There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai.

I'd pay for some app which allows be to dump all my ableton files into, train some transformer on it, just to synthesize new stuff out of my unfinished body of work. It will happen and all lines will get blurred again, as usual.

I had this opinion for a long time, but only recently was I personally affected, but that made me even more convinced.

I was listening to my new releases playlist on Apple Music and listened to a track that sounded nice, but also a little generic. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to check, but it had all the signs of something fishy going on like generic cover image, the artist page showed a crazy output of singles last year (all the same generic images), unspecific metadata and - to my surprise - I found other Reddit posts about this artist being AI.

Now, a lot of music is generic and goes through so many hands you can hardly call it a personal piece of art. But even then, there’s always some kind of connection.

I guess that’s why I felt betrayed.

I thought AI generated art was wrong before, but I didn’t expect to feel this mix of anger and disappointment.

Does that constitute "wholly or in substantial part"? Would the track have existed were it not for having that easy route into re-mastering?

I understand what Bandcamp's trying to do here, and I generally am in support of removing what we'd recognize as "fully AI-generated music", but there are legitimate creative uses of AI that might come to wholly or substantially encompass the output. It's difficult to draw any lines line on a creative work, by just by nature of the work being creative.

(For those interested - check out O Positive's "With You" on the WERS Live at 75 album!)

I want a friend to message me like "Hey, there's some interesting stuff happening in the AI music scene, check out these tracks".

But everything I've seen is pastiche, either novelty songs (hit song as different genre, or famous monologue from popular movie as pop song) or generic background music meant for algorithmic streaming playlists.

https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/

https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays

I'm still sad about the company's sale to Epic and then Songtradr, but glad to see that the service hasn't turned to garbage yet.

If you don't like the AI workflow, humans are already offering that workflow to the richest and most successful among us. The new tech is kind of leveling the playing field in that sense. When you think about how AI is applied in other fields, it's basically on the way to giving everyone CEO powers, allowing them to delegate vague directives into action. Whether there's room for 8 billion CEOs on earth remains to be seen.

I personally think barriers to entry in certain industries are features, so we aren't drowned in a sea of careless whims and can more easily find products made with love, dedication, and well articulated intent.

I don't hold it much hope for this track because everything else I've heard on suno and udio are rubbish, but the 1 minute preview I have is enticing me to spend 8 bucks just so I can experiment a bit more.

I feel somewhat conflicted by my fascination because I have a great love for music and I wholeheartedly support efforts to restrict AI music crap.

But as the tools mature, the creative possibilities to make new sounds with finer control and granularity will make the process more ... creative - with greater human input.

I'm sure we'll end up with new styles and maybe even new genres that originate from prompts, and hits too. Is this a good thing to look forward to? I can see my future listening habits become strictly human only, but dang, the start of my new track sounds so dope!

I applaud Bandcamp's stance here and I will always look for ways to meaningfully support real musicians.

I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not interested in monetary gain at all, just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.

A lot of people including myself enjoy music because it's so intimately human, the flaws and all. It's someone putting a bit of themselves into every piece they create, and people look for things that resonate with them.

AI music however is purely about consumption. It's not something made to be remembered or cherished. And the more you integrate it into your music, the less and less of yourself you put into it and the less reason for anyone to bother. I could just ask whatever AI to generate generic rock music inspired by the beatles and remove you from the equation entirely and have the same experience. Everything gets amalgamated into the exact same thing with all of the imperfections sheared away.

Discovery of a new stuff- the niche, the unknown. Some part-time band from another side of the globe with 10k listens, but whose music is something that makes ME feel.

This didn't really work all that well before streaming came about- record stores in my city were small, and their selection included either the classics, or the current top-10. Friends and radio helped a bit, but not so much with the really obscure pieces or even entire genres.

So on one hand, with self-hosting Navidrome I can't be happier and have actually started discovering the music I've long stince forgotten or just the less popular pieces of the musicians that I already enjoy (because you buy and rip the entire CD, not just the most popular song of the album, and those songs are then being played at random).

The only problem is how to find something new? Do I go to internet radio-stations somewhere? Or to curated playlists? Or maybe there's an open recommendation system somewhere?

If we look at this through the lens of making software with ai, which also allows for creativity, blanket bans may keep lots of quality stuff from being made.

How will the tracks be distinguished? Any ai and you’re out?

"Tell HN: Viral Hit Made by AI, 10M listens on Spotify last few days" [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46600681

- stream from FIP.fr via cvlc - when I absolutely love a tune, buy on Bandcamp - if it's not available or I bought it elsewhere, e.g. old CD, then get from Soulseek - scp my ~/Music directory on my mobile phone

I tried LMS for few weeks but honestly just plain VLC is enough for me.

Anyway, point is, this decision makes me want to buy from Bandcamp even more.

> Our guidelines for generative AI in music and audio are as follows:

> 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.

Which is balanced. It means that you can still use Illugen to generate a drum sample for instance, but you can't just generate a whole track on SUNO and just upload it on Bandcamp.

https://media.ccc.de/v/gpn23-153-tschss-spotify-und-co-self-...

you can scroll through the slides to get the idea

For making house/4x4 type music, it's actually pretty fun. Once you chop something and repitch it enough, no algorithm can pick up on what song it is you are sampling if the AI track is way off from the original piece.

No way would I actually try to monetize it, though.

> We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI generated.

It's going to really suck when someone eventually gets removed based on false positives... Similar problem to auto DMCA false positives.

We now sort of accepted the idea of “vibe coding”, and, even shared appreciation from people who are using it to resuscitate side projects and things they wanted to do but required a lot of work. (Heck, even Linus Torvalds is doing it).

Is “Vibe Music / Art” any different? For example, I am not a drummer, say I use Suno to program some drums for me so I can record my guitar on top, and finally release that track I’ve been procrastinating.

I think the analogy here holds. Not all vibe coding is good, and not all vibe art is bad.

Izotope Ozone uses AI to mix and master - for some reason that’s okay but you can’t actually generate the sounds with AI? Or what if I generate the notes with AI then use my own synth presets is that allowed?

https://www.izotope.com/en/products/ozone

Case in point, the other day I made a comment on reddit. I spent about 10 minutes writing it. I used proper grammar, bullet points, clean formatting, and em dashes, as I've been doing for many years.

I immediately got downvoted and sent multiple PMs about "not posting AI slop".

I didn't use AI at all to write that comment. It just looked like AI because it was well formed and researched. So am I supposed to add errors just to make it look "human"? But also, how do I even prove I wrote it without AI?

I'm not entirely sure how to solve this problem.

Ok maybe you have the opinion that it's all crap right now. That's fine. But pretend it gets good. Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.

Where does that leave Bandcamp? Do they market themselves as "fresh organic music" and live in that niche? What good does all the rights music companies own do if music generates on the fly?

I suspect a huge amount of lobbying incoming asap to stop this. Perhaps a law against AI generated music that's not owned by the RIAA? You might not like AI generated music but you should be very very cautious of those fighting it.

Real musicians play real instruments, not samples

Real musicians play real instruments, not AI-generated slop

All of the above is bullshit y’all

Real musicians play with anything they want.

Bandcamp’s first policy will become an enforcement nightmare in the short term and irrelevant the long term.

I’m still waiting for someone to create something really good with AI - meaningful, impactful, emotionally gripping - not just novelties. Same problem as AI text slop - by the nature of its training, it regresses to the mean

Also: how much time/effort/money one spends creating art is unrelated to quality. Spending 40 hours recording and producing a mediocre song does not make it “better” than a mediocre song generated in a few seconds by AI or any other tool

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).

A little shocked. The biggest issue with music streaming right now is, imo, discovery. Algorithmic discovery is cute, but there’s a perverse incentive for companies who provide discovery services (ie Spotify) to funnel users to artists that cost less (ie AI generated in-house).

There’s also the fact that flooding the market with AI music slop _also_ makes discovery even harder.

Tried-and-true methods for discovery over the past decades are network effects (artists featuring and collaborating), and niche label A&R. However, Spotify has no interest, or incentive, to allow users to explore these avenues for discovery.

So, kudos to Bandcamp. But with better discovery this wouldn’t be necessary.

Finally, anecdotally, as someone in the top percentile of listeners for several niche genres on Spotify, I’ve yet to hear AI generated music that isn’t crap. Whenever it gets recommended to me by Spotify I reach for my phone, see that I don’t recognize the artist, and then see that they’re self-published on Spotify with a few hundred listeners. I guess if you don’t have any taste you might not notice, but it’s painfully obvious for anyone who is familiar enough to recognize themes, callbacks, and instrumentation within a genre.

The real value AI has for music is discovery. I've been using Gemini and ChatGPT to build playlists based on music I already like, and discovering lots of fun new tracks. I can be really specific about what kind of music I like and don't like. I can show it a playlist I already made, and ask it to make one like it, but with completely different artists. It's insanely useful!

But these kinds of tools would just expand how many different artists Spotify has to pay from my streaming, and that doesn't do the same thing as shoving cheap mass-produced slop down our throats, so it isn't surprising what they offer us.

However, what if I use AI to generate a simple sine wave. Then I map it to a keyboard and play it with different notes.

Who's going to define what's ok.

So many creator platforms are becoming slop factories.

https://skullvomit.bandcamp.com/track/ai-generated-music-poo...