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 wonder if you’ll stand by this when WMG start pressuring you and other distributors and platforms once generative AI becomes commonplace in the material of artists signed to their label 🤔 I’ll be keeping an eye on this.
Do you even understand where you’re commenting? “Keeping an eye on this” is ambitious for someone who missed that WMG barely uses Bandcamp, if at all.
Hopefully no label that is decent with sign ai, udio, suno music. End of story
I’m genuinely curious. What makes you think WMG are going to start pressuring bandcamp? They have no authority here.
I appreciate the update and hope that it works, I do wonder about the burden of proof and what needs to be taken into consideration for people uploading music, should one take some extra steps to prevent music being false flagged and taken down? is there something like exif system that you can rely on?
False positives and malicious reporting will destroy this platform. Give that studies show 97% of people cannot tell an Ai song when they hear it (and that includes musicians no matter what they believe), it does not augur well for your human led moderation of the technology on this site.
Even the detection algos have a 10% false positive rate. NOBODY care about false negatives but false positives have the potential to kill this platform stone dead.
You heard it here first. Once again a massive failure to identify the true enemy. AI is not what is holding these talentless people back, lack of talent and mediocre music is.
Very disappointing. People cheering this one on will rue the day they did.
boo hoo you Ai user with no talent
It shall no be there because it is beginning to ruinning seriuos platforms. Yeah and I don’t wanna pay for nonsense robot music. If there is doubt what it is it must go away. Serious artist and bands tell who are in the band or solo artits. Thanks bandcamp. So, so many thanks a thousend times
I can see your page is full of AI slop https://davidgharrington.bandcamp.com/
AHAHAHA i cannot wait to see that studies
I agree David. It’s become almost impossible to tell now and some DAWs use ai to help master. The line is very blurry now. This is a bad move on bandcamps part. I actually read that the detection algos have a higher false positive rate. Somewhere around 30% but who knows if that’s even true anymore.
I think the way you losers can’t help but out yourselves dropping five “albums” in a week will be a good enough tipoff to get rid of most of the slop.
You might have given us a little notice before you began deleting our accounts. I thought my music was safely backed up on this platform only to find that it’s gone forever.
Also, my AI music was clearly and transparently declared on my album pages and profiles as AI generated and human-curated. My fans were fine with that. A better policy for everyone would be transparency, not a simplistic “no AI” ban without any advance. notice.
Your music ain’t down yet but people that pays for music can only welcome there ain’t nonsense robot music on a pay site. It is ruining bandcamp more and more. Find an ai nonsense platform so music buyers get the real deal
Music buyers can simply not buy music from an artist who has “clearly and transparently declared” if their music is AI assisted or created. Ideally Bandcamp would require it to be self-identifed by the artist and music listeners can skip (and ideally opt out) any AI music if they wish.
Fyi, I do not use AI to create my own music. I buy from and support a large number of artists yearly through BC and direct with artists. I also sometimes *knowingly* listen to, download, and sometimes buy AI music (if I find it interesting and enjoy it).
All that was required was clear labelling, same as Deezer. The Stalinist purges are unnecessary
Why? You never gave the artists who the AI stole from, at your prompting, any notice; and it’s not YOUR music anyway! Anyone who actually creates music, rather than prompting it, like a fraud, keeps back-ups on multiple physical drives, because they actually value THEIR creations! I’m glad you lost your slop, and let’s be honest, you’re just gonna use AI to generate more of it anyway.
Your transparency, you and your fans disgusting acceptance of these methods doesn’t matter a bit. You’re not a musician so your opinion on this means nothing.
A better policy would be exactly what they’re doing, plus anyone caught using generative AI for anything creative being charged for the theft they so happily commit, and made to do community service cleaning toilets, since you guys love crap so much.
What about music that uses SynthV vocals but the rest of the music is performed by a human? Synth V is is NOT a generative AI tool, but a VSTi that uses ethical AI to provide vocals that were provided by real people (similar to how SIRI works).
The policy explicitly refers to generative AI. You yourself state that Synth V is not generative AI, therefore the policy does not apply.
it generates vocals… not that difficult to understand really.
Don’t try to lawyer this. You’re not wanted. Leave.
thank you bandcamp! y’all continue to be awesome and it warms my heart 💗
I really appreciate this. I want to listen to music made by humans without the risk of consuming slop. You made my day!
Bandcamp is a place for true human creativity and soul sharing. Thank you!
It’s obvious why you guys needed to ban AI music. There must be an absolute deluge of instant, automated garbage flooding your platform. But I have two objections.
One is that real artists can also create music using new technology, write their own lyrics, seriously invest themselves in it, experiment endlessly, and produce independent, novel, and interesting songs. You are also eliminating these very real artists and taking away their funding from their own appreciative audience.
Two, your rhetoric that states or implies that any art created using AI to some significant degree is not human-created, is mere sound, and is only a product to be consumed feeds into anti-AI art and artist hate and sabotage.
A possible solution would be for all artists to petition to be excepted from automatic exclusion, which is in the end tantamount to censorship.
I fleshed out my ideas more in a blogpost here: https://artofericwayne.com/2026/01/14/bandcamp-banning-ai-music-is-needed-but-it-is-brute-force-censorship-of-art/
A solution for this would be bandcampAI, a platform similar to bandcamp with exclusive AI content
Could be. But there are all sorts of hybrids, including established musicians exploring new possibilities by combining AI with their own music they upload to AI. Dumping them in with pure slop is not fair.
You’re asserting that people who use GenAI are artists, and not backing that up at all. Art is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination” (Oxford). Definitions are descriptive, not prescriptive, but I’d argue GenAI is not that. Someone who uses GenAI might ALSO be an artist, but what they produce with GenAI is not art.
No. In the example here, and in my case, I’m demonstrating that when an actual proven artist with a history of artmaking adopts AI to expand their skills and make new kinds of art, it is art.
For your argument about why anything anyone produces using AI is automatically not art, you’ll need to come up with a reason why that is.
If you are actually interested in the topic, you can read my article addressing this on Substack: https://arikakiara.substack.com/p/why-everyone-is-wrong-about-ai-and
If your argument is that AI is theft and therefore any art created with AI is not art, you can read this post: https://arikakiara.substack.com/p/why-all-ai-art-is-not-theft-and-the
If an artist tags (maybe even a new official tag) their music as ai (partially or fully) I think it should be allowed. I don’t personally create music using AI but I have no problem with people that want to use those tools as a way to explore creatively.
Copying someone elses music is already not okay even if someone uses zero AI. (Not referring to covers, I’m saying a song that is a copy of another with minor changes). This has been a problem for as long as music has been made for profit and fame.
Fans who purchase music that was *knowling* created with AI tools should not be punished. I have supported thousands of artist using non-ai tools and instruments. I have knowingingly purchased some music from artist using AI tools (sometimes on a secondary account where there primary used non-ai).
AI tools can be abused. So can synthesizers, music sequencers, drum machines, etc etc. Yes, training a AI model with stolen music is not okay. Stealing someone’s samples and loading them into a “too cheap and good to be real” software/synth found on alibaba or whatever is also not okay. But that software or synth is jot the problem.
Make the policy require the artist to prominently show they are using AI and let other people decide if they want to support them.
Deal with blatant copying of music as usual.
“If an artist tags their music as ai […]” — If the music is generative AI, then there is no artist; there is a user misrepresenting themselves as the artist of a curated output. Claiming authorship over a generative AI output is analogous to writing a prompt to commission artwork from an illustrator and then claiming to be the artist who produced the illustration: expressing intent or constraints is not authorship. One might argue that there can be artistry in the curation, but in that case the artwork is the act of curation, not the music itself.
Therefore, the statement “an artist tags their music as generative AI” is self-contradictory: if it is generative AI, there is no artist; if there is an artist, the music is not generative AI.
I had two albums that sampled breakbeats that were generated with AI, but they were also heavily modified with effects, rearranged and sequenced, etc. Would that be “in substantial part”? Otherwise I make all of my music by myself. I have dabbled a little in algorithmic sequencing but that essentially turned out to be random sequencing. I don’t think procedural/algorithmic/the old meaning of ‘generative’ music (doesn’t use a dataset trained on existing/pirated music) is banned, right?
Thank you. At last a platform where content comes with a badge of human authenticity. Overwhelmingly people aren’t even interested in music generated by AI anyhow, it is being shoved down their throats by the other platforms.
There are some major problems with this policy.
Can you provide a definition of “AI” that would catch all of the cases you are trying to prevent, and none of the ones you aren’t? Is “AI” commercial products using transformer models? Or transformer models themselves? Or all mathematical models? What exact math isn’t allowed to be involved in the music production process? Would machine learning models count? Are you aware of all of the places complex models and transformative mathematical functions are applied in the modern music production process?
Does using auto-tune and quantization count as AI? Why or why not? What is the limiting principle? Does it depend on the code-level implementation of the auto-tune and quantizing? Do you require source code to all tools used for such purposes?
If I ask a commercial LLM for a chord progression and then play and record that progression is that “wholly and substantially” generated by AI?
If I ask a commercial LLM to produce a MIDI file of a chord progression and then import into my DAW is that “wholly and substantially” generated by AI?
If I use the neural processing hardware in my computer to do things like generate drum beats and accompaniment in a tool like Logic, on device, is that “wholly and substantially” generated by AI What if I do the same thing with a transformer model and tool use?
If I use an audio generation model to generate WAV samples of sounds or instruments and then load them into a sampler and modify their pitch, tempo, time stretch them, etc and incorporate them into my music is that “wholly and substantially” generated by AI?
These are serious questions that it doesn’t sound like you’ve grappled with.
Music has always incorporated new technology. Would Bandcamp be embarrassed if they were around in the 80s and had a “No use of Computers and MIDI” policy? Would Bandcamp be embarrassed if they were around in the 90s and had a “No sampling and remixing” policy?
If you have a specific behavior you want to prevent on the platform, such as people generating full, complete audio files of songs generated mathematically then write your policy such that it targets that behavior. But think carefully about your categories and definitions. This policy, as stated here, can be interpreted to essentially ban the use of computers in music production simply because there’s no limiting principle between “the math and software we like based on vibes” and “the math and software we don’t like based on vibes.”
This essay is a classic Gish gallop dressed up as technical sophistication. Asking whether quantization is generative AI isn’t a serious question, it’s a rhetorical smokescreen. You’re deliberately ignoring the basic distinction the policy makes: tools used by humans during the creative process vs output directly generated by machines. This is about authorship, not algorithms. Auto-tune doesn’t create music by itself. Generative models do. Nobody is confused except people with an agenda.
That distinction isn’t in the policy, that’s the problem.
I understand your point. What if my music was fully done with a piece of software i wrote that generates melodies. i think brian eno is using a lot of generative software. Should that music be banned as well, or where do you see the difference?
Right, of course, AI is the reason for your lack of success. We can expect you to soar now then?
And bloody communists…
How many comments threads have you started now? You’re crashing out hard here. Sounds like someone feels called out. Go eat a snickers bud.
Ok so you write the lyrics, and you write the melody, then you feed that rough demo into Suno, a very common use case and becoming pretty all pervasive for people who actually make their living from music.
Banned or not?
David, what part of “wholly or in substantial part generated by AI” is unclear in an example where Suno produces the final recording? Writing some inputs doesn’t change the nature of the output being generative AI.
The rest of your replies just reinforce the point: once the false equivalence is called out, there’s nothing left but vibes and insults.
https://suno.com/@daveyboy103 – your suno is full of you ripping off big pop and rock star personalities. this is shameful.
Thank you for doing this and stating it so clearly. And David, no one will miss AI music if they can’t even tell, shit for brains.
Straight to insults, not a great look Alex. Just so we are clear, allowing this to be be policed by user reports opens you up to malicious reports driven by things other than the music being AI.
Second if it s human making the judgement n whether the reported music is AI then there will be a very high percentage of false positives. I will try an make this simple for your tiny little brain. How would you feel if your music were to be flagged as AI? I mean under this system I could do that right now.
The reason for your lack of success is not AI, it’s lack of talent.
Serious bands/artists post information of the produced materiel, art and who is in the band or solo band. If doubt then take it down
You beat that strawman, Dave.
Ironic that you insult others as having a “lack of talent” while standing in defense of something used by talentless, or as I prefer ‘skill-less’, hack frauds. Your passion to stand up for generative AI suggests that you are a user of it, which then suggests that you’re projecting when you question true artists “talent”.
Boo hoo for the death of Bandcamp. I am unaffected believe me.
Boo Hoo To Ya beecause only way Bandcamp will survive is about being serious like artists and bands. Nobody wants to pay for robot music and this is ruining bandcamp this nonsense ai robot music
It will be entirely dependent on user reporting but I am sure there will be no malicious reporting or false positives. I mean it’s not like Bandcamp to stacked to the rafters with egomaniacal a**holes is it?
Yes a truly brilliant development.
I think that you could add a little button in the upload phase that let’s us, as creators, pre-flag that some sampling, Ai, etc. was used, but that no rights have been violated. This could be checked against the backend to avoid deleting albums that do not deserve it. In the case of electronic music, this is more importantly so. We cannot simply lump Electronic Music into the Ai fold. That would be a blow for us human creators that love to explore music with synthetic sounds.
Other than that, the idea is good. I’m not happy to see so much slop permeate the platform. And we know it is slop because there is no other reason it is there but to take earnings away from the real artists who struggle day in day out to make music.
Thank you, this is an excellent call
This is what Bandcamp is; let the prompt fondlers find another outlet
ps – now do generative album covers
Art is a matter strictly of experience, not principles. To hold that one kind of art must invariably be superior or inferior to another kind means to judge before experiencing; and the whole history of art
is there to demonstrate the futility of rules of preference laid down beforehand: the impossibility, that is, of anticipating the outcome of aesthetic experience. 100 years ago, you would be the luddites forbidding photographers entry into art exhibits… how fearful and squeamish you look! LOL
Art may be experienced subjectively, but it is authored objectively. Generative AI produces outputs without an author, that’s the difference. For example, if an AI output plagiarizes existing work, who is accountable? Is the user who typed the prompt responsible for plagiarism? Users can claim ownership of the outputs, but curation is not creation. If authorship could be created by ownership alone, then publishers would be artists and curators would be painters. They aren’t.
Photography didn’t eliminate the artist, it introduced a new tool. Generative AI eliminates the author of the creative work itself. Yours is not a historical parallel, it’s a category error.
Art does not require an author. This is old news: you might want to look up Duchamp.
The rest of your comment is comprised of easily answered legal questions, unrelated to art per se, and critical thinking errors.
Generative AI doesn’t produce anything in a vacuum. Someone has to feed it instructions.
Also, how is this different from, say, Brian Eno’s generative music? That involves setting up a bunch of parameters, then letting the music unfold without human intervention. If Eno were the one setting up the equipment and making the creative choices that guide the output, wouldn’t he still be the author of any resulting work?
Or what if the artist uses only their own material to train whatever AI they’re using? Then they’d not only be setting the parameters the AI followed, they’d also be the original source? Should that also be excluded?
I have no interest in using AI myself; I’d rather take the time and put in the effort to explore the possibilities of whatever equipment I’m using. But I can see that a blanket approach to AI could be problematic.
Wrong. Photography involves staging, lighting, composition, intention, etc. You know… actual work!
The creative process is part of the expression of art. What about that is so difficult for you AI defenders to understand? I get that for you lot art is just a product to be consumed, so your opinions on the creation of it is meaningless. Basically, why do you even bother putting in your two cents when it’s not even worth two cents?
It’s you who is fearful. Fearful of applying yourself and achieving something. You simply want to be able to misrepresent yourself as an artist because you are too lazy to put in the effort.
Bandcamp doesn’t appear to be judging the quality, they’re judging the authorship. Via categorization, they get to say which categories belong on their platform, and which should find a different platform. Their justification is an assertion of ethics. Additionally, art is created by humans, intentionally, from their own creativity. GenAI is not art, full start.
It’s interesting you brought up the Luddites, who were fighting back against the automation and mechanization of their industry. They weren’t ‘afraid of machines’ as they were painted to be by the capitalists, they were worried about losing their jobs to machines, installed with no consideration to the impact it would have on their communities; they saw it as soulless theft of wealth from the workers and into the hands of the upper class, which it was and continues to be today.
Your metaphor falls apart as well because photographers are still artists expressing themselves creatively. Photographers also have a right to be frustrated with GenAI photos. Because GenAI photos are not an expression of human creativity.
AI *cover art* is just as bad and too many artists and labels (even those centered in electronic subgenres) have gotten away with it for the past 3 or so years.
If you’re going to say “please use our reporting tools to flag the content for review by our team”, then you should probably add a field to the reporting tool for AI content.
Thank you Bandcamp!
“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.”
Censoring art because of a myopic, knee-jerk political stance runs exactly counter to your stated mission.
Oops!
I love how utterly inarticulate and uninformed the people who approve of this censorship sound in the comments… LOL The contrast couldn’t be more stark.
“War is peace. Censorship is humanist. Ignorance is strength.”
—1984 slogan rewritten for Bandcamp
First off, I have no interest in using AI myself. I don’t even use a computer for what I do, except to record and edit the resulting audio. I prefer to put in the time and effort to explore the possibilities of the gear I’m using, and to stumble upon those happy accidents that result in something unusual. Except for a couple of eurorack modules I have that include digital components (e.g., for sampling, for enabling the user to save presets), and the use of a couple of effects plug-ins, my sound-making setup is entirely analogue.
I wonder, though, if these guidelines are too broad.
Surely, for example, the plagiarism aspect is already covered by existing Bandcamp policy. Couldn’t the note about AI-generated material that plagiarizes someone else’s work be inserted into that section of the T&C?
Then there’s “Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp”. This is where you enter a potentially enormous grey area, or at least risk using a shredder where a scalpel would be more appropriate.
Let’s start with “in substantial part”. What does that mean? Is it applied horizontally (linearly), or vertically (number of tracks)? Does it refer to a lead part, the rhythm section (if there is one), or what? How much of the music in question does it refer to? 30%? 80%? More than 50%? At least half the tracks?
Then there’s the nature of AI itself. AI doesn’t just spontaneously create new works of art; it requires someone to give it instructions and adjust settings. In the case of music, that’s going to come from the artist.
The plagiarism concern is valid—but what if the artist were able to use only their own material to train the AI they were using? Would a piece of AI-generated or enhanced music created by an artist supplying their own source material still be banned?
What if, say, Brian Eno were to use AI as part of one of his generative music pieces? How would it be any different than a generative music piece that didn’t use any AI? Both would still involve an artist setting up equipment, creating parameters and instructions to govern the operation of that equipment, then letting the music unfold without the need for human intervention. Would that be banned? (Disclaimer: I don’t know Brian Eno’s stance on AI; this is just a “what if” scenario.)
And, of course, one cannot overlook the matter of accessibility. Would a piece created, whether wholly or in part, by an artist with physical limitations (e.g., disabilities, injuries, arthritis) who used AI as an assistive device be banned? And how different would that be from artists creating MIDI sequences of lines, riffs, or passages that would otherwise be physically too difficult to play?
As a very hypothetical example, what if Prince had not died from that overdose of painkillers in 2016, but was left physically unable to play his instruments? If he subsequently chose to use AI to enable him to continue to make music, would that music run afoul of these guidelines? What if he still had some ability to play, but used AI to compensate in those areas where he still had trouble? (Disclaimer: I have no idea what Prince would have thought of AI, and he knew enough musicians anyway that he surely would have had no shortage of people willing to play for him; this is just a “what if” scenario.)
In some ways, this is reminiscent of the debates about synthesizers in the late 70s/early 80s (where some musicians unions opposed synthesizers because they thought they’d take jobs away from session musicians), and samplers in the late 80s/early 90s. Both involved new tools whose uses were not yet well-defined, and which were seen as threats by those who failed to consider their possibilities. If some of those musicians unions had had their way, synth players would have been excluded from membership. Now you’d be hard pressed to find a studio that didn’t have one.
So, although I applaud Bandcamp’s taking a stand on AI; I think the guidelines need further consideration and refinement. Because it’s not going to be so simple as “AI = plagiarism” or “AI = fake”.