June 2025
The Velvet Sundown have 320,000 Spotify listeners, but no online mentions and zero social media presence.
The suspicious group was discovered by eagle-eyed Reddit users who spotted them in their algorithmic Discover Weekly playlists. This was followed by accusations against Spotify (that this is another ghost artist created by the streaming service itself), AI (the cover and tracks are most likely generated by AI), and others for using bots and boosting plays.
Stuart Dredge described all the collected facts in detail in an article on Musically. In short, we have:
In general, nothing criminal was noticed, but it looks suspicious. The most interesting question is where 320,000 listeners (and about 700,000 total plays on the top 10 tracks) come from for such a band, and whether there are any shenanigans there.
Obviously, without social networks, they could not have virality and listeners from platforms like TikTok. So, let’s take a closer look at their presence on streaming.
According to ChartMetric, the group’s songs were added to 62 playlists with a total reach of almost 4 million listeners.
The most popular are thematic playlists from several curators, such as Extra Music, Solitude Collective, and KULTPOP!. The playlists themselves are genre-based (Clean Pop Hits 2025), thematic (Vietnam War Music), or related to soundtracks (Supernatural Soundtrack).
90% of the music in these playlists is from well-known, established artists. But it is obvious that the music of an unknown new group could not have ended up there by accident. It was also placed in positions following a mathematical progression (34, 43, 52, 61, 70 — continue the series yourself).
One might assume that these playlists are used as a cover and that listening is generated by bots. This version is likely not true, because none of the playlists showed sharp changes in subscriber numbers and they are being checked by artist.tools.
It is possible to believe that there are 600,000 people interested in Vietnam War music or 400,000 looking for a Supernatural soundtrack. And since 90% of the music in these playlists aligns with expectations, occasionally slipping in a new artist is plausible—most likely for payment from the artist (or whoever created them using AI).
This highlights the main difference between such playlists and curated playlists from Spotify itself. This is best seen in charts showing the distribution of tracks by popularity and release date:
As a result, we are most likely dealing with a standard promotional strategy: a “sandwich” of famous tracks with new ones as the filling. This method has been proven over time (“Hey Ya!” by Outkast) and across platforms (buying playlist placements on VK has long been a key strategy for generating plays in Russia).
The final question: even if everything is legal, whose interests does this serve? Is Spotify lowering royalties for real artists, or are savvy producers exploiting arbitrage between playlist placement costs and royalty income?
Whatever the answer, both scenarios force us to reconsider how we listen to music—actively or passively—and how we assign value to it.
AI critics often paint a dystopian future where bots listen to AI-generated music and all revenue flows to streaming platforms. However, recent research suggests that 90% of listeners would disagree with that outcome.