Bandcamp has banned all music made with AI

[highplainsdem]

Source: NME

Bandcamp has officially banned AI music from its platform.

-snip-

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”.

-snip-

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.”

-snip-

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

---

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

Last edited Thu Jan 15, 2026, 03:33 PM - Edit history (1)

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. This AI came up with some clever lyrics intermixed with gibberish. The music track was sort of a Tower of Power thing with a Calypso influence. It 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 will be 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.

[Bluetus]

17. No competent lawyer files a brief written by AI

But they might use AI to give them some angles on arguments and case law. (At today's state of the art, even that is hazardous because AI just keeps making things up out of thin air.)

Skilled artists aren't going to have AI produce their next album, but they might use some AI to try out some different ideas. And they can certainly use some AI in the production process.

Things will probably look a lot different in 10 years or even 5 years, and I will probably have a different view by then. However, as of today, IMHO, anybody who relies heavily on AI is probably just faking it in the first place. It isn't that much different from AutoTune.

And a reality in the pop world is that it has been a long time since anybody outside the top 1% have been making a living from record company contracts or radio airplay (or now Spotify royalties). The reality for most pop itinerant musicians is that they have to make their living from live shows. If they want to mix in some AI or backing tracks, that's an artistic choice as far as I am concerned. Is it really different from when live bands first started using Oberheim or Prophet synths to add string sounds to the live performance? How dare they fake their strings? This is putting violinists out of work.

The day that songs are produced entirely with AI is the day I expect to see a show with nothing but Elon Musk's robots in the audience.

And I'm not really kidding about that. Some people have predicted it will not be long until more than half the traffic on the Internet will be bots pushing around bullshit AI content consumed by other bot accounts. Anybody on Facebook lately is probably being flooded with the tsunami of articles that tell an emotional story of a heroic figure prevailing over impossible odds, written in the style of all that old Paul Harvey crap. None of it is true, but the fake stories are flooding the zone.

[highplainsdem]

21. No ethical person should be using generative AI, period, for anything, unless forced to do so by a

school or employer, or possibly by a disability.

Voluntary use of generative AI, by anyone aware of how AI models are trained, shows the user really doesn't give a damn about the theft of intellectual property to train the AI. And that attitude is despicable. Even if they act ethically in other areas, using AI shows they decided to check all their principles at the door for whatever convenience they think the AI gives them.

They're also being dumbed down using it.

It's one of the stupidest, most unethical and most antisocial things anyone could do, harmful to society overall as well as all the people whose intellectual property was stolen to train the 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. Jan 22, 2026 Edits

Last edited Thu Jan 22, 2026, 12:31 AM - Edit history (2)

Jan 22, 2026:
I am intuiting a rough, no frills ;-/ protocol for how to proceed as a former academic scientist/a citizen scientist wrt reality monitoring, but ..reality. This is reality, not a simulation of reality and there are no experts I trust I can consult right now. And it would be an insult to reality to say that reality isn’t better for me than a forced monoculture of lousy ideas with heavy influence by the private sector and private sector friendly forces.

I don’t come into your labs or hospitals demanding jobs or treatment. You can’t come into my home, adding insult to injury wrt education, mental health etc.

It is cool..Google marketshare! Yes! Tech yay! Computers!!!! Sorry..so lame..;-/. I cut my teeth an EECS dept so I don’t see anything impressive here, but I do see a lot of very questionable decision making that I will from now on constantly have to thwart.

Please enjoy the world the cs creeps build where you want them. This is my home. No billionaire or king is anything but an intruder as is the everyperson mob..seriously ;-/.

I really don’t want the right to hijack a point about telemarketers and advertising and things most people hate, thanks to my side’s tendency to attack its own or just be lame. Yeah I have some privilege and I am not the one using it to kick out all arguments except for the most polarizing or least relatable ones. That too regardless of whether they apply in a specific situation or not. It makes it hard for people to tell when it is truly an issue. Godwin’s Law and every other pointless except online or within cs meme or joke or idea, when it is just this one field.

This is not how i wanted my life to turn out, but if I have to do this, I resist both the overarching monoculture of the net along with superficial customised quirkiness, at a time when we have the legit right to without histrionics, throw away the scripts of the past (they got us to this point..How good could they have been? Yasha Levine’s wife Evgenia is another of the few people out there I would trust to decode reality for me far from my usual haunts).

Everyone is too lame and polite in science and the admins are an unambiguous “they”. There is no need for histrionics or “tough love”.

Its as simple as this: the private sector seems to get away with theft, deregulation, no consequences etc. without in any way contributing anywhere near their fair share. This isn’t Kids Nation etc sadly. It is the Idiocracy and well building an internet of humans wasn’t going to go that easily.

I am always wary of being identified as lame for superficial lameness. I was never in any fight and now i think i am and i was frozen on a particularly useless version of “Fight-Flight-Freeze-Fawn”. Flight is my default strategy as I can’t take these guys on academically (I am struggling to finish one paper); sanity and decency otoh I can give a shot to, but I literally do not know how to behave as a person I am not. I was trying not to be in situations like these.
My fellow rabble would commiserate precisely if/where they understood. Besides, well..instinctively deprived of the sense that one can even plot or scheme..lol..I just understood something the same way I got in 2023 that keys is a reference to cryptography.
Hmmm…This is an oddly constricted space to be manoeuvring in. Why is everything in this severely limited by what is obviously fake..entertainment, reality tv, ..
I cant stand the thought of fully fleshed out takes on this same bs in various bad flavors.
Lina Khan was awesome. No wonder Reid Hoffman didn’t like her. Yasha Levine/Lina Khan and of course my fellow Greens are the only people who have felt real to me after I gor cut off from academic colleagues/doctors etc -mostly they would get it and be as inept in terms of stage managing stuff that typically is in the disgraceful realm of media and politics.
I like the Limits to Growth. That is how I know how to behave. The billionaires and oligarchs do behave like superfit cancer cells, but so do other overcompensated people who yell at worse off people …
If all this is working out for everyone else..awesome! But whatever the deal is, I do not see a reality where it is working out for me or in anyway fair and most importantly it is not even a rip off or cliche anyone can pull off without really commiting to lies or fraudulent post outcome sincerity or anger. Yes it is all bad and awful and atrocious, but some stuff isn’t and it is separating the two.
I’ll keep it simple. Income..that is what it comes down to. Commensurate payment for effort or for exploitative use of a space for technologies no one in that space buys into withour clear liability private sector or state.
These are my devices and this is my home.
And if these other less tangible things are a factor, you don’t get to make decisions for other people or just completely throw off all responsibility. And I reserve the right to not buy into this wide-eyed shit. I don’t pull it except with the home team where it isn’t..those are my friends or potential allies etc.
It is not the same as an acrimonious dispute or worse a communication issue. There is rarely that much friction once I identify people, but it is hard to find them in the mess of randoms in between-creeps, charlatans, histrionics etc etc

I have a horror of three things: blah drivel, fake non blah and creepy self or other commodifying non-blah.
It is not personality to be identifiably eccentric. That sort of misses the point and is broad enough to be from some constantly navel gazing, awful, self referential Judd Apatow made mediocre thing..It would be as hacklike as that Robin Hanson guy..clunky evol psych.

But my people..the left..we do have some strategies that may have served the purpose of being the poor man’s tool back in the day..dissecting and analyzing those we can only look at from the outside. But they are being gamed inside this war machine. In part because i bet it is more banality of evil than directed malice (and thats the trickiest kind/l..because we can all try to be non malicious. We can’t be sure we wouldn’t avoid mistakes.

Like you may be too busy as a doctor to know why this time-sucking nuisance being shilled as a cure-all (as they always are) is not actually genuinely convenient or useful, but more an aggressive industrial push from industries with no products or services..
Well anyway. I have togo work and think about it more..
Subterfuge doesn’t come to me easily anymore than to say Nathan Robinson or Troy Farah for example.. But clunky manipulation is still enough sometimes and so..well I guess I was trying to say that I am not a fool, just because i acn’t be bothered about how I come off unlessit matters. This seems adequate for the level of effort care sense or principle I have seen so far..I mean no one’s fault but thats hardly the type of person you want having their way with your home or street. Honestly incompetent best case. And its bs that that is an academic or medical failure. This is because of the private sector’s degree of unchallenged influence and the culture that results which is pretty unforgivable as of this date and there is no point in trying to hijack that for politics or profit.

Original Subject Line: 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.

[FakeNoose]

18. Well I get that

There might be a temporary "gain" in profit.

However you ultimately lose profit if all your subscribers quit in disgust. That's what I did probably 4 years ago. It used to be pretty great for a while, but it got overrun with rightwing podcasts, for one thing, and also the AI-generated fake music. It quickly became worthless to me, I wasn't paying them $10 per month.

[Bluetus]

19. Of course it can be copyrighted.

Now, if you are saying that Spotify is creating AI content themselves, then they could be the copyright holder.

If you use Suno for free, you agree that Suno has the copyright. But if you pay the Suno subscription, Suno grants the copyright to you.

Any copyright can be challenged as being a ripoff of prior art. That doesn't change with AI. But the kind of pap that is produced by Suno is so much like all the rest of the mindless pap that was ripped off from prior generations of musicians, it is pretty tough to win these infringement cases.

It can actually be argued that technologies like Suno can include guard rails that ensure their ripoffs pass legal muster. In other words, Suno may actually be less of a ripoff than what human artists have been doing to each other basically forever. Bach "borrowed" heavily from Vivaldi and others. And countless successors tried to capture that perfect Bach fugue style. Nothing new here, except that it is a lot easier to steal music today when there are 3 chords and the "melodies" are mostly just diatonic meanderings on the same 4 notes without any changes to key center or rhythmic interest.

[highplainsdem]

20. No. That's not true, and they don't claim copyright. See this:

https://help.suno.com/en/articles/2746945

Copyrights are complex, and vary by region! To ensure you have the most up-to-date information, we suggest reaching your local copyright office before applying.

It is important to know there is a difference between ownership and copyrights. It is often said that if you come up with something on your own, you automatically assume the rights to it. In music, there are several other factors that help determine rights beyond ownership.

-snip-

In the US, copyright laws protect material created by a human. Music made 100% with AI would not qualify for copyright protection because a human did not write the lyrics or the music. Writing the prompt does not constitute the creation of the song.

If you wrote the lyrics for your song(s), you own those lyrics. Most copyright offices will allow you to register those lyrics on their own, and you may be able to use those lyrics to register your whole song as well. Some regions/registrars may recognize you as the writer of the song and Suno as an instrument to help you create the song. If this happens, the song will likely be eligible for copyright protection.

IMO it's pure bullshit that Suno, or the Suno user, own what's spat out by their plagiarism machine, because it produces anything resembling music only because they sto!e all the copyrighted music they could steal, AND all the text they could steal describing that music - reviews, articles and books about the music they stole - because that's the only way their mindless machine can link the prompt the AI users give it to anything resembling the type of music they're ordering, in a way that's no more artistic than ordering a pizza.

But if you sign the agreement with Suno that's described on that page, and you've paid for one of their plans, they won't try to sue you for monetizing fake music neither you nor they created, whereas they will block or sue you if you haven't paid them.

Btw, the last time I looked at Suno's complete TOS, it included a clause admitting that they can't guarantee their plagiarism machine won't spit out the same song for you that it spat out for someone else. They're not really in control of what it spits out, any more than the AI user is.

They're nothing but thieves. And AI users aren't artists. They're people who don't mind taking advantage of theft to pretend they have knowledge and skills they don't have.

What generative AI does best is fraud.

[Bluetus]

22. I don't think you understand copyrights.

Anybody can assert a copyright. You simply file a paper and pay the fee. That's the easy part. Defending it is the hard part.

What I said is 100% accurate. With the free Suno, the user agrees that any copyright privileges remain with Suno. If you pay the subscription, Suno waives its right to the copyright and the customer can claim the copyright.

That doesn't mean the copyright will hold up, but that has nothing to do with AI. I've played around a little on Suno. In my (non-lawyer) view, the songs I've generated could hold up in a copyright suit, but the songs aren't good enough that anybody would challenge them. In another 5 years, that may be different.

[highplainsdem]

23. You're still 100% wrong, because you ignored this paragraph:

In the US, copyright laws protect material created by a human. Music made 100% with AI would not qualify for copyright protection because a human did not write the lyrics or the music. Writing the prompt does not constitute the creation of the song.

Trying to claim copyright on a song made 100% with AI is fraud. Legally fraud. It doesn't matter if no one later sues you, challenging your claim. It's still fraud.

That page on Suno's website makes it clear that they do not claim copyright and know that what is generated by AI can't be copyrighted.

See this page, since you don't understand copyright. Note there is an exception for what's called work for hire:

https://www.etblaw.com/can-you-copyright-something-you-didnt-create/

[Bluetus]

24. What you are citing is only an opinion by the copyright office and that is not binding on anything.

The case law is limited. I agree that the case law, so far, addresses only the case of 100% generation from AI. That isn't what most people do with Suno. Most people supply some lyrics or some musical lines. And they might record the work with live musicians, and certainly perform it live. The 100% AI generation case is pretty much irrelevant.

The stuff that comes out of the AI engine is not commercial grade -- not by a long shot. Suno will provide stems. Some people will then take these stems and combine with other AI sources to add other layers to the mix. And even if the stems are untouched, there is plenty of human artistry in the mixing and mastering process. None of this is addressed in case law yet, AFAIK.

The case law, if I understand it correctly, only applies to files written entirely from AI without any modification. Thus, if you simply apply a little compression or verb and then write the file yourself, then you are clear of the 100% rule. That is nonsensical as a real world standard, but I believe that's where we are today legally.

As of the moment, you most certainly can claim a copyright for your work inasmuch as there was human artistry involved (lyric suggestions, musical lines, arranging, mixing, mastering), and if you pay the Suno subscription, they will release any claims for their parts of the project.

We are a long way from these questions being settled.

[highplainsdem]

25. You can claim a partial copyright if you did any of the work and can prove it. I doubt applying a little

compression would qualify.

The robber barons of the AI companies are hoping the law can be changed.

No ethical person should ever hope that their theft of intellectual property will someday be legalized.

And real artists should create their own work. Use of generative AI is pretense and fraud, IMO, and deserves to be completely rejected and discredited.