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: there’s a clear argument for making a policy anywhere you have an open-submission platform. There is a sizable population of people who are just generating music from text prompts. The sounds they produce are based on the use of big data sets, which in turn on many of these platforms are built without consent. That means the user-generated in the user-generated content is called into question. I can talk at length 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. These have to do with how the policy is designed, and how it’s implemented — especially that second one.
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?
In particular, here the mechanism is based on user reporting. That might appear to sidestep concerns about false positives, but then it opens itself to user abuse (or at the other end of the spectrum, an inability of users to keep up).
Even the more obvious-looking prohibition on impersonation has some ambiguity in policy — and raises even more questions about how user reporting will work. 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.
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.
Updated: In writing this, I didn’t go too much into the how, but that may be the more critical issue.
Bandcamp is alone among the bigger, more established music players, but other platforms are joining in.
Mirlo, an excellent collectively-owned alternative to sites like Bandcamp, already had a policy (someone from that team reached out to share this shortly after publishing):
https://mirlo.space/pages/content-policy
Excerpt on AI:
Mirlo’s priority is preventing human artists from being forced to appear alongside or compete with low-effort AI-generated works. For that reason we do not allow the addition of music that is entirely created by AI. We recognize that AI can be used creatively but are very conscious of many large language model’s absolutely catastrophic energy costs. However, it’s incredibly hard for us to moderate or know what music is generated by a LLM, and we ask musicians to reflect seriously on how the music or art they’re making expresses their creativity.
Where images (artwork on albums, merch, etc,.. as well as logos and artist profile images) are concerned, similar rules apply to all content.
That in turn was modeled on a policy from independent music platform Ampwall; see also these couple of points in a larger AI section of their content policy:
Music created with limited use of AI, such as a human band with human-written songs and some amount of AI-contributed instrumentation or AI “performing” alongside humans, is generally prohibited. Some exceptions might be made when the AI contribution is minimal.
Use of AI to create effects that modify an input signal akin to traditional analog and digital equipment is currently permitted.
I don’t want to misspeak about specifics of what’s being used on each platform, but suffice to say some content platforms are now using automated systems to detect AI. The amount of AI-produced content is such that it may require those systems and human moderation. And that means this comes at an awkward time for Bandcamp and their ilk as they’ve cut staff. (Bandcamp slashed half its workforce in 2023 after being unloaded from Epic; as I reported, customer service was a big area.)
In other words, Bandcamp policy statement aside, there’s a storm coming for all these platforms. Bandcamp at least is well positioned in that the philosophy of the platform, its editorial, and its users are united in being anti-AI slop, which could make self-policing very effective — especially without the aggressive recommendation engines and always-on torrent of sound that streaming-focused competitors offer.
(Also, compare SoundCloud, who had to even reassure its users it wasn’t ingesting all their music to train models!)
All this will mean big discussions about how we define AI, what we want to be permissible, and crucially, how we intend to moderate platforms and staff customer service in dealing with enforcement and filtering. 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.
his 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 text detectors often produce false positives, so that number is not yet cause for concern. That does loop back to my questions about reporting and enforcement, though audio detection right now seems biased toward false negatives, not false positives. (The score for the text of this article: 0%.)