Bandcamp bans purely AI-generated music from its platform
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/bandcamp-bans-purely-ai-generated-music-from-its-platform/Open linkView original on lemmy.world1584
Comments130https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/bandcamp-bans-purely-ai-generated-music-from-its-platform/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
I'm glad they did this. Confident in my choice to remain with Bandcamp.
What's a good way to discover artists on Bandcamp? Most artists I listen to at the moment are with the usual big labels and don't sell on Bandcamp.
This is the best answer! Thank you for sharing your methods. I was going to reply about the daily editorial, but yours is more complete.
I would also like to add that I type the name of things I like and often find them on bandcamp. Including big artists.
Peter Gabriel, Evanescence, Run the Jewels, Flight of Conchords, Ghost...
What I don't find there, I get from a thrift store (easy to find famous artists there) or quobuz.
The real rare gems are still hard to find, and require more ambitious exploring.
Most of the best, I get from suggestions from other people in irc or on the fediverse.
I'll often find something interesting and look through the collections of other people who also have the album. Another way is to just start in the genre sections and browse.
Here are a few varied suggestions, no specific genre since I don't know your tastes:
https://boyharsher.bandcamp.com/album/country-girl-uncut https://idlesband.bandcamp.com/album/tangk https://williethrasher.bandcamp.com/album/spirit-child
Thanks, I didn't know about music map. I have used Everynoise, which is similar, but doesn't get updates anymore since Spotify closed that particular API access.
Try searching by tags within genres that you like.
That doesn't really work in my experience because artists seem to be incapable of tagging their work correctly.
N-th the suggestion to creep on people who buy the same stuff as you. There's a lil grid of their pfps, I click on a cool one and check out the stuff they listen to that I haven't
This, I think, is the best way. You start to recognise people that are buying all the same stuff you like so follow them and periodically have a look at what they are buying.
All other avenues on bandcamp are a bit shit IMO. Tags are dog shit because artists never tag their work correctly and my feed will constantly be old shit I listened to a long time ago. You can't even rely on it to let you know when artists you follow release new work.
I love bandcamp but I also fucking hate bandcamp xD
Not answering your question exactly, but finding community (non-commercial) radio shows in your local area that you like is a good way to find new music. Find a few shows/presenters that play music/genres you like and they should play local artists that you might not have heard. They'll also mention upcoming gigs etc.
I love option c. I've been going to the music shop and buying stickers, then looking up the bands whose stickers i've bought and going to their shows. most of the bands are, uh, well the bands i was in at that age sucked and they're a little better than we were. but like $5 concerts, you can't be mad even if the music sucks
That's definitely one of the more unique methods of finding new music haha
maybe someone [who is not me because i am done being a mod] could make a "hey i found this neat song/album/artist/genre/existence on bandcamp" community because i would for sure sign up and comment and share songs
I'm a fan of the new and notable feed on the main page myself. KEXP is also a great source of new acts which are typically not on major labels.
Keep it up bandcamp. We are all waiting for when you enshittify like everyone else but you've held it at bay so far.
They gave us a scare over the years, being sold around to companies that are famous for enshittifying platforms.
Epic sold the company when people unionized, and the next did a trick to not recognized the union and "hire" half of the staff (contrary to fire half of them).
The platform is not what has been 5 years ago, but it is still my favourite place to get music around.
I hope more platforms ban this useless spam.
Just watch, we’re two weeks away from some tech bro trying to start a Clankercamp website. The best part is that no one except other tech bros will care.
They do already, and most of the comments on the noise are "please share promp".
https://suno.com/song/56199a21-16e1-4906-b3db-5d847cf81a18
I really hope they do. I hope the build their own websites to host all of there slop and self-segregate. Please do it. It would be so easy to add a couple of slop domains to my pihole.
Suno.com is basically this. It even allows users to comment on the songs.
Unfortunately they would never stick to segregated websites like that. AI pushers needs to expose it to everyone and slop it on general platforms, otherwise they will lose out on that sweet investment money.
Oh, I need to get back into Bandcamp
The next Bandcamp Friday is Feb 6 (Bandcamp foregoes their cut).
Bandcamp consistently throws Ws
Surprising considers that it's parent company Epic (yes, of
FortniteUnreal Tournament and GoW fame) has a pro-AI stance.Your info is a bit out of date. Epic already sold off Bandcamp back in 2023 during layoffs. Its owned by Songtradr now, who I personally know nothing about.
Short Wikipedia, so far so good for a company.
Good.
And sure... People will obviously try to break this rule, and I'm sure some will succeed. But that's true of any rule. Rules don't prevent bad behavior, only deter it.
Great decision Bandcamp, I use Bandcamp to support musicians
Bandcamp is where you want to be if you want to support artists. they get money when you buy things from them on there
YES! YES!! YES!!! I hate having to sift through that tripe when exploring certain genres.
Are Bandcamp still the good guys? I thought they were bought by the big capital and now went down the drain. Artists' opinions especially welcome
on average, i'm earning 3x as much from bandcamp FLAC sales compared to what i earn off streaming. Hasn't been ruined so far.
People expected them to get fucked after the acquisition, though the new owners are just going "you keep doing what you're doing, not gonna change a thing, just give us a cut of your profits"
Touch wood, it's gonna stay that way.
They fucked the union, though.
Shit, that I didn't know about 😭
Were sold by epicc to some other company.
Still doing their regular job and not went to shit.
I don't bought a lot of music, but all the independent musicians I follow have a bandcamp store. They also sell merch there.
I haven't noticed any change since they've been bought up. The new owners did bust up an attempt at unionizing, though, so there's that.
Neat, my current setup is :
I tried LMS for few weeks but honestly just plain VLC is enough for me.
Anyway, point is, this decision makes me want to buy from Bandcamp even more.
First I've heard of FIP, I'll have to give it a go
I was buying some LPs recently and saw one that caught my attention. I looked them up and almost all their content included some form of AI.
it's bullshit.
fuck AI.
If anyone needs to bypass this ban, for $3 I will record 1 minute of yodelling so your content isn’t pure AI.
uh, i may want to collaborate. can i offer $20 for a 3-5 minute blues yodel (song pending, probably about a shower running out of hot water or a wife being too proud to borrow deodorant, album title A Complaint Letter to the Sea)
how do i pay you
good decision, also good decision to not ban all music with ai in it. like, we got so many pedals nowadays. live pitch correction? like wtf. how is that not ai. as long as there is some human pouring their blood, sweat, tears and soul into the music, that is what i want to hear.
Bandcamp W. One of the platforms I buy music from and surf other than soundcloud. You can find some banger albums by genre on there.
It was being OVERRUN with AI stuff, hopefully this cleans it up
Good on them on recognizing that slop is undesirable and shouldn't be encouraged, but that a full ban also kills the nuance of creative freedom and creates painful situations where a single AI tool anywhere in the process (even indirectly) gets hard work rejected, which could hamper aspiring creatives in their ability to (start to) get their work out there and (start to) make a living when they are not what (most) people have issue with.
Not quite sure what you're trying to say. The article literally says:
Which is what I'm applauding and affirming, so I'm not sure what you're saying I'm saying is opposite to what the article says.
I incorrectly interpreted your comment originally, I apologize for the hostility.
Ah, no worries, none taken. Have a good one.
I hope all my fave autistic musicians are not mistaken for AI and deleted under a false-positive detection of being AI. At least my fave's album releases all pre-date AI music generators. Safe, for now.
I think safer would be to encourage all purely AI-generated be tagged as such, so it can be optionally toggled out of view, and then there's less incentive for the unscrupulous to simply hide that it's AI generated. Banning increases the "hide that it's AI" vibes, not the "don't do AI" vibes. Prohibition does not prevent. Prohibition makes the good things bad and the bad things worse.
Prohibition of AI does indeed prevent Bandcamp's servers from being overwhelmed by the storage needs of slop "artists" and the gruel they call their "music".
I've been re-reading LOTR lately and I like to put on Middle-Earth ambience in the background. Do you have any idea how much LOTR themed ambient slop is on YouTube? There are channels with over 100 videos, each exactly a 3-hour slopfest of sounds with HD/4k resolution slop art playing on screen.
Considering the vast majority of real artists might put out 5 hours of music in their entire careers, why the hell would bandcamp want to host hundreds of hours of fake music from a single source and pay for all that storage?
AI is a plague upon humanity. Bandcamp is on the right side of history and I'm happy to have my music on their platform.
I doubt they would just blanket scan all music and ban that which they think is AI (aside from how that's practically impossible). That's the kind of thing a lazy big tech company would do. I wouldn't be surprised if this will just end up being on a report basis, at the very least with human verification once steps like banning would be taken. Because otherwise it would be pretty disastrous for the reasons you mentioned, since it would ban legitimate artists. Not to mention the bar of "substantially AI" would need to be judged by someone.
That's nice. But I wonder how they detect them.
There are usually some tells. For AI generated music (AIGM for short) the cover “art” is also AI generated. The vocals/style are different between tracks. Another method that I think was recently made obsolete was that if you opened the track in audacity it looked weird compared to regular music when you looked at the spectrograms because AIGM added some weird unnecessary noise to the music. AIGM “artists” usually don’t have any social media presence, they don’t really exist outside of the internet. No shows/interviews etc. Is it a lot of effort to find out whether something is AIGM? Maybe. Is it worth it? Yes, I don’t want to give money to people who desecrate the art or music.
So you're saying a milli vanilli would be basically impossible to detect.
Besides, who cares? Isn't the purpose to enjoy the music? Whether some uses a capella, instruments, electric instruments, autotune, vocaloid or AI... if you like the music, listen to the music. It's ultimately created by a human using tools.
not the same thing. AIGM is by definition not created by a human.
if i tell you to create a song about a recent breakup i got through, gave you some notes about rhythm and maybe what kind of feel i would like it to have, and then you went ahead and composed the whole song, played all the instruments, provided the vocals, did the mixing and editing and gave me the result, do you think it's fair to say i made the song?
Same as vocaloid. Or autotune. How far do we go?
Besides, again, who cares. If you like the music, enjoy it, if not, pass.
how is it like auto tune? auto tune corrects your singing, it doesn't sing for you.
also, humans care? that's kind of the entire point of art? we care where art comes from. find the best painter in the world, have them make mona lisa's exact copy, and see if it sells for even remotely similar price as Mona Lisa's estimated value which is probably around a billion dollars. anyone can "enjoy" an exact copy, no?
no. we care about art because art tells stories. human stories. computers don't have stories to tell. they can imitate, but the best it can ever be will be as valuable as an imitation: not much.
What does monetary worth have to do with anything? A photo of the Mona Lisa is an exact replica, you could even make it bigger to appreciate the details better. If what you like is the picture, you can have it. If what you want is speculation and tax write offs, then you need the scarcity.
oh ok, so you're a bot. there's no way a human being would think like that. someone programmed a bot to defend genAI.
a bigger photo. Jesus.
I care. Clearly so do the people in support of this decision on here as well as bandcamp themselves.
I hope you are familiar with survivorship bias.
I disagree on all counts.
It's not exploitative, it doesn't exploit anyone.
It's not trash, and if it were you wouldn't need to regulate it because people would reject it on the merits.
The space belongs to whoever wants to create art, with whatever tools they want to do it. Gatekeeping and true Scotsman arguments are really grasping.
I don't know what "social value" is created. A nurse or a fireman create social value. You won't see them worrying about AI. If AI could put out fires they would definitely be interested.
It had to be trained on music created by human artists. Those artists were not compensated.
I would reject if I knew it was AI. I can't always tell, though.
The owners of Bandcamp get to set the rules, because they own it.
You can't always tell, I can't always tell, bandcamp can't always tell. And it's only going to get harder.
I think you might misunderstood what Bandcamp is aiming for here. They're explicitly trying to still allow it when humans are using it (responsibly) as tools. This is essentially a ban on AI where no human is involved (or not involved enough), where the music produced is focused on quantity over quality (slop). That's a fine and nuanced distinction for a music distribution platform in my opinion.
Ok, if this is just a spam prevention I think it's fine. Obviously I didn't read the article (as tradition mandates).
If AIGM was like VSTs or vocaloids that'd be one thing. But it's more like imitation of sounds, synthesizing song chunks instead of instruments and voices themselves.
The best way to think of it is something creating an audio file solely by using the Photoshop clone stamp tool across millions of source files.
That's not how transformer neural networks work...
Sure, but we're talking generative here, as is the article, and to pretend it's referring to a tool that's been standard in libraries and even VSTs for over a decade is either misunderstanding the article or being disingenuous on purpose.
No, I get it. It's generative. GPT: Generative Pretrained Transformer. Music generators add a diffusion layer, but it's fundamentally new music being generated, not copies of existing songs.
My point is that it's just another tool, that automates it even more. It's not the same, it's the next step.
A text prompt -> audio is not a transformer in the sense of what people are talking about, and you know it or just don't care, or don't wholly understand how these systems work under the hood as well.
What I'm referring to are neural models that take an input audio and are effectively a filter that operates as a neural network. Voice mods, instrument adapters, virtual pedals, amp models... These are all actually transformative. There is actual music and effort going into these. And that is not what Bandcamp is after; those were already in heavy use like 15 years ago.
The things that generate based on text are a transformer in the most technically correct sense but not in the sense of what is meant when people talk about transformative.
They're fundamentally different purposes and usages. It's not generated vocals from nothing but the lyrics; it's someone else actually singing it and then a model transforming the sound to match an intended pre-set trained target, not generalization.
You suck
Well, maybe.
Benn Jordan made an AI model to detect generated music but I thought he wanted to build his own platform...?
Using AI to detect AI? Someone's head is going to explode.
Exactly my thoughts. Tho I think that purely AI generated music would be somewhat easy to detect? As in compared to original chord progressions with AI lyrics or vice versa
An important feature is that you can basically download (and thus, own) the music you pay for (in many formats too).
Bit of both. More on the indi/hobby side of things though.
Major labels have a presence on there too though.
It’s more like old iTunes and the like. No subscription, just buy albums. Artists define the price, and keep the majority of their revenue with some Fridays being Bandcamp Fridays where they get to keep all the revenue. You can download everything you own or you can stream it from the website or app on your phone also.
Only real downside with Bandcamp is that you won’t find some artists there but it all depends on what you listen to and want to find.
I literally thought you meant Bandcamp gets to keep all the revenue on Bandcamp Fridays lmao
Oh shit lol. I should stop responding before having coffee!
Bandcamp is where you go to download/buy stuff for a band you already know and like. I rarely if ever have listened to music through the website itself, nor have I found new bands through it.
As they should.
On the other hand, if AI music was any good why would I go to bandcamp for it?
Fuck yeah.
How would you even screen for AI music?
With AI, duh
Ya love ta see it!
FUCK YEAH!
Good
Love the idea of bandcamp, but sucks that there are no artists there I am interested in. I just download M4A (MP4 audio) files off of YouTube lol
Yea I do find that often there is no bandcamp page, or it's 5 years old with no new albums. In those cases my next check is qobiz as they tend to have more large artists.
Good luck to them.
Is it the metal that makes it bad? Or music in general?
lol I can imagine decades ago people cheering for songs that use sampling to no longer being allowed on a site. We really never learn sigh.
That really was a thing. There was a backlash towards sampling for like a decade and nowadays, no one seems to even notice or care. Same with synthesizer based music…so many people argued that it was not music and not real and that it was going to ruin music.
It genuinely astonishes me how regressive people turn about AI in art, its like I'm talking to Bill O Reilly complaining about modern art.
I can imagine lots of things, but I don't confuse it with reality, because I'm an adult.
I think there’s a place for AI in music, just like sampling, and it has to be regulated, but not straight-up banned (or regulated in a muddy way like “substantially made by AI”).
It doesn’t help that everyone has their own personal opinion on how much AI should be allowed, though, and we’re never gonna reach a solution that everyone agrees on.
We will just like all these issues before, A new generation of artists will rise and see the use in them, while a new generation without the prejudices of the previous will consume. Everyone complained about how digital art "isn't art", literally the computer IS doing most of the work for you, computers are complex machines and something as simple as drawing pad goes through layers among layers among layers of abstractions made my the work hours of hundreds of engineers. But we agree the artist was the person using the drawing pad no? People complained about photography the same way. The world is flooded with horrible hip hop beats over copy pasted sample packs over 808 VSTs, we all agree now that this is all art, the people at the time did not.
People confuse the playing an instrument and illustration as art, when art is much more complex, vague, and interesting idea than that. All forms of human production carry some artistic value, we simply value things where the production process feels less alienated than others (Carpentry vs factory work)
And we agree on that, I think most people do. What they don’t agree on is what qualifies a “human production”. Or, to which degree does a human have to get involved in a production for that to be considered “human”.
I think there’s a gigantic difference between someone composing a song and writing its lyrics, then pasting it into an AI and having it sing it (basically Vocaloid), and a guy going onto Suno, writing “make me a pop song”, and taking the first output. And they shouldn’t be treated the same way.
I agree theirs a big difference, mostly from the fact they are using the tool bad (Just writing make me a pop song does not inspire) but to me this is the same as good hip-hop versus people who just rap random shit over premade hip-hop beats. It's "art" but its just no high quality (which makes sense why sense why would we want to limit it on a site).
One thing I wonder is if you make a recommendation system that generates new music purely based on what previous music you liked (That was also generated by AI) who is the artist? Think like spotify but the AI keeps creating new music based on what you like from it. In the end I feel you are the artist of that song then no? Your recommendations then created whatever final song you listened to. Just something I was thinking about
I still don’t think it’s the same, even the guy who rapped random shit over someone else’s beat put MUCH more effort and input into the “song” than the random prompt guy.
The line gets blurry when you talk about stuff like Duchamp’s readymades, which are considered “art” by a reasoning that you could easily apply to the prompt guy song too. Just goes to show how literally everyone has a different definition of “art”, and even a single person’s definition might be contradictory in itself.
Ehh… that’s just an indirect commission. For example, the Prince of Wales in 1876 was gifted by the Maharaja of Jaipur some british usage items crafted by the city’s artisans that were specifically made as a gift to him. But the “artist” in this situation is not the prince whose taste was tailored to, nor the Maharaja who commissioned them, it’s still the individual artisans.
In the case of the algorithm-made song, you basically “commissioned” to it a song made for your tastes, and it “gifted” it to you. But it’s still the algorithm who “made” it, not you. And personally, unless you take it and consciously edit/remix it in some way, I wouldn’t label it as “art”. But again, it’s a blurry subject and that’s just my opinion.
Would be cool if bandcamp had a streaming subscription.
Thats not their model, and that model also sucks ass for supporting other humans.
I am one of those weirdos who likes to own my media. There are few of us geezers left, but luckily enough that bandcamp exists.
Just because the Spotify model sucks doesn’t mean it has to.
I don’t see a reason why 85% of a monthly subscription couldn’t given directly to the artists you actually listen to, and any albums your purchase is on the platform (and you get to keep the drm-free files).
Honestly it kinda sounds like an awesome service.
Edit: I’m one of those geezers too, who prefers to own my music. I just think there’s room for both.
I agree. Probably not profitable to the company though. Gotta keep those server costs covered...
It'd be nice if people could make a living off art but capitalism is against that at every turn especially now. Art shouldn't even be related to money in some people's opinions .
The Spotify model sucks despite throwing money at it for years, so my guess is they surely can give you some reasons why 85% of your monthly subscription can't be given to the artists you listen to.
Publicly traded companies are always going to turn to shit, the "Spotify model" is just appeasing shareholders with infinite growth.
So it stop being profitable?
You already can't tell if a song is generated with AI.This is never going to work, watch them backpedaling in a year.
But there are clues. And those clues are part of the reason some people are opposed to it. Like 30 EPs released in a year.
I think there's a place for AI music. There are plenty of instances where you need some vaguely musical audio filler. Hold music, shopping background, etc. Well bandcamp ain't that place.
Clues are not evidence.
They should limit the number of EP you can release in a year then.
I'm sorry your AI music "career" isn't taking off like you thought it would.
You are listening to AI music already without knowing.
So 99% AI is OK if the last 1% was made by non-AI, a real dog bark or so.
The actual wording is "Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp."
So no, 99% AI is also not allowed
Helps if you read past the headline
Nothing can be good, amiright
It's a PR stunt if 99% AI is fine.
you should reread