Bandcamp’s mission is to help spread the healing power of music by building a community where artists thrive through the direct support of their fans. We believe that the human connection found through music is a vital part of our society and culture, and that music is much more than a product to be consumed. It’s the result of a human cultural dialog stretching back before the written word.
Similarly, musicians are more than mere producers of sound. They are vital members of our communities, our culture, and our social fabric. Bandcamp was built to directly connect artists and their fans, and to make it easy for fans to support artists equitably so that they can keep making music.
Today we are fortifying our mission by articulating our policy on generative AI, so that musicians can keep making music, and so that fans have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.
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.
If you encounter music or audio that appears to be made entirely or with heavy reliance on generative AI, please use our reporting tools to flag the content for review by our team. We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI-generated.
With this policy, we’re putting human creativity first, and we will be sure to communicate any updates to the policy as the rapidly changing generative AI space develops. Thank you.
Please can you clarify a little more what you mean by ‘substantial’? Can you use generative AI for supporting tasks, e.g. to brainstorm ideas / help with sound engineering and recording / write the lyrics / do the artwork / do one of the instruments?
I understand the drive to prevent the space from being taken over by ‘AI slop’, but there is a grey area that is difficult to define
This Bandcamp move? Sorry, but straight clown energy. All that “healing power of music” talk is just corporate sage smoke. Sounds deep, means nothing. The real message is simple: if it smells funny, we can pull your record. No proof, no science, no spine. Just vibes and a report button.
That’s not protecting artists, that’s building a snitch pipeline. You don’t like somebody eating off the same corner as you? Flag ’em. Their mix too clean, their beat too sharp, their sound a little too locked? “AI suspicion”. Boom. Let Bandcamp play judge with a blindfold on. That’s not culture, that’s platform dice.
And then let’s talk electronic music, because this is where the whole thing collapses. Minimal, techno, house, trance – bro… you don’t need GenAI for that. You need Splice, Loopcloud, a credit card, and five minutes. Click-click-click-e-click. Preset here, loop there, sidechain, limiter, done. Club-ready. Fully legal. Fully licensed. Difference to GenAI? Sometimes the sample-pack version even sounds better. Artistic ambition? Often about the same. So what exactly are we pretending to defend here?
Bandcamp is fine with construction-kit music all day long, but suddenly acts like the purity police once AI enters the chat. Miss me with that. There is no clean line anymore. Modern music is machines on machines – quantize, pitch tools, generative patterns, algorithmic swing. We’ve been dancing with ghosts for decades. Acting like there’s some sacred human lane you can police is either dumb or dishonest. Probably both.
The real damage is the fear. Now everybody’s side-eyeing each other. Homage looks risky. Style looks suspicious. Being good at what you do suddenly makes you a target. That’s how scenes die – not with noise, but with quiet self-censorship.
I’m done. Not because I make AI music – I don’t. Not because the profiles still look like ’99 – they almost always did. I’m out because once “suspicion is enough”, trust is gone. And without trust, you don’t have a community. You’ve got a block full of twitching curtains.
If this is your big moral stand, miss me. Go shadowbox with yourselves.👎😑
Find another place for ai music so us fans can buy real music
I am in favour of limiting AI music, but when a platform like Bandcamp starts policing its own community by asking people to report one another, that is heading in a very dangerous direction. Why? Because Bandcamp will never be able to reliably distinguish all AI music from human made music. And if artists, labels or bands can be banned purely on assumptions, then that is a complete deal breaker for me.
If this is implemented, I think it will be time to find another platform to release my music on. And no, I do not make or release AI music. But I can already see how such a system could be misused to target artists people do not like, either for political reasons or simply because they mistakenly assume human made music is AI generated.