Bandcamp takes a stance against AI music, banning it from the platform

Music distribution platform bandcamp It announced in a Reddit post on Tuesday that it is banning music and AI-generated audio.

“We want musicians to keep making music, and for fans to have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans,” the company said.

Bandcamp’s new guidelines state that music and audio produced “in whole or in part by AI” is not permitted, and that it will not allow AI tools to be used to impersonate other artists or styles.

So, if Drake is released “Taylor made Freestyle.” On Bandcamp, he would have had a problem (and he probably would have). For his own good).

He also likes AI music generators sun Synthetic music is becoming more complex, and synthetic music is becoming harder to avoid, as has been the case with songs created using AI tools topped the charts On spotify and Bulletin board. AI music now sounds real enough that it can be difficult to decipher how it was made.

In one notable example, 31-year-old Mississippi native Telisha Jones used Sono to turn her (supposedly organic) poetry into a viral R&B song.”How was I supposed to know?Her AI “character”, Xania Monet, received several bids for record deals before signing with Hallwood Media in a deal said to be worth 3 million dollars.

The legitimacy of AI-generated music is up in the air. He is currently facing Sonu Lawsuits from three major labels — Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group — alleging that the company trained its AI on copyrighted material from the labels.

But that didn’t deter Silicon Valley. Sonu raised a $250 million Series C In November, the company was valued at $2.4 billion. While Menlo Ventures led the increase, Suno saw participation from Hallwood Media, the company backing Xania Monet.

The legal outlook does not look good for artists. In a recent lawsuit, Judge’s ruling That Anthropic could use copyrighted books it illegally downloaded to train its own AI. What was illegal, the judge said, was that Anthropic pirated books that it fed into its AI models. The company got slapped with a valuation of $1.5 billion, which isn’t a big deal for a company value With a value of $183 billion.

Unlike Spotify or 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 its sales from artists — but even if it presents itself as the premier distributor for artists, a tech company is still a tech company, and the bottom line matters. Looking at Bandcamp’s move optimistically, perhaps the company confirms what artists hope is true: No one actually spends money to buy AI-generated music, at least not on Bandcamp.