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.
I’m happy to hear this.
Stupid policy.
You will be banning people who use AI based VSTi and other music tools, because there is no clear way to recognise any difference.
Not only that, you will without a doubt remove music that has no AI tool what so ever, and leave some completely AI generated song on, you will piss off everyone, and kill all of the good will you have created until this point.
I don’t like AI slop, but the way some people act so aggressively towards anything AI related is worse than AI slop.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!
This is excellent news. On the back of this, would it be possible to add AI content as an option in the reporting tool to further simplify the process (alongside the currently existing options for spam, unlicensed content, etc)?
Thank you so much for standing up for human creators. I would like to see a prohibition on artist/album “artwork” made using generative AI, but this alone is fantastic. Thank you again!
What’s your policy concerning AI generated visuals used for songs and album covers ? I’ve already found a lot of them on this platform.
Thanks for the notice, unfortunately that means I won’t be buying anything anymore on the platform and will be removing my user account.
No need to announce your departure. Just go.
Thank you for taking a stand on this!
Thank you
Can you also take the same stance on AI generated album covers? Cover artists are artists too.
Hell Yea Brother. Get these spam AI losers out of here.
‘Human creativity first’ sounds noble, and yeah, the ethics around training data, consent, and compensation are real problems that deserve real solutions. But those problems relate to training and development, not the existence of output itself. This policy is the wrong solution, and it sets a terrible precedent.
You’re trying to dictate what counts as ‘real’ art, how it can be made, and how it’s allowed to exist on your platform. Creativity isn’t a purity test. Art doesn’t need your permission. And just because you don’t personally like something doesn’t automatically invalidate it for everyone else.
Tools don’t invalidate art, intent and execution do. Saying ‘music generated wholly or in substantial part by AI isn’t permitted’ is basically saying ‘if this tool was involved, it’s not welcome.’ That isn’t a serious way to evaluate creativity. What matters is what the artist does with the tools, the taste, the decisions, the editing, the structure, the context, the emotional intent. That’s where artistry lives.
Music has always been shaped by technology. Multitrack recording, samplers, drum machines, synths, sequencers, auto-tune, time stretching, granular synthesis, algorithmic composition tools, random sequencers, ‘happy accident’ plugins, and countless effects that blur the line between performance and processing. None of these made music ‘less human.’ They expanded what humans could do, and they created entire genres in the process.
This policy ignores nuance and is way too generic. There’s a huge difference between someone typing ‘make me a Drake x Nirvana song’ and uploading the raw output, versus an artist using generative tools to create ambient textures, environmental beds, glitch fragments, melodic seeds, or samples, then shaping them with effects, resampling, layering, mixing, and actual composition.
Many artists already use generative AI to create soundscapes that sit alongside traditional instrumentation, and the end result doesn’t present as AI. It’s natural, musical, and crafted. There is still a ton of human creative work involved. Is that now banned too? Are those artists now illegitimate? Because that’s what your policy implies.
Blanket bans don’t fix the real problem. The core ethical issue is not ‘AI output exists.’ The real problem is models trained on artists’ work without consent or compensation. That’s the theft part. But that’s a licensing, rights, and attribution problem on the back end, not something you solve by banning creators from using certain tools in their workflow.
If you actually want to be ethical and pro-artist, you should be considering policies like requiring disclosure (contains generative elements), requiring proof of licensing where relevant, enforcing rights and attribution, cracking down on impersonation and fraud, and putting pressure on companies who build models irresponsibly. Instead, you’re choosing the most blunt solution possible, ‘no AI’. That does not protect artists. It just pushes experimentation off-platform and punishes honest creators who are already working in good faith.
You also say ‘any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited.’ Impersonation and misrepresentation are already covered by existing rules. That is not a new moral stance, it is basic enforcement.
And where does this end?
If someone generates a retro groove, then plunders it for samples and turns it, by hand, into a French Touch house track or a Kanye-esque beat with radical slicing, filtering, repitching, and resampling, how is that ‘not art’? That’s literally how entire genres were built. This kind of transformation, reinterpretation, and recombination is foundational to modern music culture.
The policy also collapses under its own logic the moment you ask basic questions about real-world workflows.
What about cover art? Video? Visualizers? You’re making a policy about ‘music and audio’, but generative tools do not stop there. So where does it end?
AI-generated cover art: allowed or banned?
AI music videos: banned?
AI-assisted lyric writing: banned?
AI mastering tools: banned?
AI noise removal and stem separation: banned?
AI voice cleanup: banned?
AI-based synth plugins that generate sequences: banned?
There are already countless workflows that include some form of generation, prediction, or algorithmic output. Pretending you can draw a clean line is fantasy.
And even if you try, this will be impossible to police fairly.
Leaning on ‘we reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI-generated’ is an insane standard. AI detection tools are unreliable and full of false positives. They routinely flag heavily compressed audio, ambient and drone music, glitch and experimental genres, vocals with unusual processing, hyper-clean productions, tracks with heavy quantization or pitch correction, and so much more. So what happens when a real human artist gets removed because their mix is too clean, their voice is too edited, or their genre sounds ‘suspicious’? This invites arbitrary enforcement, and that kills trust.
It also creates a perverse incentive. People who are honest about their process get punished, while bad actors simply hide it. That isn’t protecting anyone, it’s just encouraging deception.
What’s especially frustrating is that the loudest voices against AI are often the least informed about what it actually can and can’t do. AI will always be AI, and human creativity will always be human creativity. One doesn’t erase the other. The idea that people will suddenly stop valuing human-made music because AI exists is tin-foil-hat crackpot logic. Humans do not stop caring about authenticity just because tools improve. If anything, authenticity becomes more valuable, not less.
Fans should be allowed to choose what they enjoy. Even if someone doesn’t personally care for ‘insert text, receive song’ content, why should they care if someone else enjoys it? Bandcamp’s whole identity is built on letting people find niche communities, weird art, outsider music, and experimental scenes. So why are you now deciding what is ‘allowed to be enjoyed’?
A better approach is transparency, not prohibition. If you actually want to fortify trust, do it without punishing creators. Add relevant tags, for example: ‘AI-assisted’, ‘Generative elements’. Require disclosure for major generative use, like you do with samples and credits. Let fans filter it out if they want. Keep enforcing impersonation, fraud, and rights violations. Focus on the real ethical problem: training data, consent, licensing.
That protects artists and respects creative freedom.
Bandcamp should feel like a place where art can be messy, new, hybrid, and experimental, where creators thrive because the platform doesn’t police taste. This policy flips that upside down. Trying to define ‘real music’ and ban tools outright is not pro-artist. It’s anti-experimentation, anti-nuance, and it will punish legitimate creators while doing basically nothing to stop the actual slop.
Blanket decisions like this are unhelpful. Music is too complex for purity tests. If you want to support artists, support rights, consent, and transparency, not censorship dressed up as morality.
I agree with everything you said!!
The above post was generated by ChatGPT.
This is the most accurate statement I’ve ever seen about AI music and its creators. There are always going to be bad actors in any situation. People looking to make a quick buck. But, there are definitely people out there who use AI in a much more involved way than just putting in some 3 word prompt and clicking a button.
I’m a musician. I have been playing, writing, singing, recording, producing, etc. for decades. I’m using AI as a means to help improve my production quality, increasing productivity, iterate ideas and more, not to simply replace myself. My songs are not soulless, just because there is an added element of AI. They are still my words, my chords, and my voice.
What an absolute gish gallop!
Why do you keep mentioning ‘real’ when the word isn’t included a single time in the statement? I can’t believe you wasted so much time on a strawman argument, when the topic is about actual human output vs lazy prompting.
They do support artists. Users of generative AI are not artists, they’re prompters misrepresenting themselves as artists. No one of ANY artistic merit supports the use of generative AI in anything creative.
Bandcamp already has tags like ‘aimusic’ and ‘ai music’, so I wonder what they will do with tracks tagged with those
Some interesting points here. As a DJ, and one who has used Bandcamp since its inception, I want to support humans using tools. But not AI. Its a disconnect from the authenticity I want to support and connect with. Bandcamp could simply offer a separate AI-only page on its site for artists to feature their AI-generated music.
Either you spent way too much time writing a novel that no one’s going to read, or you asked a GenAI chatbot to come up with that for you. Either way: I spy genAI apologia, tons of strawmen, and emotional appeals.
Based
Thank you for taking a stand against AI slop! It has no place in creativity.
Amen and thank you.
Thank you, genuinely. Bandcamp is a place for real people, making genuine, purposeful art, and I’m glad you understand that.
what about artists who are deliberately and explicitly using generative AI as part of their artistic expression, like Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst? their explorations into AI sound have been really interesting. like i mean, if an artist is absolutely open about using generative AI and it’s part of the concept for the art, is it allowed on Bandcamp?
They don’t want it. AI is cursed here. When I first started, I was using AI to help generate the music while I created the lyrics. I don’t even do that anymore. I took off all my music that was related to that and will post something only when I have it ready without AI’s help. I’m sure, now, people are going to say that even my new stuff is cursed because I used AI in the beginning…
Did you not read the statement? The short answer would be no, they can find another platform to market their generated audio.
Do you realize how contradictory and ridiculous that sounds, “using generative AI as part of their artistic expression”?
Based
Thank you!
thanks.
Thank you, Bandcamp!!!
Thank you.
Thank you very much for helping to defend “humanity” in the arts 🖤
Best thing to happen this year and it’s still January ❤️❤️❤️
So anyway, we need to make a stand on this AI stuff
Really Why?
Well a talentless mediocre vocal minority see to think it’s holding them back from attaining their full potential
Oh no, that’s terrible, then we must act to help this mediocre vocal minority reach their full potential
Let’s ban AI music!
Great, Let’s ban Ai music.
[Silence for a few minutes]
How will we do that though?
[More silence, clock ticks]
We could scan all files on the way in with some totally foolproof algorithm hacker and stop the upload?
Yes, good plan apart from the small detail that these algos return more than 10% false positives and we would be pissing off many of the very mediocre people we are aiming to uplift.
Oh and we have no budget to do that.
[More silence]
I KNOW! Let’s get the community to REPORT something when they think it’s AI!
Brilliant. I mean there is no way that someone, who is perhaps a bit talentless and mediocre, would use that facility to report someone they have a grudge against or who they are jealous of. No people like THAT on THIS platform of morals.
So we let the humans decide? Excellent, they will be so much more accurate than an AI detection algorithm.
By god, David. You are either REALLY worried about your soulless music being mistaken for generated trash, or you are a user of gen AI, and thus not an artist, and thus your opinion on the matter is meaningless.
In either case, get out of the comment section and go practice!
Thank you! It’s starting to get really annoying with all AI music on all platforms, thanks for making a statement like this.