Cardiff band speaks out after AI artist trained on their music outperforms them on Spotify

AI music is becoming more and more prevalent, with the likes of Deezer and Spotify both recently announcing measures to combat its rise on their platforms.

Spotify recently announced a crackdown on AI “slop” in a bid to protect the artists on its platform, while Deezer revealed nearly a third of all music uploaded to its platform daily is fully AI-generated.

The potential for fully AI-driven music projects to become successful is strong, as demonstrated by the Velvet Sundown, which, this year, amassed half a million monthly Spotify listeners before being revealed as an ‘artist’ with music generated by AI platform Suno.

With the availability of AI music generators, it was inevitable AI-generated music would find its way into people’s playlists. But what about when it starts outperforming the music of artists upon which it has been trained?

Lucas Woodland, frontman of Cardiff-based band Holding Absence, says this has now affected his band, saying an AI artist by the name of Bleeding Verse has been trained on its music, and has more monthly listeners, at the time of writing.

At present, Holding Absence have just over 851,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, while Bleeding Verse has over 904,000.

Woodland, in a new post on X, has shared his thoughts on Bleeding Verse: “So, an AI ‘band’ who cite us as an influence (ie, it’s modelled off our music) have just overtaken us on Spotify, in only two months.”

He continues: “It’s shocking, it’s disheartening, it’s insulting – most importantly – it’s a wake-up call,” and urges listeners to “oppose AI music, or bands like us stop existing”.

Per Bleeding Verse’s YouTube channel bio, the project is “inspired by artists like Dayseeker and Holding Absence”, and “blends ambient textures, soaring vocals and poetic lyricism to explore grief, identity and healing. Lyrics from the heart. AI-assisted instrumentation and vocals”.

Legislation has yet to meaningfully catch up with the training of AI on copyright-protected material, with many artists and industry professionals concerned about the music on which these models are trained, and whether the appropriate licences have been obtained.

Last year, the big three record labels, Universal, Sony and Warner, sued AI music generation platforms Suno and Udio over “unimaginable scales” of copyright infringement.

Sam is the Associate News Editor for Guitar.com and MusicTech. Thoroughly immersed in music culture for the majority of his life, Sam has played guitar for 20 years, studied music technology and production at university, and also written for the likes of MusicRadar, Guitar World, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer.