AI Artist Xania Monet Streaming Numbers v The Velvet Sundown: Analysis

The Velvet Sundown is an AI-generated rock four-piece that captured worldwide attention in June after word of the surreptitiously computer-made music spread online. The music is a mix of classic rock, folk and psychedelic Americana. The album’s surrealist artwork evokes Salvador Dali during a stint in the high desert of the American Southwest. The band came replete with an AI-generated press photo and a halfway believable bio.  

News of The Velvet Sundown’s AI origins spread like wildfire, and U.S. on-demand streams quickly jumped to approximately 140,000 per week, according to Luminate. The dramatic rise revealed strong curiosity about a band with a fully formed concept but no human creativity. Interest reached a fever pitch the following week when weekly on-demand streams jumped to 760,000. That turned out to be the band’s high-water mark.  

Streaming activity dropped 25% the following week, and another 7% the week after. Then interest in The Velvet Sundown fell off a cliff. Weekly streams plunged 48%, then 34%, and then another 25%. Six weeks after hitting its streaming pinnacle, The Velvet Sundown’s weekly on-demand streams were just 15% of its peak number. In another nine weeks, those streams were just 7% of the peak week. 

The band’s Google search traffic followed a remarkably similar trajectory. The number of searches for “The Velvet Sundown” peaked the same week that on-demand streams did, and then steadily dropped. 

When plotted on a chart, The Velvet Sundown’s weekly U.S. on-demand streams and U.S. Google search traffic look like one-half of a seismometer after a massive earthquake. A sharp peak of curiosity — measured in streams and searches — was followed by a cliff of disinterest.  

The shape of the curve says a great deal about both The Velvet Sundown and AI music in general. If AI music is fortunate enough to find an audience, it won’t be easy to keep listeners engaged. Maintaining and building an audience is the domain of record labels, artist managers and armies of service providers and consultants. People see chart positions, news appearances and social media mentions, but they don’t see the behind-the-scenes blocking and tackling that creates all that visibility. The Velvet Sundown had the benefit of being one of the first AI artists most people encountered. Once that novelty wore off, it was left to compete with far more organized, more resourceful artists. 

Enter Xania Monet, an AI-based R&B artist who signed a multi-million-dollar deal with Hallwood Media in September. Monet is the creation of Mississippi artist Telisha Jones, who used AI music platform Suno to create songs based on lyrics she penned herself. Monet could have had an experience similar to The Velvet Sundown’s, but she took a different path. 

When Billboard broke the news about Monet’s signing, a wave of media attention drove her on-demand streams and Google search traffic to a peak in mid-September. The week after the peak, Monet’s streams fell 24% — remarkably close to The Velvet Sundown’s 25% decline after its peak week. That could have been the beginning of a steep drop following the height of the public’s curiosity. Instead, Monet’s weekly streams stopped their downward decline and leveled off over the last three weeks. So why didn’t Monet suffer the same fate as The Velvet Sundown? 

A week after Monet’s streams hit their apex, Hallwood Media started securing radio play for her songs. In the first week — when her streams fell 24% — Monet’s songs were played just twice on broadcast radio, according to Luminate. But weekly spins rose to 109 the next week, then climbed to 423 and 485 in the next two weeks. By the most recent week (the period ended Oct. 16), Monet had something The Velvet Sundown didn’t: an aggregate radio audience of more than 1 million listeners.  

Placed side by side, the charts representing The Velvet Sundown and Xania Monet show the difference between existing outside of the traditional music business and operating within it. Radio play helped turn Monet away from the cliff of disinterest and put her on a different trajectory. Without promotion, both radio and digital, it can be exceedingly difficult for any artist to maintain momentum — much less one created with AI.