Good especially those that mix’s Quran verses with metal music which is very haram and forbidden to us Muslims
Bandcamp consistently throws Ws
Surprising considers that it’s parent company Epic (yes, of
FortniteUnreal Tournament and GoW fame) has a pro-AI stance.Your info is a bit out of date. Epic already sold off Bandcamp back in 2023 during layoffs. Its owned by Songtradr now, who I personally know nothing about.
Short Wikipedia, so far so good for a company.
It was being OVERRUN with AI stuff, hopefully this cleans it up
I was buying some LPs recently and saw one that caught my attention. I looked them up and almost all their content included some form of AI.
it’s bullshit.
fuck AI.
lol I can imagine decades ago people cheering for songs that use sampling to no longer being allowed on a site. We really never learn sigh.
I can imagine lots of things, but I don’t confuse it with reality, because I’m an adult.
I think there’s a place for AI in music, just like sampling, and it has to be regulated, but not straight-up banned (or regulated in a muddy way like “substantially made by AI”).
It doesn’t help that everyone has their own personal opinion on how much AI should be allowed, though, and we’re never gonna reach a solution that everyone agrees on.
We will just like all these issues before, A new generation of artists will rise and see the use in them, while a new generation without the prejudices of the previous will consume. Everyone complained about how digital art “isn’t art”, literally the computer IS doing most of the work for you, computers are complex machines and something as simple as drawing pad goes through layers among layers among layers of abstractions made my the work hours of hundreds of engineers. But we agree the artist was the person using the drawing pad no? People complained about photography the same way. The world is flooded with horrible hip hop beats over copy pasted sample packs over 808 VSTs, we all agree now that this is all art, the people at the time did not.
People confuse the playing an instrument and illustration as art, when art is much more complex, vague, and interesting idea than that. All forms of human production carry some artistic value, we simply value things where the production process feels less alienated than others (Carpentry vs factory work)
All forms of human production carry some artistic value, we simply value things where the production process feels less alienated than others (Carpentry vs factory work)
And we agree on that, I think most people do. What they don’t agree on is what qualifies a “human production”. Or, to which degree does a human have to get involved in a production for that to be considered “human”.
I think there’s a gigantic difference between someone composing a song and writing its lyrics, then pasting it into an AI and having it sing it (basically Vocaloid), and a guy going onto Suno, writing “make me a pop song”, and taking the first output. And they shouldn’t be treated the same way.
That really was a thing. There was a backlash towards sampling for like a decade and nowadays, no one seems to even notice or care. Same with synthesizer based music…so many people argued that it was not music and not real and that it was going to ruin music.
It genuinely astonishes me how regressive people turn about AI in art, its like I’m talking to Bill O Reilly complaining about modern art.
I’m glad they did this. Confident in my choice to remain with Bandcamp.
Totally agree. I just wish I had more money to spend with Bandcamp. :D
What’s a good way to discover artists on Bandcamp? Most artists I listen to at the moment are with the usual big labels and don’t sell on Bandcamp.
- read Bandcamp’s writeups. Sometimes they do a deep dive into a genre, city, or band. https://daily.bandcamp.com/
- if you find something you like, scroll down and there’s other users who bought it. Peek into their collections
- if you scroll down further on an album, there will be more recommendations
- you can search by genre or tag, too
Keep it up bandcamp. We are all waiting for when you enshittify like everyone else but you’ve held it at bay so far.
They gave us a scare over the years, being sold around to companies that are famous for enshittifying platforms.
Epic sold the company when people unionized, and the next did a trick to not recognized the union and “hire” half of the staff (contrary to fire half of them).
The platform is not what has been 5 years ago, but it is still my favourite place to get music around.
I’m generally supportive of removing AI from artistic endeavors, but also wildly unfamiliar with bandcamp. I’m looking at it for the first time right now. Does it work like Deezer / Tidal or one of the streaming services where I can listen to things from my phone, or is it more of a website that you use to discover unsigned / smaller acts by clicking through a bunch of things and listening?
Bandcamp is where you go to download/buy stuff for a band you already know and like. I rarely if ever have listened to music through the website itself, nor have I found new bands through it.
It’s more like old iTunes and the like. No subscription, just buy albums. Artists define the price, and keep the majority of their revenue with some Fridays being Bandcamp Fridays where they get to keep all the revenue. You can download everything you own or you can stream it from the website or app on your phone also.
Only real downside with Bandcamp is that you won’t find some artists there but it all depends on what you listen to and want to find.
I literally thought you meant Bandcamp gets to keep all the revenue on Bandcamp Fridays lmao
I hope all my fave autistic musicians are not mistaken for AI and deleted under a false-positive detection of being AI. At least my fave’s album releases all pre-date AI music generators. Safe, for now.
I think safer would be to encourage all purely AI-generated be tagged as such, so it can be optionally toggled out of view, and then there’s less incentive for the unscrupulous to simply hide that it’s AI generated. Banning increases the “hide that it’s AI” vibes, not the “don’t do AI” vibes. Prohibition does not prevent. Prohibition makes the good things bad and the bad things worse.
I doubt they would just blanket scan all music and ban that which they think is AI (aside from how that’s practically impossible). That’s the kind of thing a lazy big tech company would do. I wouldn’t be surprised if this will just end up being on a report basis, at the very least with human verification once steps like banning would be taken. Because otherwise it would be pretty disastrous for the reasons you mentioned, since it would ban legitimate artists. Not to mention the bar of “substantially AI” would need to be judged by someone.
How would you even screen for AI music?
With AI, duh
Are Bandcamp still the good guys? I thought they were bought by the big capital and now went down the drain. Artists’ opinions especially welcome
People expected them to get fucked after the acquisition, though the new owners are just going “you keep doing what you’re doing, not gonna change a thing, just give us a cut of your profits”
Touch wood, it’s gonna stay that way.
They fucked the union, though.
The massive layoff that gutted Oakland-based music service Bandcamp hit one group at the company particularly hard: leaders of its nascent union.
As of Monday, Bandcamp has been sold by video game juggernaut Epic Games to Songtradr, a music licensing firm. The acquisition closed with just half of Bandcamp’s employees offered jobs at the Santa Monica-based company.
The job cuts, which SFGATE reported Monday amounted to about 60 of 118 employees, disproportionately hit union leaders, Bandcamp United told SFGATE in a Tuesday press release. Every member of the union’s eight-person bargaining team was laid off, it said, and in sum, 40 of the bargaining unit’s 67 people lost their jobs.
Shit, that I didn’t know about 😭
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That’s nice. But I wonder how they detect them.
There are usually some tells. For AI generated music (AIGM for short) the cover “art” is also AI generated. The vocals/style are different between tracks. Another method that I think was recently made obsolete was that if you opened the track in audacity it looked weird compared to regular music when you looked at the spectrograms because AIGM added some weird unnecessary noise to the music. AIGM “artists” usually don’t have any social media presence, they don’t really exist outside of the internet. No shows/interviews etc. Is it a lot of effort to find out whether something is AIGM? Maybe. Is it worth it? Yes, I don’t want to give money to people who desecrate the art or music.
So you’re saying a milli vanilli would be basically impossible to detect.
Besides, who cares? Isn’t the purpose to enjoy the music? Whether some uses a capella, instruments, electric instruments, autotune, vocaloid or AI… if you like the music, listen to the music. It’s ultimately created by a human using tools.
You suck
It’s exploitative trash occupying space that belongs to real artists who actually create real social value.
I disagree on all counts.
It’s not exploitative, it doesn’t exploit anyone.
It’s not trash, and if it were you wouldn’t need to regulate it because people would reject it on the merits.
The space belongs to whoever wants to create art, with whatever tools they want to do it. Gatekeeping and true Scotsman arguments are really grasping.
I don’t know what “social value” is created. A nurse or a fireman create social value. You won’t see them worrying about AI. If AI could put out fires they would definitely be interested.
I think you might misunderstood what Bandcamp is aiming for here. They’re explicitly trying to still allow it when humans are using it (responsibly) as tools. This is essentially a ban on AI where no human is involved (or not involved enough), where the music produced is focused on quantity over quality (slop). That’s a fine and nuanced distinction for a music distribution platform in my opinion.
Ok, if this is just a spam prevention I think it’s fine. Obviously I didn’t read the article (as tradition mandates).
If AIGM was like VSTs or vocaloids that’d be one thing. But it’s more like imitation of sounds, synthesizing song chunks instead of instruments and voices themselves.
The best way to think of it is something creating an audio file solely by using the Photoshop clone stamp tool across millions of source files.
That’s not how transformer neural networks work…
Sure, but we’re talking generative here, as is the article, and to pretend it’s referring to a tool that’s been standard in libraries and even VSTs for over a decade is either misunderstanding the article or being disingenuous on purpose.
No, I get it. It’s generative. GPT: Generative Pretrained Transformer. Music generators add a diffusion layer, but it’s fundamentally new music being generated, not copies of existing songs.
My point is that it’s just another tool, that automates it even more. It’s not the same, it’s the next step.
not the same thing. AIGM is by definition not created by a human.
if i tell you to create a song about a recent breakup i got through, gave you some notes about rhythm and maybe what kind of feel i would like it to have, and then you went ahead and composed the whole song, played all the instruments, provided the vocals, did the mixing and editing and gave me the result, do you think it’s fair to say i made the song?
Same as vocaloid. Or autotune. How far do we go?
Besides, again, who cares. If you like the music, enjoy it, if not, pass.
Besides, again, who cares. If you like the music, enjoy it, if not, pass.
I care. Clearly so do the people in support of this decision on here as well as bandcamp themselves.
I hope you are familiar with survivorship bias.
how is it like auto tune? auto tune corrects your singing, it doesn’t sing for you.
also, humans care? that’s kind of the entire point of art? we care where art comes from. find the best painter in the world, have them make mona lisa’s exact copy, and see if it sells for even remotely similar price as Mona Lisa’s estimated value which is probably around a billion dollars. anyone can “enjoy” an exact copy, no?
no. we care about art because art tells stories. human stories. computers don’t have stories to tell. they can imitate, but the best it can ever be will be as valuable as an imitation: not much.
What does monetary worth have to do with anything? A photo of the Mona Lisa is an exact replica, you could even make it bigger to appreciate the details better. If what you like is the picture, you can have it. If what you want is speculation and tax write offs, then you need the scarcity.
oh ok, so you’re a bot. there’s no way a human being would think like that. someone programmed a bot to defend genAI.
a bigger photo. Jesus.
Would be cool if bandcamp had a streaming subscription.
So it stop being profitable?
Thats not their model, and that model also sucks ass for supporting other humans.
I am one of those weirdos who likes to own my media. There are few of us geezers left, but luckily enough that bandcamp exists.
Just because the Spotify model sucks doesn’t mean it has to.
I don’t see a reason why 85% of a monthly subscription couldn’t given directly to the artists you actually listen to, and any albums your purchase is on the platform (and you get to keep the drm-free files).
Honestly it kinda sounds like an awesome service.
Edit: I’m one of those geezers too, who prefers to own my music. I just think there’s room for both.
I agree. Probably not profitable to the company though. Gotta keep those server costs covered…
It’d be nice if people could make a living off art but capitalism is against that at every turn especially now. Art shouldn’t even be related to money in some people’s opinions .
The Spotify model sucks despite throwing money at it for years, so my guess is they surely can give you some reasons why 85% of your monthly subscription can’t be given to the artists you listen to.
Publicly traded companies are always going to turn to shit, the “Spotify model” is just appeasing shareholders with infinite growth.
You already can’t tell if a song is generated with AI.This is never going to work, watch them backpedaling in a year.
But there are clues. And those clues are part of the reason some people are opposed to it. Like 30 EPs released in a year.
I think there’s a place for AI music. There are plenty of instances where you need some vaguely musical audio filler. Hold music, shopping background, etc. Well bandcamp ain’t that place.
But there are clues.
Clues are not evidence.
Like 30 EPs released in a year.
They should limit the number of EP you can release in a year then.
I’m sorry your AI music “career” isn’t taking off like you thought it would.
So 99% AI is OK if the last 1% was made by non-AI, a real dog bark or so.
The actual wording is “Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.”
So no, 99% AI is also not allowed
Helps if you read past the headline
Nothing can be good, amiright
It’s a PR stunt if 99% AI is fine.
you should reread
