Bandcamp takes action against AI music, bans it from platform

Music distribution platform Bandcamp announced in a post on Reddit on Tuesday that it would ban AI-generated music and audio.

“We want musicians to keep making music, and we want fans to have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp is made by humans,” the company said in a statement.

Bandcamp’s new guidelines state that music and audio generated “wholly or in large part by AI” is not allowed, and that using AI tools to imitate other artists or styles is not allowed.

I mean, if Drake had released “Taylor Made Freestyle” on Bandcamp, he would have been in trouble (and it probably would have been for his own good).

As AI music generators like Suno become more sophisticated, synthetic music is becoming harder to avoid. Songs created with AI tools are topping the charts on Spotify and Billboard. AI music now sounds so real that it can be difficult to decipher how it was created.

One high-profile example is Terisha Jones, 31, of Mississippi, who used Snow to turn her (organic) poetry into the viral R&B song “How Was I Supposed To Know.” Her AI “persona”, Zania Mone, received multiple bids for a record contract before landing a deal with Hallwood Media worth $3 million.

The legality of AI-generated music is up in the air. Suno is currently facing a lawsuit from major labels Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group for allegedly training its AI using the labels’ copyrighted material.

However, this did not deter Silicon Valley. Suno raised a $250 million Series C round in November, valuing the company at $2.4 billion. The financing was led by Menlo Ventures, but Suno also saw participation from Wholewood Media, which backed Zanier Mone.

The legal outlook is not good for artists. In a recent case, a judge ruled that Anthropic can use illegally downloaded copyrighted books to train its AI. What was illegal, the judge said, was that Anthropic pirated the books it fed into its AI models. The company received a $1.5 billion penalty, which is not significant for a company valued at $183 billion.

Unlike Spotify and Apple Music, Bandcamp doesn’t pay artists per stream. Instead, Bandcamp allows artists to sell their music digitally alongside physical products like merchandise and CDs.

Bandcamp only makes money from a portion of an artist’s sales. But even if they claim to be artist-first distributors, tech companies are still tech companies, and revenue matters. Looking optimistically at Bandcamp’s move, perhaps the company is confirming that what artists want is true. At least on Bandcamp, no one actually spends money to buy AI-generated music.