotify and then just block playing music from them. That option at least exists for the moment until they take that away.
That fret marker detail is hilarious, AI clearly didn’t get the memo on standard guitar layouts. Spotify’s lack of transparency with AI-generated content is getting out of hand, especially when it’s flooding niche genres. Naming the band in the comments is actually helpful, so not sure why that got downvoted. At this point, we need filters or at least labels to separate human-made music from this algorithmic stuff.
The cynic in me finds this to be is a hilarious indictment of this cultural moment and landscape. And I say this as a musician of forty years, who has dealt with the “industry” and the public in many past incarnations.
Spotify suggested Doreen Bright for me. Rather unassuming cover with a picture of a woman who I presumed to be the artist. Dug around online and found nothing about her other than a Facebook post suggesting she might be AI. It was good enough for me to have it in my regular rotation. Then she disappeared from Spotify, but remained on Apple Music, Amazon, YouTube. Now she’s gone from all platforms. I feel duped.
Humans get the culture we deserve, if you’re curious, open, interested in having a personal experience with music, films and artworks with substance, that evoke meaning within us, or resonate with our human condition, that etch that after-image in our brains for us to ponder days, weeks, months after our first encounter — then AI is no threat. If we’re content to be placated by vacuously created product churned out by some algorithm just to take up space in the zeitgeist or make money for bean counters with no artistic talent then that’s what our culture will look like.
I was just reading an interview with Grant Hart from 2011 and he said something about file sharing (the issue of the day) that seems to have evoked into this bullshit we are seeing now.
“propaganda to minimalize the importance of the artist and the intellectuals in society, cause, you know, if we are doing our job, then it's impossible for some things to happen for very long. I mean this criticism from artist about the socio/media... The artist was savaged and it was disguised as a democratic evolution, with the file sharing... The U.S. congress acted like nothing was being stolen, and they... were ignoring laws that were on the books for hundred and hundred years, all to subsidize a computer industry with the money from artist... Somebody doing that with my work, when I pay for my time as a designer, I pay for my time as a...”
We're entering a new era of the dead internet. Expect this to be the norm- AI music, AI art, AI redditors, AI everything where you don't need a live human face. All to make a buck or influence. Should it be stopped? Probably. How? Absolutely no idea.
Oh my goodness, this band popped up on a playlist I was listening to just yesterday and I went to check them out and told my husband that I couldn't believe how AI-generated their photo looked, but didn't think it'd be for real because of the Billboard quote in their bio, which is fake?? 😳 This is some dystopian shit.
This is the sad state of the music industry. People actually making music are banned from society while fake AI bands go viral because the AI algorithm is feeding into it.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's firm has invested $690 million in Al-powered military startup Helsing. Helsing's makes Al-powered military decision-making software, and is moving to produce its own drones, aircraft, and submarines.
There is actually something fishy about this whole story. When I sent a tiktok to a friend friend about this topic yesterday, they noticed several articles and videos came out about this very topic and band yesterday. They suggested someone was creating 'manufactured outrage' using the topic.
If AI music is anything like what I experienced with AI stories, you'll find it kind of novel and give it a go for a bit, realize its all patterns, then be unable to tell any of it apart.
Well, at very least it’s lame as hell. The lyrics have this weird uncanny valley lack of coherence and the music itself is unremarkable. It sucks and I’m sure someone will love this lazily generated no-band. But I still think boring soft rock made by unimaginative human beings will live to see another day
Can't wait until there is a congressional hearing about this and someone plays Lucho Buerle's 'Rubbin and a Tuggin' my Fucking Nips' and it becomes a part of congressional record.
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u/SmwhereAroundBarstow Jun 28 '25
Dude’s guitar in that pic has fret markers on the 10th and 13th fret. Your honour, I rest my case