The Fab Fake Four - AI music just went mainstream

It's the soft rock band taking the streaming services by storm. Four handsome, hairy lads playing music tinged with early 70s West Coast nostalgia.

But are the Velvet Sundown actually bots? It's this week's Pick of the Pods.

This week...

🎸 if you listen to one podcast on music, entertainment and AI...

Make it The Rest is Entertainment from Goalhanger

"They sound like the memory of something you never lived and somehow make it feel real."

That's what Billboard had to say about the Velvet Sundown.

Except it's not. Both the quote, and the band itself, were made up.

That hasn't stopped it clocking up well over a million listens on Spotify, and hundreds of thousands on YouTube. If you don't mind adding to that number, you can check out their hit, Dust on the Wind, here:

More entertaining than the song are the comments on YouTube, along the lines of:

"My wife used to love this song, we just to listen to it while driving in the highway. She passed in 1998. She was a toaster, I'm a calculator."

Is it a hoax? An art project? The future of music, or the herald of its death? RIchard Osman and Marina Hyde have their say on this episode of The Rest is Entertainment, the twice-weekly show that dissects the zeitgeist.

Anyone can make a song in seconds on AI sites such as Suno, just by using a prompt saying the genre or vibe required. Whoever is behind the Velvet Sundown appears to have done that and managed to get enough listens to make it big-ish.

They could have created the momentum, Osman tells us, by getting other bots to listen to their bot-generated songs.

'Stream farms' are these depressing sheds all around the world, with hundreds, thousands of tablets and phones all streaming the same thing at the same time to bump your numbers up.

If you can sit at home, come up with a new song, put it on Spotify ... and have 1,000 phones listening to it at the same time, there's money to be made there.

AI music is a topic I discussed with music legend Nile Rodgers on Radio Davos, and, for our roundup of the year episode, I made an AI version of one of his greatest hits, called 'We Are AI Generated Family'. Listen, if you dare here or click below and listen from 5:50.

Read more on the Velvet Sundown story: https://www.vice.com/en/article/ai-band-velvet-sundown-spokesperson/

As fascinating as it is, the Velvet Sundown is not even the lead hoax story on this episode, which looks at allegations that a best-selling memoir, The Salt Path, was based on what some might term alternative facts.

How sport can change the world

I'm heading to a quarter final of the UEFA Women's EURO 2025 this week, and, in the run-up to that, Radio Davos just published this interview with the inventor of the Homeless World Cup .

The event has been going for 20 years and is the subject of this movie:

And don't miss ...

My new podcast, A Book - A Place: Geneva, Episode 1: Frankenstein.

Episode 2, The Birth of the Comic Book, is coming soon. Here's a trailer:

Heard any great podcasts that you like to see on Pick of the Pods? Drop a note in the comments.

Thanks for listening.