Is That Band Even Real? AI-Generated Music and the Disappearing Line Between Real and Synthetic

Is That Band Even Real?

A question I fear we will be asking more and more in the near future.

I recently played a song on my radio show, Brenda from Tinder by Nick Hustles. Funky groove, retro soul vocals, cheeky storytelling. It fit the vibe perfectly. But it wasn’t until I looked into the artist that I realised something strange: Nick Hustles doesn’t exist. Or more accurately, he’s an AI-generated artist.

It caught me off guard. I’ve heard about AI-generated music before, but until now I’d mostly associated it with ambient or instrumental tracks made for background listening. But this? This was fully structured funk with vocals, lyrics, social media marketing, and Spotify presence. And it wasn’t the only case.

I stumbled across Velvet Sundown, a psychedelic rock band that had quickly racked up over 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Their presence felt convincing: album art, backstory, band photos.

It’s startling how convincing AI-generated art is becoming, not just in sound but in story. And as a music lover, I find that deeply unsettling.

Because AI doesn’t create from scratch. It creates from us. Whether it’s a song, image, or video, it pulls from massive datasets of human-made content: lyrics, photos, vocals, artwork, and recombines those elements into something new. Ask an AI to draw a knight and it references thousands of real human-made knight illustrations. That’s the quiet plagiarism at the core of this.

And it raises moral questions. If an AI song is built from the bones of thousands of real ones, who owns it? Who gets paid? And what happens when the line between "real" and "synthetic" is no longer visible?

Right now, if you’re not paying attention, you can easily miss the signs. But there’s something missing in these songs. It’s subtle. A lack of tension, maybe. Or the absence of a lived experience behind the lyrics. But that gap is closing fast.

The average listener might not care. Most consumers don’t deeply engage with who made a track or why. They’re just hitting play on Spotify, skipping to the next TikTok audio, letting algorithms soundtrack their lives. And the industry is responding to that passivity.

Think about where AI music is already being used: restaurants, hotel lobbies, elevators, shopping malls. Anywhere corporations can save a licensing fee by cutting out the human middleman. That’s money no longer circulating to musicians. No studio time, no mixing engineers, no songwriters. Just algorithms feeding algorithms.

And if this keeps scaling, what happens to live music? Do we end up with holograms at festivals? Synthetic pop stars playing to real crowds while we eat lab-grown food and let robots vacuum our houses? Universal basic income, social credits, and computer-generated culture piped in 24/7?

What’s the role of creativity, or even an economy, in that world?

Maybe this sounds dramatic, but I don’t think it is.

We're not just talking about tech. We're talking about what it means to be human, to create, to struggle, to express something real.

AI music doesn’t come from experience, heartbreak, late nights, or lived truth. It mimics the output but not the process. And when we stop valuing that process, we risk losing something vital.

Not just the music. But the meaning.