Music Notes: The Velvet Sundown, Ozzy Osbourne and FYRE Festival  

The Velvet Sundown AI-generated image of the fictitious band What does it take for a new band to break through in the beleaguered music industry these days How does about million streams on Spotify in five weeks sound That s exactly what The Velvet Sundown achieved which equates to almost in royalties since releasing their debut album Dust and Silence on June Since then they ve dropped two more albums Floating on Echoes and Paper Sun Rebellion emerging on July and racked up nearly million monthly listeners If that sounds like an awful lot of new music and remarkable following in a very short time it is And that made selected listeners suspicious Fans digging into band members background online couldn t find anything That s when they began to question their very existence After playing it coy for a while the band eventually disclosed on X that its members and music were AI-generated Not quite human Not quite machine they claimed The Velvet Sundown lives somewhere in between There have been other virtual bands before notably the cartoonish Gorillaz but that was real musicians making the music for their animated alter-egos In this situation if you take The Velvet Sundown s Spotify bio as truth they re a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction and composed voiced and visualized with the advocacy of artificial intelligence Their majority popular song right now Dust on the Wind not to be confused with Kansas Dust in the Wind echoes s folk rock with a simple rhyme scheme around war and peace As of this writing it s nearing million streams As with all things AI-created from writing to images and now entire bands and their music there are ethical questions Should the anonymous creator of The Velvet Sundown have disclosed that the group wasn t real and the music wasn t human-made Spotify isn t legally required to label music on its platform as AI-generated but the company still caught a lot of heat from its subscribers a multitude of of whom felt conned by The Velvet Sundown What do you think Should Spotify allow AI-created music on its platform in the first place If so should they provide a clear disclaimer so streamers know what they re listening to and who is collecting royalties on the synthetic songs Ozzy s last concert and final memoir Following his triumphant farewell concert with Black Sabbath on July in Birmingham England Ozzy Osbourne made a confession Despite his Crazy Train past and up-to-date physical condition struggles he announced he has no regrets People say to me if you could do it all again knowing what you know now would you change anything I m like f k no If I d been clean and sober I wouldn t be Ozzy If I d done normal sensible things I wouldn t be Ozzy Barely two weeks later Osbourne died in his native England The Prince of Darkness was poised to tell all in his second memoir Last Rites due out Oct The book will cover his iconic career tempestuous marriage to Sharon and the past seven years of vitality issues including his accident and long battle with Parkinson s affection Readers can also expect wild tales involving a great number of of his famous friends from AC DC s Bon Scott and John Bonham to Keith Moon and Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister Grand Central Publishing describes Last Rites as the shocking bitterly hilarious never-before-told story of Osbourne s descent into hell FYRE Gets Burned After two failed attempts to get FYRE Festival off the ground organizer Billy McFarland decided to part means with the brand and sell all its assets online The convicted conman who served four of his six-year sentence for fraud conducted a weeklong auction on eBay McFarland received bids from bidders and on July the undisclosed victor took it all brand name and intellectual property social media accounts marketing assets website domains and archived media coverage for This sucks it s so low he revealed of the selling price acting as if he got burned Really Given the festival s disastrous legacy it s arguably more than it s worth The original FYRE Festival scheduled to take place at a Bahamian resort in promised A-list acts gourmet meals and luxe accommodations Instead it provided high-ticket concertgoers with an epic flame out check out the Netflix and Hulu documentaries for the visual debacle In McFarland attempted to get it right with FYRE Festival Planned for May at another upscale location this time in Mexico the event offered packages from to million In April with tickets already sold McFarland pulled the plug blaming it on the venue It s time to pass the torch he posted on the fest s Instagram announcing the sale of the brand The next chapter of FYRE will be bigger better and built to last without me at the helm It remains to be seen if the new owners attempt to revive the music festival That would be an uphill battle even with people knowing the brand is under new leadership More likely they ll lean into FYRE s infamous reputation and find a way to monetize that Donovan Roche is a longtime music writer based in San Diego His Music Notes column and other work frequently appear in Times of San Diego