The now “famous” AI band The Velvet Sundown is filling playlists around the world. Their songs were never played in a garage, never sweated over in a smoky bar, never launched from the heartbreak of a bad breakup or the adrenaline of a wild night on tour. And yet people are listening. Some are dismissing it outright, of course. AI music has no “soul,” they say. But if it resonates with the listener finds a place in your head or heart, what difference does it make who, or what, made it?
The Velvet Sundown is a completely AI generated band that appeared this year and immediately went viral on platforms like Spotify. In fact, they generated over a million monthly listeners before the creators revealed that they were AI. Other AI artists have now jumped on the scene. Listeners just like their music.
I want to be clear before human musicians come after me with pitchforks that I understand the struggle of trying to make any kind of living as musicians. But this struggle started long before AI due to streaming services and extractive music labels (yes, I’m looking at you UMG). And the discussion about whether human musicians should have to compete against AI was over when we created AI.
The knock you hear most often about AI-generated music is that it may be technically impressive, but it has no “soul.” The word hangs there like a theological judgment, more religious than practical. What does it mean to say that a song, one that stirs you or makes you hum along, has no soul? What people usually mean is that it wasn’t created by a human who suffered, loved, or bled for the art. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that our culture has never demanded such purity from human artists. We’ve long built our most cherished art on inauthentic performances that audiences embraced without hesitation.
Johnny Cash became an icon of the outlaw country image singing songs like Folsom Prison Blues. He played concerts in prisons, dressed the part, carried himself like a man who’d done hard time. But Johnny Cash never served a prison sentence. His outlaw persona was part performance, part myth. It resonated not because listeners needed him to have lived behind bars, but because the music gave voice to something they felt in themselves. The “authenticity” came from the performance, not the biography.
And then there was John Wayne. For generations, he stood as the on-screen embodiment of the American soldier. The fearless warrior in World War II epics. The Duke’s swagger, his gravelly authority, became synonymous with national heroism. Yet John Wayne never fought in combat. His war stories were celluloid, not battlefield memoirs. Did it matter to the audiences who filled theaters in the 1940s and 50s? Not at all. They weren’t paying for his life story. They were paying for the performance that reflected the image they wanted of themselves and their country.
We could make a long list of similar cases. Elvis Presley borrowed liberally from Black musical traditions to build his career, and few listeners paused to ask about authenticity when they danced to “Hound Dog.” Today, most pop stars don’t write their own songs. Teams of producers and lyricists churn out the hits. Studio engineers shape the sound. Layered effects polish every note until the human hand is almost invisible. Yet people still cry to a ballad or pump their fists to an anthem without caring whether the person on stage was the actual author. The performance, not the biography, is what lands.
So why do we give human fakery a pass but draw the line at machine fakery? I think it comes down to performance. Human artists, even when they’re working with a persona or singing someone else’s words, still show us their charisma and their stage presence. We forgive the inauthenticity because they sell the performance. With AI, there’s no person to project onto and no backstory to make the art feel lived-in. And so we feel robbed even if the music itself moves us. The anxiety isn’t really about the song. It’s about human exceptionalism. We want to believe that only we can give art meaning.
But if the point of art is to resonate, to stir something in the listener, then biography has never been the true test. Nobody listens to “Folsom Prison Blues” because they believe Johnny Cash once served time in San Quentin. Nobody tears up at a pop ballad because they verified the singer wrote the lyrics alone at a kitchen table. They respond because the performance speaks to them, because something in the sound mirrors their own emotions. If AI music can do that, if it can make you hum along or feel less alone, then what exactly is missing? The “soul” that critics talk about is invisible on the audio track. It only lives in the stories we tell ourselves about who made the music and why.
And the uncomfortable truth is that much of what we call “authenticity” in art has always been manufactured. We’ve never demanded absolute truth from our cultural icons, only that they deliver the feeling we want at the moment we need it. AI doesn’t break that pattern. It just removes the human mask and we’re unsettled by what’s left. It exposes the fact that “soul” might not be in the making at all, but in the receiving. The echo is in us.
The fight over AI art isn’t really about quality, or even about jobs. It’s about identity. If a machine can write a song that resonates as deeply as one written by a person, then we’re forced to admit that the magic isn’t in the suffering of the artist but in the resonance of the sound. That realization feels like a loss of something sacred. But maybe it’s just honesty. Maybe “soul” is not what the artist puts in, but what we hear when the music hits us in the right place.
Disclaimer: Jim Powers writes Opinion Columns. The views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Polk County Publishing Company or its affiliates. In the interest of transparency, I am politically Left Libertarian.
