Band facing AI allegations part of elaborate “art hoax”

Despite posting defiantly denying their AI rumours, the band spokesperson and “adjunct” member Andrew Frelon admitted. “It’s marketing. It’s trolling. People before, they didn’t care about what we did, and now suddenly, we’re talking to Rolling Stone, so it’s like, ‘Is that wrong?’”

It has been suggested that playlist manipulation was used to rack up so many listeners for the band, as Frelon admits they “got on some playlists that just have like tons of followers, and it seems to have spiralled from there.”

This suggestion comes after the Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, became the chairman of an AI military start-up after a €600 million investment. There are no protections against AI music in Spotify.

However, the story shifts a gear. Only a day after the interview was published on Rolling Stone, Frelon revealed himself to be a fraud. His interest in “art hoaxes” led him to stage one for the media, reaching out to outlets from channels officially affiliated with the band. He was able to engineer this verifiable evidence through a long list of “social engineering” tricks.

The Velvet Sundown posted on their Spotify-linked Twitter page, confirming that Frelon is not part of the band. They said, in part, “The Velvet Sundown is a multidisciplinary artistic project blending music, analog aesthetics, and speculative storytelling. While we embrace ambiguity as part of our narrative design, we ask that reporting on us be based on verifiable sources — not fabricated accounts or synthetic media.”

Nonetheless, the band has not yet responded to a request for further comment, which seems to provide more evidence that they aren’t at all real.

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