Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Let us take a good, hard look at where the music industry stands today. If you wander onto digital platforms like YouTube or Spotify, you are no longer just listening to the sweat, tears, and late-night songwriting sessions of human artists. Instead, you are increasingly sliding down a slippery, algorithmically greased slope of generative artificial intelligence. Tools like Suno and Udio have opened the floodgates, allowing anyone with a prompt box to churn out commercial-grade audio tracks in seconds. While some hail this as a democratizing technological revolution, we at Dreamchaser Music see it for what it truly is: a lazy, uninspired, and deeply unlawful threat to the soul of creativity.
As an independent label, we have built our entire identity on the sweat of real talent. Our roster, comprising Woozle and Pip, Magic Garden Works, Amsterdam Mini Pops, tsuraii, Chastity and Elienne, and A Cup of Hot Milk, spans delightful English-language and bilingual children's and pop genres. We work hard. We write our own lyrics, arrange our own harmonies, draw our own visual art, and pour genuine emotion into every single track we release.
That is why we are drawing a definitive line in the sand against the tidal wave of AI. We firmly believe that the proliferation of generative AI in commercial music is not only legally questionable, but it can and will hurt about seventy-five percent of the music industry, brutally squeezing out indie artists who actually know how to play an instrument or pen a meaningful verse. And standing right at the epicenter of this synthetic plague, basking in unearned algorithmic glory, is an entity known as Vaelissed.
Who, or what, exactly is Vaelissed? If you check their YouTube account, their location is pinned to Serbia, and they market themselves as "a fresh voice in New Italo Disco and electronic music." What the heck is "New Italo Disco," you might ask? Honestly, we are still asking ourselves that very question. Is it a nostalgic nod to the nineteen eighties synth-pop subgenre, or is it just a fancy buzzword generated by an LLM to dress up algorithmic slop?
Every single element of Vaelissed's output, both the music and the accompanying visuals, is entirely generated by AI. In fact, YouTube's automated systems are doing God's work here, routinely slapping official "AI-generated content" labels onto their videos. Yet, despite this transparent lack of human touch, Vaelissed enjoys a strange, baffling popularity within the digital AI music scene.
What leaves us scratching our heads even more is the viewer engagement. Scroll through a Vaelissed video, and you will find an ocean of glassy-eyed praise from commenters, with tiny amounts of dislikes almost completely nowhere to be seen. It's as if a digital cult has formed around a lifeless producer with zero actual proficiency in music production or songwriting.
When you look at the numbers, the disparity is enough to make any genuine artist weep. Vaelissed currently commands thirty-six thousand three hundred sixty-one monthly listeners on Spotify. Meanwhile, all of Dreamchaser's diverse artists combined hold a modest twenty-five thousand four hundred ten monthly listeners. On YouTube, Vaelissed's uploads routinely pull in two hundred fifty thousand to five hundred thousand views in just two to three weeks, sometimes even crossing the coveted one-million-view mark. Their crown jewel, a track titled "Circling Hearts," sits comfortably at seventy-seven thousand streams on Spotify and a staggering three million views on YouTube.
In stark contrast, every time one of our flesh-and-blood Dreamchaser artists drops a new music video, the view counts are painfully, unjustly lower. It turns out that when an algorithm feeds an audience twenty-four seven junk food, people will eat it up without ever wondering if there is a real chef in the kitchen.
We couldn't sit quietly forever while this synthetic imposter dominated the airwaves. Four weeks prior to drafting this essay, one of us left a pointed comment directly on the music video for "Circling Hearts." We called Vaelissed out for their unlawful, uninspired usage of AI for both audio and visual assets. We didn't mince words, either: we declared that Vaelissed should stop making "Suno-slop" alongside their digital partner-in-crime, RheeCJ, forever. We even threw in a cheeky jab suggesting they tell an intern or music director at Dreamchaser to "LARP" them instead, just to show how easily a human could replicate their hollow formula.
Words, however, are only the first step. To truly take a stand, we had to fight fire with well, human fire. On July thirteenth, we dropped a collaborative official protest track and diss-track aimed squarely at Vaelissed and the broader plague of AI in music. Titled "Anti-Artificialist Song," this cross-roster anthem brought together the vocal talents of Ben Leible and Sandra Nadeau (voicing Woozle and Pip), alongside the Amsterdam Mini Pops and tsuraii (whose real name, for the record, is Cary Yong-Gi). We didn't use a single prompt generator to make it. We didn't let a machine write our feelings. We crafted it with real instruments, real vocal cords, and real artistic integrity. Upon its release, we proudly pinned the music video as the featured centerpiece on Dreamchaser Music's official YouTube channel homepage to spread awareness far and wide.
The contrast between Dreamchaser and Vaelissed extends far beyond the audio tracks; it trickles down into how both operations present themselves commercially.
If you venture over to Vaelissed's Fourthwall shop, you will find a bizarre digital storefront. They sell CDs of compilation albums featuring tracks like "Circling Hearts." But take a close look at the official product images: they are nothing more than lazy, AI-generated mockups. There is no actual photography of physical products, no tangible proof that these items even exist in the real world outside of a digital render. Alongside the phantom CDs, you'll find generic-looking apparel, T-shirts, dad hats, and even a bucket hat, where the design is literally just the word "Vaelissed" slapped onto fabric in a default font.
Honestly, it strongly implies that some shadowy shell company is running the e-commerce backend. Realistically, we have to wonder if anyone will ever actually buy any of Vaelissed's products unless their listeners are willing to roleplay as gullible buyers.
Compare that to Dreamchaser Media's main store, the proudly dubbed "Petaldream Market." We don't just sell physical pressings of our music library; we offer high-quality, lovingly crafted merchandise tied to our actual intellectual properties. This includes physical goods for our well-acclaimed Woozle and Pip property, which is currently enjoying a triumphant third season of our English-ified cartoon revival, as well as our exclusive Petaldream subbrand, featuring apparel and concert-ready goods designed for real fans attending real events.
At the end of the day, we are left looking at a weird cultural crossroads. AI music is undeniably controversial, and the core philosophy of Dreamchaser Media and Music is simple: we do not purely use AI and machine learning tools to produce our audio and visual content. We use our brains, our instruments, and our lived human experiences.
In fact, we have some mischievous plans brewing. We might just "LARP and become them" for Vaelissed one of these days, stepping into the digital simulation just to show how hollow the whole machine truly is. But until then, the lore surrounding the bitter independent conflict between Dreamchaser Music and the phantom menace of Vaelissed is far from over.
As we look toward the horizon of late twenty twenty-six and beyond, one thing remains crystal clear: machines can generate audio frequencies, but they can never generate a soul. And as long as Dreamchaser has breath in our lungs and instruments in our hands, we will keep fighting for the real artists of this world.