The mysterious case of Ella Rey – An AI darkwave artist
Ella Rey has attracted thousands of darkwave listeners without revealing a singer, producer, band line-up or physical location. The project openly acknowledges using artificial intelligence, but the human operation behind it remains hidden.
Ella Rey
A darkwave artist named Ella Rey has rapidly built an audience through the use of melancholic vocals, cold synthesizers, post-punk guitars and a carefully constructed gothic imagery. Her songs circulate on Spotify, YouTube, Shazam and social media. Yet almost nothing is publicly known about the person – or people – creating them.
There are no interviews explaining Ella Rey’s background. No musicians are named. No producer discusses the recordings. No hometown, studio, label team or live history connects the digital identity to a conventional artist.
But there is, however, one clear disclosure: Ella Rey uses artificial intelligence to create music and actually the whole project is as far as I am concerned AI from A to Z (albeit with human intervention in the direction of the songs and structure).
Descriptions published on Ella Rey’s official YouTube channel state that AI forms part of the music-creation process. According to the disclaimer, AI tools support “generation and experimentation,” while a human directs, selects and refines the final results. The same wording accompanies numerous songs, including “Within,” “This Is How It Ends,” “Cold Blood Heart,” “Children of Night” and “The End of Always.”
That disclosure clearly confirms that Ella Rey is an AI-assisted project. It does not reveal how much of each song comes from generative tools though and as far as we can gather it’s a lot, most probably 100% generation with some – clever – human intervention.
The visual identity of Ella Rey is that of dark haired, attractive and emotionally distant female character, not that one of the usual performer. But also here it’s 100% AI (and those who experiment with AI images instantly will recognise the characteristics). At least one Instagram promotion for “Cold Blood Heart” explicitly labelled its imagery with the hashtag “#aiphoto.”
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A virtual artist but with a real audience
If you thought that Ella Rey is just an obscure experiment buried on an anonymous channel, then think again. By July 2026, the project had reached roughly 110,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Its most visible releases included “Cold Blood Heart,” “The Remnant,” “Within,” “Angels in Flames” and “Dancing with the Void.”
The numbers show how quickly an unknown virtual artist can enter an established music scene. Unlike what you would expect for these kind of plays, and followers, Ella Rey does not need a touring history, record-store presence or a recognisable group of musicians to compete for attention. The project has a consistent identity, frequent releases (although some are clearly rushed to hard as the AI use is obvious and even annoying) and material that fits existing listener habits.
Whereas the project openly admits that AI contributes to the music, the official disclaimer also claims that a human directs, selects and refines the results. Logical. A track like “Within” for instance is an excellent track, turn it the way you want it. And the 145k views are surely not all payola. I played it to a few colleagues who had never heard of the track and all agreed this was strong material. The other tracks are not all as strong and seem to be based too much on a structure used on “Within”.
Musically Ella Rey sounds like Hante. and The Birthday Massacre filtered through Blutengel’s gothic melodrama, with occasional traces of Twin Tribes and Within Temptation. On “Within” we even discovered a vocal part that could well have been Erika Dunham of Unter Null.
The volume of releases raises immediate questions
Ella Rey’s catalogue grew at a pace that would demand intense work from a conventional band. During 2026, 35 (!!) new tracks appeared that mix darkwave, post-punk, synthpop, industrial metal, cinematic rock, gothic rock and symphonic metal.
Genre movement in itself is not proof of automation of course, but 35 tracks clearly is a big tell-tale sign that something is off to start with compared to a normal music production flow. On the Ella Rey YouTube Channel (20.4k subscribers!!) you will find even more content, 62 videos.
Note that the YouTube Channel also holds blogposts where the Ella Rey persona is posting updates like the below one (one one which real people actually respond as well):
What’s next for Ella Rey?
An artist such as Ella Rey can remain on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music, provided the distributor accepts the material, the operator controls the required rights and the project does not impersonate another artist or manipulate streams.
The same catalogue would face larger obstacles elsewhere:
- Bandcamp: high probable rejection if the music is substantially AI-generated.
- CD Baby: due to their AI ban the platform cannot be used as the distributor.
- Deezer: likely AI labelling and exclusion from recommendations.
- TuneCore: the operator would need to establish that the generator used licensed training material.
- LANDR: restricted release volume and reduced store coverage.
- SoundCloud distribution: generators such as Suno would not qualify.
The industry’s emerging position is not really banning AI music as such though, but it wants creators to disclose AI use, and make sure they control the rights, where others cannot clone real artists, or flood the catalogues. The same goes for manipulating streams, although a lot of bands and labels are guilty as hell here as well. The egos you know…
Clear is that fully AI-generated virtual artists remain permitted on several major services, but they increasingly receive labels (with a lot of false alarms as well as we noticed in the past few months), reduced discovery, distributor restrictions and closer fraud monitoring.
AI is a revenue model for Spotify
Approximately 44% of all newly uploaded music (!!) on streaming platforms is AI-generated, but Spotify has recently removed over 75 million “spammy” AI tracks to combat royalty fraud. Officially, Spotify commissions zero AI tracks, though investigations have revealed an internal “Perfect Fit Content“ program that relies heavily on thousands of tracks from “fake artists”.
Spotify partners with specific production companies or session musicians to create thousands of low-cost, functional background tracks (e.g., lo-fi, chill piano, ambient noise) under hundreds of fake pseudonyms.
Spotify then aggressively pushes these “artists” into its most popular owned-and-operated mood playlists (like Deep Focus or Chill Lofi Study Beats). Because these tracks are accepted under a much lower royalty rate, Spotify keeps a larger share of the subscription pool.
While these “ghost tracks” traditionally relied on human session musicians writing thousands of songs under fake names, the industry consensus is that these production houses are rapidly shifting to AI generation tools to lower costs even further.
Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
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