Bandcamp is the first major platform to impose a strict prohibition of generative AI. The principles are clear, but how will it work in practice? And is this more symbolic than practically meaningful? Here’s a first look.
Bandcamp posted this yesterday, January 13, on Bandcamp Updates. (Hey, how did you know what I wanted for my birthday?) For now, that includes just the statement of principles, under “AI & the Bandcamp community”:
Philosophically, they’re talking about protecting the value of artists and the trust of fans. As they put it, the move is “so that musicians can keep making music, and so that fans have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.”
In practical terms, though, it appears the change boils down to this two-point policy:
- Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.
- 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.
The implementation falls on users: so you’ll report violations, and Bandcamp is now saying they can use this as grounds for removal:
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.
So far, so good. On principle, this statement looks like it’s well aligned with the values of a lot of Bandcamp users (both producers and listeners).
And I think this can’t be understated: this is a great move. There is a sizable population of people who are just generating music from text prompts. The sounds they produced are wholly based on sound content without consent. I can talk separately about why that’s fundamentally different from sampling and the moral panic around it, but the short version is this: sampling involved a lot of human input and manipulation. (There are some exceptions that — people generally rejected, over whatever arguments they heard.) That stuff could easily clog up Bandcamp and undermine its use as a platform. Bandcamp was never going to see major issues with AI slop the way streaming platforms do, but it’d be naive to think that the genAI slopstorm wasn’t going to hit there, too.
This does raise some questions, though — interesting questions, even.
One word to note is “suspicion.” “Generative AI” is not defined as a term. Now, I mean, I know what they’re concerned about here is AI slop — but where do you draw the line on what qualifies as “generative” or “AI”? Over the years, I’ve written about generative compositions on CDM that were released on Bandcamp. That has included everything from aleatoric structures to people training their own neural network models. But is that any more or less “human-created” than a lot of other music produced with software and DSP?
Now, I do feel pretty strongly that those cases are radically different than someone typing a text prompt into Sora. But Bandcamp hasn’t defined any specifics on this.
Even the more obvious-looking prohibition on impersonation has some ambiguity. For instance, vocal synthesis techniques based on vocoder-style carrier/modulator architectures are blurring with AI-based techniques. Even Yamaha’s mighty Vocaloid, the software that led the popularity of digital voice synthesis, uses machine learning in its latest version. (Hatsune Miku, by the way, was based on samples of singer Saki Fujita.)
“Substantial part” is probably wise wording here. And maybe the easiest way to boil down all the problems with AI right now hinges on plagiarism, theft, and impersonation.
But Bandcamp hasn’t updated its terms of service, and so far hasn’t detailed how it intends to manage reporting and enforcement. So I’m interested to hear more, and to get some other perspectives. (As I write this, I haven’t yet reached out to Bandcamp for more, but I will.)
If I seem like I’m being pedantic, it’s for this reason: by being explicit and taking a stand, Bandcamp and its artists and fans have an opportunity to define exactly what they mean and how this will work. There’s a similar opportunity for Fediverse and alternative, independent platforms to take a similar stance.
Slop is massively uninteresting — sorry. But it is interesting the way that synthetic and human have been intertwined since the advent of recording, then the evolution (in parallel) of electronic music and digital technology. There’s a lot to say and discuss on that point. Just reducing it to simplistic binaries misses out on the histories of technology, theory, and power that impact music. None of us is ever producing “human” music alone.
And just as was true a few years back, none of this is necessarily going to convince anyone to buy your new EP on Bandcamp anyway — that’s another story altogether.
So I’m being a pain in the ass because, for the first time, we have a platform wading questions of what qualifies as human creation. This might be our last, best hope to really talk about human-machine relationships in music before the whole thing is drowned out by terrible generated country music.
Or you might say, “We’re all just livin’, hm / On borrowed time.” (No, really, it is godawful!)
Here before any of us gets Breaking Rust stuck in our heads, a Johnny Cash rescue. I was talking about where lines are drawn and how, uh, we walk them.
(I would also accept Hurt, depending on just how depressed you feel!)
Side note: yes, I ran Bandcamp’s announcement through an AI Detector. It scored 21% on Grammarly, but note that these detectors often produce false positives. Except… oh yeah, that loops back to my questions about reporting and enforcement. (The score for the text of this article: 0%.)