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.

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[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.

[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