Andrew Frelon claimed to be a spokesperson and “adjunct” member of the band, Velvet Sundown. The band is not a traditional band, their songs are made with AI. Even with their AI songs, they have gained over a million streams total on Spotify, according to an article on Stereogum. Frelon admitted to orchestrating an ”art hoax” with the band. “It’s trolling,” said Frelon. “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?’” 

However, according to The Velvet Sundown’s, Frelon is not even affiliated with the project at all. The twitter linked to their Spotify is also not a very active one. Frelon explained that he has experience and a background in web privacy. He used AI to “uncover vulnerabilities in order to fix them.” He had also used AI to understand how The Velvet Sundown works. He had seen coverage of the band and decided he wanted to be a part of the phenomenon.

“A year ago with a friend, we attempted much the same formula as TVS seemed to be using as an experiment on Spotify to see if we could get an entirely AI-generated band to trend and earn money,” said Frelon. “Because of those experiences, I completely understood TVS as a phenomenon. I also noticed based on media coverage that there were not really any social media accounts associated with the band, apart from an Instagram account with a few obvious AI-generated images of the band on it. Suddenly, I had the crazy idea, what if I inserted an extra layer of weird into this story? What if I re-purposed an old Twitter account I’d barely used for another project, and made that into an ‘official’ looking account for TVS?”