Comment by rendaw
1 day ago
I'm really not sure about this. I love art, I'm an avid collector of all sorts of things, and I hate "AI art". I've skipped over multiple suno albums, when something feels vaguely AI-ish I'll dig to see if it's denied/acknowledged anywhere.
But I think Bandcamp has some value for being a place where anyone can publish their music. The statement is basically "We're banning AI because we don't like it." I feel like this is creating a rift or a battle where one was totally unnecessary. People who publish slop are probably also people who like music and buy music themselves. Whenever there's a guideline like this there will be false positives in enforcement. There's already tons of non-AI slop on bandcamp (plunderphonics, plagiarized stuff, 30 minutes of 10 people playing random notes on their instruments cacaphonic contemporary classical, ambient that's one chord for 60 minutes, etc). And the only people who this affects are the 10 people using Bandcamp's terrible music discovery services (I'm one).
This may also be a financial decision. Bandcamp is not a huge player compared to Spotify, Google, or Apple. Deezer said more than a third of new music uploads are GenAI now. If AI slop starts outnumbering real musicians' uploads 10 to 1, 100 to 1, or 1000 to one, which doesn't seem so far out there given the complete lack of talent, effort, or experience required to generate it, how would a site like Bandcamp pay for storing and processing all that data? They may have no choice but more rigorous curation.
Also, it's kind of antithetical to the purpose of Bandcamp. As you say, a place where anyone can publish music - but that's true for Spotify et al. these days, too. Bandcamp was always about a more direct connection to the artists, so it makes sense that they want their site to be about actual flesh-and-blood artists who have put sweat into their work.