Have you heard of The Velvet Sundown? It’s kind of like The Velvet Underground, except The Velvet Underground is definitely real, and the jury is still out for The Velvet Sundown.
The band’s photos look remarkably AI-generated — too clean, not quite textured enough, oddly inhuman, yet it has racked up more than 372,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Their bio reads that they are “quietly spellbinding” and uses those odd, unspecific metaphors so common in AI-generated text, like comparing the band’s music to “a scent that suddenly takes you back somewhere you didn’t expect.”
Their bio purports that it was formed by singer and mellotron player Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, synth player Milo Raines, and percussionist Orion “Rio” Del Mar. None of them has ever been interviewed. And, not that a social media account is necessarily proof of life, but none of them have an Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook account — and neither does the band itself. In fact, none of the band members seems to have a single shred of an internet presence.
SEE ALSO:
AI music startup Suno admits to using copyrighted music, but says it’s ‘fair use’
The song credits on Spotify are also a bit suspicious. Most artists will have multiple people in the credits, but the credits on Spotify for every single one of their songs are “Performed by,” “Written by,” and “Source” by The Velvet Sundown. There is no producer listed.
“The Velvet Sundown aren’t trying to revive the past,” their Spotify bio reads. “They’re rewriting it. They sound like the memory of a time that never actually happened… but somehow they make it feel real.”
Mashable Trend Report
Are they playing with us? Listening to the band myself, it does sound AI-generated — the lyrics lack specificity, and the music itself lacks depth. But it’s also kind of… fine music? Suno and Udio, two of the most-used AI-powered music generators, have been “churning out soulless slop” for about two years, as Music Radar reported, and if The Velvet Sundown is using those tools to create music, it might be one of the first more successful uses of the platforms’ ability to “capture the public’s imagination in the way that many of the technology’s critics had feared.”
On YouTube, there’s an entire ecosystem of AI-generated music. One standout is AI For The Culture, a channel that reimagines rap and R&B tracks as vintage Motown or blues cuts — complete with fictional artists and AI-generated bios to match. One particularly notable example: an AI-rendered cover of Future’s “Turn On the Lights,” which was later sampled by rapper JPEGMAFIA on his latest album.
While the band hasn’t confirmed that it’s AI-generated, it has also done little to prove people wrong. Music Radar says it “bears the unmistakably lo-fi veneer of a Suno creation.” One Reddit post says there isn’t a “shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed.”
But, in the end, there’s no actual proof that the band is generated by AI, and therein lies the struggle. When AI music becomes this difficult to catch, whose job is it to catch it? The trouble has led some users to post their disappointment in Spotify for not informing listeners that the band is or is not AI-generated. “We should be boycotting Spotify by now,” one person said on Reddit, and another person responded by pointing out that the band is also on Apple Music and Amazon Music.
Spotify did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mashable.
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![OpenAI’s existential questions | TechCrunch
OpenAI has been all over the news recently, whether that news is about acquisitions, competition with Anthropic, or bigger debates about AI’s impact on society.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”
First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.
Anthony: [We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN — a business talk show, like a new media company.
And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try out different things.”
Especially [with] the TBPN deal […] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
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San Francisco, CA
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October 13-15, 2026
Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s it.
I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that’s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t be able to access this anymore.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.
Sean: I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who’ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become.
I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that’s not raising the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report at The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.
I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s Anthropic kind of looming in — not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very much taking up a lot of space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they’re really not directly competing with each other — maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?
Anthony: I think they’re directly competing with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity.
And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s rise.
Our reporter Lucas [Ropek], he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they’re sort of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine, too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that is exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
#OpenAIs #existential #questions #TechCrunchAnthropic,Equity podcast,OpenAI](https://i2.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2266645295.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1 "OpenAI’s existential questions | TechCrunch
OpenAI has been all over the news recently, whether that news is about acquisitions, competition with Anthropic, or bigger debates about AI’s impact on society.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”
First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.
Anthony: [We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN — a business talk show, like a new media company.
And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try out different things.”
Especially [with] the TBPN deal […] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s it.
I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that’s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t be able to access this anymore.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.
Sean: I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who’ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become.
I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that’s not raising the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report at The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.
I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s Anthropic kind of looming in — not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very much taking up a lot of space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they’re really not directly competing with each other — maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?
Anthony: I think they’re directly competing with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity.
And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s rise.
Our reporter Lucas [Ropek], he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they’re sort of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine, too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that is exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
#OpenAIs #existential #questions #TechCrunchAnthropic,Equity podcast,OpenAI")
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