Bandcamp has banned all music made with AI

[highplainsdem]

Source: NME

Bandcamp has officially banned AI music from its platform.

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It went on to say the fact it is “home to such a vibrant community of real people making incredible music is something we want to protect and maintain”.

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It also said that any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is “strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.”

Bandcamp added: “If you encounter music or audio that appears to be made entirely or with heavy reliance on generative AI, please use our reporting tools to flag the content for review by our team. We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI generated.”

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Read more: https://www.nme.com/news/music/bandcamp-has-banned-all-music-made-with-ai-3923071

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Good for them!!!!!!!

From their blog: https://blog.bandcamp.com/

Bandcamp’s mission is to help spread the healing power of music by building a community where artists thrive through the direct support of their fans. We believe that the human connection found through music is a vital part of our society and culture, and that music is much more than a product to be consumed. It’s the result of a human cultural dialog stretching back before the written word.

Similarly, musicians are more than mere producers of sound. They are vital members of our communities, our culture, and our social fabric. Bandcamp was built to directly connect artists and their fans, and to make it easy for fans to support artists equitably so that they can keep making music.


Today we are fortifying our mission by articulating our policy on generative AI, so that musicians can keep making music, and so that fans have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.

-snip-

[SheltieLover]

1. Good for them!!!!!

[Bluetus]

2. I wish them well. It is fraught.

Last edited Wed Jan 14, 2026, 11:51 PM - Edit history (1)

Where do you draw the line? AI tech has been used at all levels of the music production industry for a long time. It is a fairly recent development that an entire song that approaches commercial quality can be produced entirely from ai. Certainly it would be nice to ban all of that.

But I just don't see how you can draw the line effectively. For example, a few weeks ago, just for fun, I generated a song entirely from AI. It was not half bad. And I am planning to rearrange that music for a live band to perform in a show later this spring. I will introduce it and tell the backstory about how it originated in AI. I think it's important for the audience to understand what is and what is not possible.

Would Bandcamp ban that particular selection? I don't think they should. It certainly involves a great deal of human artistry. But how do you draw the line between enough human input and too much AI?

[highplainsdem]

3. Because those tools are trained illegally on stolen intellectual property, any use of them is unethical

and a betrayal of real musicians.

Your plan to rearrange music generated by AI for a live band to perform later is in effect promotion of AI, and very harmful. Please reconsider it. AI gets enough undeserved hype from greedy corporations and tech robber barons. No real musician should add to that.

Editing to add that no use of those tools is "just for fun.". See the Bluesky replies to a teacher's union president who thought some AI slop was " fun" :
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220895856

[highplainsdem]

4. And btw, what you wrote about AI being used at all levels of the music industry "for a long time" is wrong and

Last edited Wed Jan 14, 2026, 07:46 PM - Edit history (1)

very misleading.

Generative AI, the type you used unfortunately to generate a song you want others to hear, has been around only a couple of years, with the two most popular AI music generators becoming available in the spring of 2024. Since then the people using them, none of whom should have been using them, have flooded music platforms with AI slop. Deezer alone has been getting more than 50,000 AI-generated tracks PER DAY.

YouTube is flooded with that crap, too.

Seriously, if you are a musician - as your mentioning rearrarranging an AI tune for real musicians suggests you might be - please steer clear of generative AI, for your sake and others'. There is a very strong backlash against the exploitation and fraud that is generative AI. I can't imagine real musicians wanting to play something written by genAI, or real music lovers wanting to hear it. If you try springing something AI generated on real musicians and music lovers, don't be surprised if they walk out or let you know in no uncertain terms what they think of genAI.

[Bluetus]

10. By "long time" I mean 5+ years

That wasn't generative AI, but it was AI processes that could have a big impact on the quality of output. None of it is as good as real experts, but some of it is a lot better than what the average professional can do.

And truly, the generative stuff can only mimic what it is trained on. Frankly, I have very little use for music that is so formulaic as to be easily aped, but that is 90% of what is out there. I have trouble working up too much sympathy for people who spend their days trying to copy the latest sound, then get unhappy when a computer can steal somebody else's sound better than they can.

Of course, this is a race to the bottom. Even the best, most creative and innovative music will eventually be subsumed. Hopefully the humanoid robot makers will perfect their machines, so there will be somebody to go to the clubs listening to all this regurgitative AI music.

[highplainsdem]

11. I don't believe that AI music taking over is inevitable - that's propaganda from the AI companies. And

I have 100% more sympathy for real artists making real music, even if they're hoping it will help them to try what worked for someone else, than I have for anyone using a plagiarism machine to generate something that exists only because of stolen intellectual property. AI users really have little control over what is generated, and the AI can offer endless alternatives from the same prompt. It isn't creativity and artistry. It's more like online shopping using various keywords and options, with the AI user claiming the option they finally chose was something they created.

It's anti-human. Anti-art.

[Bluetus]

15. Just to be clear, my use of the AI material

is to show the audience what AI does and how they can recognize fake art. I have no intention of using AI on a regular basis. I don't need to. But I think this particular exercise will be entertaining. It came up with some clever lyrics intermixed with gibberish. The music track was sort of a Tower of Power thing with a Calypso influence. Ut followed a common formula (intro, verse, re-chorus, chorus, re-entry, break chorus, etc.) So it sounds like 1000 other empty vessels you can hear every hour of the day. But there were a few interesting harmonic twists that put this AI ahead of 90% of the pop "artists" out there.

In this instance, it is a jazz big band playing in a popular jazz club to an audience that is hop to Hancock, Coltrane, Blakey, Shorter, Hubbard and all the other creative geniuses. I think they will get a kick out of this moment of monkey-see-monkey-do music.

Training a computer to do what Max Martin has been doing for decades is just not something that gets me too worked up.

[highplainsdem]

16. You're still likely to end up encouraging some of those people to use AI.

[jfz9580m]

7. What highplainsdem said

I don’t know about music…I listen to it, but my favorite background is unperturbed wildlife sound with as little anthropogenic nuisance noise (including music) as possible.

Where I live in India, my family has been filing complaints against local temples and other places that blare music for 50 years now.
We don’t like invasive noise pollution. And fight loudspeakers on our street all the time.

So any Ai voice assistants or other such rot illegally and without permission left on as inevitable will now as inevitably result in a backlash.

I was not the best person to induce into these parasitic tech things pushed on people as inevitable. 5% of people actively like that shit and those are people I avoid. Another large percent reacts with : 😳.
I am in the group that will take it to court and make it criminally liable if possible - theft of space, time..New legal precedents. I don’t bother with money. Criminal liability will send a message.

You make a good point. Where is the line? My answer is that after all this, I am for pushing back as much as possible.

I was thinking about my ancestors yesterday..we are from a rare matriarchal community. And my family generally keeps to itself and avoids other people, though not in the Margaret Thatcher sense. It is not atomization so much as finding the minimal amount of social cooperation sans much socializing.

But for all that my family had some modern (i.e. typically associated with Westernization) and non tribal instincts long before they were common, nothing I heard indicated a meekly colonizable or colonized people.

They generally stay out of the papers etc. But the few stories I heard about brushes with would be colonists indicated that it didn’t go that well for the would be colonists. These days it is less about race and nationality sometimes than industry. Lots of oblivious people like I used to be, unaware of the rapacious non-consensual decision-making, mining etc with the constant normalization of the same as if corruption is routine and only irrational people pushback.
That is bullshit.

Now we are all more civilized and so it would be via the courts and criminal liability for the kind of theft highplainsdem talks about. But yeah, I wish these creeps working in ai and data mining and trying these space grabs would get that this won’t end well for them and they need to stay off my street and this part of the grid without destroying normal access to normal infrastructure.

Anyway I will be filing complainte retroactively. That is the sole deterrent.

[LudwigPastorius]

5. Now, if only Spotify and the other streaming platforms...

would follow suite.

Yeah RIGHT! That’ll never happen because fake AI music makes them more profit.

Easier to rake it in when you don’t have to pay those pesky musicians, don’tcha know?

[littlemissmartypants]

6. Very cool. ❤️

[tazcat]

8. I absolutely can't stand ai so called music.

There was a show I followed for years but the wife of the host apparently is bored and is pushing the most god awful noise. Needless to say I cannot watch anymore.

[Tikki]

9. I am a happy CAMPER and have been for years.

My downloads are of a specific niche of a niche. Still, I want to know that someone isn't trying to put something over on me.

Tikki

[jfz9580m]

12. I am of the view that criminal liability is the only deterrent at this point

They just do whatever they want - all those parasites in tech.

Now I am not a writer (as most of the fairly execrable writing in my journal would attest to). But I do love reading - paperbacks or hardcovers, not the kindle. I am not a luddite, but I choose what I use (that came out sounding like something you would find on a ghastly Substack page). And I find ai written writing to have the effect of nails on chalkboard.

It is mimicry. If a human did that, most everyone but the rare super douches (i.e. our industrial and political leaders, their sycophants and media) would find it grating.

I have been looking at some of my own DU journal in distaste. It is not that I disagree with some of it (the parts that are most choleric I certainly agree with .. ;-/..I didn’t want my personal signature to be an aspect of myself I don’t like that much..).

Something about the insipid corporatized cheeriness of those things (Scarlet Johanssen in Her comes to mind) made me feel that only vicious and dour writing would be human ..But thats also bs. Because it angers me even more when those things start to sound cynical, world-weary, skeptical, sarcastic.

The point is they have no depth. Ed Zitron wrote about it in his piece on Dudesy.
The average woman who starts to sound bitter isn’t a damn llm. It is usually someone groped irl by a series of loathsome creeps..bounced out of many jobs and hospitals and so on. Movies and reality tv themselves have started feeling like theft. Even sans ai, the data mining and the commodification of human life is disgusting.

It is lazy. You don’t have to use your imagination even as a human when you can scrape the web for content (though ai makes it easier).

My writing is all human written..no bots. But the writing has the same grating, anonymous insipid quality I associate with this sort of person (a nightmarish person who voted for Trump and was boosted by that ass Bill Ackman/Musk etc - Stepfanie Tyler):

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-musk-tech-venture-capital-execs-maga-1235060567/
She apparently voted for HRC and Biden, but had a change of heart…she is also a grifty ai booster.
Anyway, I checked out her blog to see if she has had buyer’s remorse yet (was curious about this peculiar representative of the vacuous swing voter class) and it isn’t clear.

But the writing really struck me in how derivative, insipid and shallow it is.

I don’t use ChatGPT since I think it should be..well let’s just leave it at this - I reflexively grind my teeth & clench my fists at the thought of ChatGPT ;-/. You know how it is hpd.

But it is also all at the end of the day perilously close to a persona without a definite endpoint as I have which is criminal liability. If the public doesn’t start this they will not only destroy all our livelihoods and for these substandard pieces of junk. But also move us further into surveillance states where we can be targeted for retaliation.
If Trump 2.0 isn’t the wake up call, what is? Authoritarianism is generally on the rise everywhere. The business class (a small set of small businesses aside) in tech is the instigator of it not against it. They have no real products or services and are engaged in a coup.
Project 2025, the rampant parasitism and destruction of the public sector, attacks on all regulatory bodies is a part of it.

And they can’t toss marijuana legalization into that noxious mix. I use pot. I don’t steal in depraved ways from other people. All this overexposure is bad for my health and work.

I saw something in “Call Me by Your Name” (an actual work of art and a favorite of mine -the book and the movie) that struck me..one of the characters says that people who read books like to hide. That actually fits. I have always loved books and I like peace and quiet. The sole reason I regret not having a kid is, I have no one to leave my books to. And I love my home. I HATE encroachment into my home. And that is what these creepy tech cos don’t get. I don’t want to be connected. This lowers quality of life. Who would choose theft of their life except a grifting future influencer?


Back to why I hate the effect all this has on one..It makes fairly laidback people like me into neurotic people, since I don’t like being annoyed with inexplicable drivel affecting my home..it is not even a smart home.

As for my crummy writing, while I am not happy with my skill/knowledge/memory/spatial awareness etc, I do have basic language skills. However, that still doesn’t make me a good writer and that isn’t a goal anyway. It is offensively like writing like a human llm or logorrhoea. I can’t decide which is worse/
A by the book dishonest shrink working with data miners could argue that these lengthy rants with many tangential rambles are like Trump’s weave indicative of sickness.

It is all making me furious.

I am pretty sure that woman uses ChatGPT and you can see it in her style. I find it somewhat parasitic to use someone else’s ideas or work even with attribution.

I do it only with a specific, definite real world goal - to warn off any ai or data companies. Trying to indicate that “Hey, I am wise to you and gearing up to press charges some day if your data hygiene is poor enough that you can read this message posted in an online community anonymously and connect it to me. Don’t use my home or devices or street.”.

Reading that woman’s blog made me realize why I feel such revulsion. If my posts aren’t llm written, my whole situation is artificial..

I had this job at a place I really disliked. I didn’t want to be this douchebag in bed with some creepy tech cos/spooks. This totally shallow woman with no sense of self who is just batted around..I am not a human research subject.
I do trust the old school NIH, but not once these parasites from Google/Facebook/Musk/Palantir/other small creepy tech cos etc. pile on.

Anyway, I get why my own writing here often disgusts me. I think blatantly artificial situations make people sound like bots. I really dislike the parts of my life that were deformed by these tacky VR or mixed reality adjacent things that this journalist Yasha Levine writes about. Like that movie Existenz. I am not even a gamer.

It made me think back to that hideous job (long before the Sandy Hook conspiracies). Early on a guy sat next to us during a lab lunch at the cafeteria and I caught this snippet of conversation “I could believe all the people here are actors”.

I found it a baffling statement at the time. Now I figure that is how an alt right troll could think. I usually associate that type of stuff with fishing or authentic paranoia (hard to tell sadly). That sleazy Project Veritas would be an example of astroturf, alt right trolling rather than the more sympathetic actual issue (people who think they are targeted individuals..this tech environment probably doesn’t help with that and I am often furious that a simple complaint about deregulated garbage tech will be treated that way. I actually have sympathy for those guys..).


There are even people who think everyone online is a bot and even more scarily might dox someone in their home to verify they are not a bot etc. Or most risibly that a bot has become sentient a la that asinine Google engineer Blake Lemoine.
It is all so daft. The fuss around these stupid llms is inane. And their souped up versions would be more grating - goddamn parlor tricks.

I altogether disapprove of all of it except maybe in rare academic contexts or if DU was trying to handle the bot issue using different strategies. Such rare things I am sympathetic to aside, the stuff I see here or back then, is just outrageous and creepy, where real and can disorient a person and throw off their sense of reality.

This entire set of industries needs draconian oversight and regulation by the left.
These are more tools for these right wing nuts to exploit..

[FakeNoose]

13. Why aren't they all doing this?

Wasn't there some kind of controversy over at Spotify? (I lost track because I'm not on Spotify any more.)
Really, it's not in anyone's benefit to promote AI-generated music, is it?

[highplainsdem]

14. Spotify makes more money from AI-generated music. It can't be copyrighted, so they don't have to

pay royalties. Spotify also has a lot of music under different names, often fake names, by songwriters and musicians doing what's called work for hire, which Spotify owns outright and so pays no royalties on. The more of this garbage they can get people to accept, the higher their profits.