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

What does it take for a new band to break through in the beleaguered music industry these days? 

How does about 6 million streams on Spotify in five weeks sound? 

That’s exactly what The Velvet Sundown achieved, which equates to almost $24,000 in royalties, since releasing their debut album, Dust and Silence, on June 5.

Since then, they’ve dropped two more albums (Floating on Echoes and Paper Sun Rebellion, breaking on July 14) and racked up nearly 1.5 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 some 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 announced 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 case, 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 support of artificial intelligence.”

Their most popular song right now, “Dust on the Wind” (not to be confused with Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind”), echoes ‘70s folk rock with a simple rhyme scheme around war and peace. As of this writing, it’s nearing 2 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, many 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 5 in Birmingham, England, Ozzy Osbourne made a confession. Despite his “Crazy Train” past and recent health struggles, he said 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. 7. The book will cover his iconic career, tempestuous marriage to Sharon, and the past seven years of health issues, including his 2019 accident and long battle with Parkinson’s disease.

Readers can also expect wild tales involving many 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 ways 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 175 bids from 42 bidders and, on July 15, the undisclosed victor took it all — brand name and intellectual property, social media accounts, marketing assets, website domains, and archived media coverage — for $245,300.  

“This sucks, it’s so low,” he said of the selling price, acting as if he got burned.

Really? Given the festival’s disastrous legacy, it’s arguably $245,000 more than it’s worth.

The original FYRE Festival, scheduled to take place at a Bahamian resort in 2017, 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 2023, McFarland attempted to get it right with FYRE Festival 2. Planned for May 2025 at another upscale location, this time in Mexico, the event offered packages from $1,400 to $1.1 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.