I hope more platforms ban this useless spam.
Bandcamp bans purely AI-generated music from its platform
Submitted 3 weeks ago by kinther@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/bandcamp-bans-purely-ai-generated-music-from-its-platform/
Comments
Ilixtze@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Keep it up bandcamp. We are all waiting for when you enshittify like everyone else but you’ve held it at bay so far.
Nils@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
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.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Just watch, we’re two weeks away from some tech bro trying to start a Clankercamp website.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
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.
Hackworth@piefed.ca 3 weeks ago
Suno.com is basically this. It even allows users to comment on the songs.
Rothe@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
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.
Nils@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
They do already, and most of the comments on the noise are “please share promp”.
heyWhatsay@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Oh, I need to get back into Bandcamp
YetAnotherNerd@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
The next Bandcamp Friday is Feb 6 (Bandcamp foregoes their cut).
MortUS@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Bandcamp consistently throws Ws
SpiceDealer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Surprising considers that it’s parent company Epic (yes, of
FortniteUnreal Tournament and GoW fame) has a pro-AI stance.greencoil@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 3 weeks ago
Your info is a bit out of date.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.
mrmaplebar@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
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.
Zarajevo@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Great decision Bandcamp, I use Bandcamp to support musicians
AntEater@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
YES! YES!! YES!!! I hate having to sift through that tripe when exploring certain genres.
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Bandcamp is where you want to be if you want to support artists. they get money when you buy things from them on there
utopiah@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Neat, my current setup is :
- stream from FIP.fr via cvlc - when I absolutely love a tune, buy on Bandcamp - if it’s not available or I bought it elsewhere, e.g. old CD, then get from Soulseek - scp my ~/Music directory on my mobile phone
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.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
First I’ve heard of FIP, I’ll have to give it a go
udon@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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
Techlos@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
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.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
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.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
They fucked the union, though.
The massive layoff that gutted Oakland-based music service Bandcamp hit one group at the company particularly hard: leaders of its nascent union.
As of Monday, Bandcamp has been sold by video game juggernaut Epic Games to Songtradr, a music licensing firm. The acquisition closed with just half of Bandcamp’s employees offered jobs at the Santa Monica-based company.
The job cuts, which SFGATE reported Monday amounted to about 60 of 118 employees, disproportionately hit union leaders, Bandcamp United told SFGATE in a Tuesday press release. Every member of the union’s eight-person bargaining team was laid off, it said, and in sum, 40 of the bargaining unit’s 67 people lost their jobs.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Were sold by epicc to some other company.
Still doing their regular job and not went to shit.- A user
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 3 weeks ago
I don’t bought a lot of music, but all the independent musicians I follow have a bandcamp store. They also sell merch there.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
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.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
If anyone needs to bypass this ban, for $3 I will record 1 minute of yodelling so your content isn’t pure AI.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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)
kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com 3 weeks ago
how do i pay you
Digit@lemmy.wtf 3 weeks ago
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.
AstralPath@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
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.
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Suavevillain@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Victoriathecompact@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
It was being OVERRUN with AI stuff, hopefully this cleans it up
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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) make a living when they are not what (most) people have issue with.
Doctorbllk@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
[deleted]ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Not quite sure what you’re trying to say. The article literally says:
Bandcamp’s policy targets the latter end of that spectrum while leaving room for human artists who incorporate AI tools into a larger creative process. 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.
nil@piefed.ca 3 weeks ago
That’s nice. But I wonder how they detect them.
CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Tja@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
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.
UltraBlack@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Benn Jordan made an AI model to detect generated music but I thought he wanted to build his own platform…?
Tja@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Using AI to detect AI? Someone’s head is going to explode.
bluesheep@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Exactly my thoughts. Tho I think that purely AI generated music would be somewhat easy to detect? As in, apart from original chord progressions with AI lyrics or vice versa
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
As they should.
On the other hand, if AI music was any good why would I go to bandcamp for it?
woelkchen@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
So 99% AI is OK if the last 1% was made by non-AI, a real dog bark or so.
AnExerciseInFalling@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
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
9point6@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Helps if you read past the headline
frog_brawler@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m generally supportive of removing AI from artistic endeavors, but also wildly unfamiliar with bandcamp. I’m looking at it for the first time right now. Does it work like Deezer / Tidal or one of the streaming services where I can listen to things from my phone, or is it more of a website that you use to discover unsigned / smaller acts by clicking through a bunch of things and listening?
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
An important feature is that you can basically download (and thus, own) the music you pay for.
GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Bit of both. More on the indi/hobby side of things though.
AstralPath@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Major labels have a presence on there too though.
detren@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
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.
lenz@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I literally thought you meant Bandcamp gets to keep all the revenue on Bandcamp Fridays lmao
procapra@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
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 bands through it.
null@piefed.nullspace.lol 3 weeks ago
Good luck to them.
pirating@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
How would you even screen for AI music?
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
With AI, duh
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Fuck yeah.
J92@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Ya love ta see it!
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
You already can’t tell if a song is generated with AI.This is never going to work, watch them backpedaling in a year.
Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
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.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
But there are clues.
Clues are not evidence.
Like 30 EPs released in a year.
They should limit the number of EP you can release in a year then.
evol@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
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.
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
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.
evol@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
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.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
FUCK YEAH!
SacredHeartAttack@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m glad they did this. Confident in my choice to remain with Bandcamp.
mr_noxx@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Totally agree. I just wish I had more money to spend with Bandcamp. :D
exu@feditown.com 3 weeks ago
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.