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 love you i love you i love you i love you. this is why you’re the only company that matters. i can’t stand how this trash is being pushed absolutely everywhere. thank you so much for continuing to support and enable artists. and thank you for choosing human artists over robots. you’ve probably taken the hardest stance on this issue out of any company i’ve seen, and this is why you’re the absolute best! keep being the best. absolutely loving clubs aswell. happy new year bandcamp team. i love you so much.
this is exactly why I pay for bandcamp pro. you’re the only company who actually gives back to me. thank you.
Hi guys, I have been shadow banned It’s ridiculous, I have 6 albums, and have tested only the suno “cover” vocals on my own composed tracks, for testing purposes , and I have clearly mentionned it in the tracks. I can’t be found on searchs any more, I think somebody mallicious has reported me, while I use bandcamp for training and just wishing for a few plays . I am one of the only music composers shadow banned on bandcamp, i hope they will remove my shadow ban, because bandcamp is nice to order my works. I use AI to improve my pictures but It’s me on my covers, and you can easily recognize me, I have sent an ID to their support email , I dont know what to do else , Imagine that, an innoncent music composer, being shadow banned, While tons of agressive musics and pictures are delivered each days as punk music on bandcamp, I only have a few sexy pics, My lyrics aint agressive or something, problem is that any malicious folk can report your account , a stalker, a hater, anyone , and bandcamp have shadow banned me, I can’t believe, while I don’t even sell or something.
I feel this decision is rooted in misunderstanding rather than nuance.
I’m a writer, musician, and storyteller who has recently started using AI-assisted tools because of illness and disability, not to replace creativity, but to extend it. Writing, intention, lived experience, artistic judgment, and post-production decisions still matter, and I do all of that myself.
I write my own lyrics, create melodies, make substantial editing and mastering decisions, and shape the final work. AI is a collaborative tool, not the author.
So what is being dismissed here? The writer? The composer? The human who conceived the work? Are singers or instrumentalists the only artists that count?
The music and film industries have always used technology, synthesizers, samplers, Auto-Tune, algorithmic mastering, digital instruments. Those tools were once attacked too. Now they’re industry standards.
A blanket ban ignores the difference between automation and authorship. Music isn’t defined solely by the instrument or the voice. My words come from lived experience, from a deeply human place in my soul.
I had two songs on Bandcamp that used AI as part of the process, and I removed them. Not because they weren’t human works, but because this policy erases the human contribution entirely.
You’re not hurting me personally. But it’s disheartening to see this turn into a cultural witch hunt against a tool, rather than a thoughtful conversation about intent, labor, and authorship.
I’ve shared a short video on my channel offering another perspective, if you’re open to it:
https://youtu.be/hbz41zyO3e0
Sorry, this is a duplicate and the link doesn’t work. If an admin sees the post I’m replying to, can you please delete it? Thank you.
Ok. Curious… If say an artist decides to create ligit music, following the – “no Ai policy” where does album art/covers fall into that category? I understand bandcamp being against Ai. I am as well. Album art being made with Ai tools, how extensive is *”No Ai?
I want Bandcamp to support creators. I want artists to be paid fairly. I want the exploitative parts of the generative AI industry regulated into the ground. But Bandcamp’s new policy on generative AI is not the principled stand it pretends to be. It’s a blunt instrument, and it sets a dangerous precedent for policing how art is allowed to be made and consumed.
My frustration is not that Bandcamp wants to protect artists. It’s that they’re doing it with a vague, suspicion-based ban that collapses nuance, invites false positives, and turns a real upstream ethics problem into downstream punishment for creators.
The policy says music ‘generated wholly or in substantial part by AI’ is not permitted, and that Bandcamp ‘reserves the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI-generated.’ Those two phrases are the entire problem. They are vague enough to cover almost anything, and strong enough to justify removal without clear process or proof. If you were trying to design a policy that creates uncertainty, encourages pile-ons, and punishes honest disclosure, you would struggle to do better than that.
People keep framing this as if the only thing being targeted is ‘Suno slop’ or low-effort prompt-to-upload content. I don’t personally use text-to-sound music AI tools. They’re not for me, and they don’t really interest me creatively. But I’m also not arrogant enough to assume my personal preferences should define what other people are allowed to explore. If someone else finds inspiration in those tools, or uses them as part of a broader workflow, or discovers a new sound they wouldn’t have reached otherwise, why should my beliefs get to stand in the way of that? The moment we start treating individual taste as a universal rule, we stop talking about ethics and start talking about control. And that’s exactly what makes these blanket bans feel so wrong.
I understand the impulse, nobody wants platforms flooded with junk. But the assumption that only junk will be caught is wishful thinking. The kinds of music most likely to be falsely flagged are exactly the kinds Bandcamp has always been good at hosting: ambient, drone, experimental electronic, extreme processing, hyper-clean vocal productions, highly quantized rhythm music, anything that sits near the edge of conventional ‘human performance’ cues, and I’m already seeing genuine artists removing their genuine content. When you base enforcement on user reports and ‘suspicion’, you’re not creating a clean filter. You’re creating a vibe check. And vibe checks always end up reflecting the biases and grudges of whoever is loudest.
Then there’s the false positive problem. AI detection is not a solved problem. Even if it gets better, it will never be perfect, and ‘good enough’ is not good enough when the cost of being wrong is an artist losing their account, their catalogue, and their income. A policy that explicitly leans on suspicion is basically asking for malicious reporting.
Music creation is nuanced.
There is a massive difference between typing a prompt, exporting the first result, and selling it, versus using generative tools as part of a broader creative workflow. People are already using generative systems to create textures, atmospheres, incidental fragments, or raw material that gets chopped, resampled, distorted, layered, and transformed into something new. That is not hypothetical, that’s how electronic music and sampling has worked for decades. We have always taken sound from somewhere, processed it, recontextualised it, and made it ours. Whole genres are built on that logic.
Artists have always pushed against whatever the current limits of technology are, because that’s literally where new styles come from. Gamers use TAS runs to test the absolute boundaries of what’s possible, find exploits, and reshape what ‘skill’ even means in speedrunning. Kit bashers have been recycling off-the-shelf toys and products into entirely new models for decades, turning mass-produced objects into something personal and original through imagination and craft. Even in music, every single guitar effects pedal you’ve ever loved started out as an experiment by someone curious enough to mess with circuits, break the ‘proper’ sound, and see what happened when you pushed the tech past its intended use. That impulse to explore, misuse, remix, and reinvent tools is not a threat to creativity, it’s one of the most consistent drivers of it, and a fundamental role of the artist and the creative process.
If someone generates a retro funk 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 suddenly not ‘real’ music? If the person is making compositional decisions, arranging, mixing, editing, and shaping the emotional arc, then the person is doing art. Pretending the tool used at one stage overrides everything else is just another form of purity testing, and is downright elitest.
Which brings me to the part of this debate that I find genuinely unsettling: the way some people want their personal taste to become a rule for everyone else.
It always seems to be the people with the lowest exposure to the tools who complain the loudest, and that’s what makes this whole backlash feel so unsteady. A lot of the loudest anti-AI voices speak with absolute certainty while clearly not understanding how these systems are actually used in real workflows, especially the nuanced cases where generative output is treated as raw material, then heavily edited, resampled, and shaped into something intentional. What’s more unsettling is how rarely the opposition forms a coherent argument for removal beyond a dressed-up version of ‘I don’t personally like it’ or ‘it feels wrong’, as if personal taste is enough to justify platform-wide prohibitions. Disliking something is fine, filtering it out is fine, but turning preference into policy, especially without clear definitions, consistent enforcement standards, or an honest engagement with edge cases, is not a serious foundation for deciding what other people are allowed to create or enjoy.
I’ve been told, flatly, that ‘GenAI art is not art’ and that it should be ‘removed from the face of the earth.’ I understand that reaction comes from anger at morally bankrupt tech companies and the way they trained these models. I share the anger. But it doesn’t follow that the correct response is to erase entire categories of creative work, especially when those categories include legitimate use cases that help people make things they otherwise could not.
Here’s a simple and real example. A mute artist using AI voice tools to give their lyrics a voice. Under a vague ‘substantial’ rule, do they get banned? People respond with ‘they can just get someone to read it.’ But why should they have to? Why is the acceptable solution always ‘work around the tech that exists’ instead of ‘use the tech that exists in a transparent way’? If your policy punishes accessibility and alternative workflows, it’s not pro-artist. It’s pro-conformity.
The deeper irony is that Bandcamp is trying to solve an upstream problem with a downstream ban.
The core ethical issue is training. Consent. Licensing. Compensation. Attribution. Accountability. Those are the real fights. If a model was built on stolen work, that’s not the fault of the listener, and it’s not even the fault of the creator using a tool that the market shoved into their face. The bad actor is the company that built a system on rights violations. If you want to be taken seriously, target that: require disclosure, set standards, demand provenance where possible, and push for regulation. Don’t turn creators into collateral damage because lawmakers are asleep at the wheel.
What would a sane, genuinely Bandcamp-aligned approach look like? Easy, transparency and choice.
If the concern is that people want to buy music ‘made by humans’, then give them the tools to do that without policing other creators out of existence. Introduce clear tags like ‘AI-assisted’ and ‘Generative elements’. Let artists disclose the role it played. Let listeners filter it out. Make impersonation and misrepresentation a hard line. Enforce plagiarism. Enforce label and artist identity. Make it easy for people to avoid what they dislike without turning the platform into an ideological checkpoint.
Right now, Bandcamp is replacing a discovery and curation problem with a moral absolutism, and that’s a downgrade.
The argument that ‘there are plenty of other platforms’ misses the point. Bandcamp is one of the last places where artists can sell directly and build a sustainable relationship with listeners. Saying ‘go elsewhere’ is how you create gated cultural spaces where only certain kinds of creativity are allowed. That’s not ‘keeping Bandcamp human.’ It’s deciding which humans get to participate.
I want Bandcamp to thrive. I want it to remain a place for weird scenes, outsider music, and experimental work that doesn’t fit anywhere else. That’s why this policy worries me. Not because I want a flood of low-effort slop, but because the cure they’ve chosen is worse than the disease. Vague rules plus suspicion-based enforcement does not create trust. It creates fear, self-censorship, and arbitrary punishment.
The solution is not banning tools. The solution is honesty, labels, filters, and targeting the actual source of harm. Hate the game, not the player.
I need to add here that I am genuinely interested in alternate views on this. I am incredibly open to having my mind changed on this, but as it stands, no supporters of this policy seem to be able to respond with anything more than ‘I don’t like it’. If you have an opinion on this that helps me steer what I see as elitest conformity, please feel free to share.
I agree wholeheartedly with you on this. It seems to be mostly people who fear AI or simply don’t understand it’s use who want it banned. Maybe, someday, AI will replace human connection. I don’t see it right now. I see a tool that can be used to help an artist bring his dream to life. Sure, anyone can make a song with AI but, most of that effortless music sounds just that. I do understand Bandcamps desire to separate itself. If you’re familiar with Deezer, they slap a label saying something like; May contain the use of AI or made with AI. The lister can choose if they want to hear it. Pretending that music isn’t derivative or that you’re creating music out of thin air is nonsense. I suppose you could use all acoustic instruments and create something so different that no one wants to hear.
Amen. You said everything I came here to say. I’ve been making music with found sounds, sampling, and remix for over 20 years and consequently experience our vibratory universe as musical. Anyone who hears sonority in birdsong and industrial machine rhythm (like Björk? Dancer in the Dark) is going to be curious about sculpting sound with whatever tools they can, and this is a huge group of immensely creative, fascinating artists. The machine we have to be worried about lurks also in human thinking, in how people collapse the multidimensional complexity of our world into flimsy categorical abstractions that don’t hold up to the science. Banning all music composed with generative elements is a much more mechanical act than, for instance, taking a year to lovingly craft something that includes live instrumentation, remixed text-to-audio outputs, and X-ray observatory data sonifications like I did:
https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/track/scalar-reconfigurations
Functionally this is only going to make things worse for Bandcamp, as it will drive those of us who want to hack and tinker and explore off into other platforms like Subvert.fm. If this company wants to truly support the act of musical creativity, it needs to invite transparency in process and create a scene hospitable to human innovation, rather than virtue signal in ways it will never even be able to effectively enforce.
I see a lot of sheep on here crying about how AI is a bad thing. Same kinda people cried when Photoshop came out “you are taking the art away from true artists by using a computer” then with CGI ” movies will never be the same, they will make digital copies of actors and use their likeness….it will ruin movies”. And both are now widely accepted.
To me it seems like bandcamps is being bullied into this by “artists” who are afraid of the future and change. I play drums, guitar and piano. I’m not worried about ai. It’s a tool. Nothing more. Those that make alop will vanish soon enough as they will get bored. I think this is a bad call in bandcamps end and it’s gonna bite them in the ass. I’m with David on this one. This is brute forcing a rule on people. Not a good look for a business that needs people to survive.
Bravo. Thank you for taking a position to or artists and against AI slop.
I don’t envy those implementing the policy, as prompt-jockeys will try to get around the rules — they have surrendered their integrity to the machine.
Other platforms are full of genAI aren’tists; let’s have this one for the humans.
Thank You! Keep BC Human 👍
One can look at this philosophically or practically. Bandcamp is choosing to argue the former the ‘keeping bandcamp human’ angle but is probably being motivated just as much by the latter, a surge in uploads to the platform boosted by it being so easy to produce something with AI. Bandcamp is already full of albums that have around 10 (or less) sales do they need another million such uploads? At some point the cost of server space to sales ratio must become uneconomic. One might imagine that if unchecked at some point Bandcamp would have to start charging to upload which would fundamentally change the model. Rather than say this though Bandcamp has chosen to feed into the AI anxiety that surrounds music.
I purchased several albums from an artist that I KNEW was AI – that I actually enjoy listening to! Now dozens of tracks are GONE! Where’s my refund, Bandcamp!?
We’re looking at you random Glitch generators. lol. This article was written by chatgpt.
I wonder where you will draw the line. Every other Reverb Plug-in is using AI technology these days.
I wonder how you want to prevent the “report button” from being misused against for example music with political messages.
I feel your decision is based on ignorance and fear.
I’m a writer, musician, and storyteller who has recently started using AI-assisted tools as part of the creative process for some of my music due to illness and disability, not to replace creativity, but to extend it.
Writing, intention, lived experience, and artistic judgment still matter. I write all my lyrics, create melodies, significant post editing and mastering and put significant input into the entire creative process of creating a song using AI as a collaborative tool to help expand my creative musical canvas because in my world, I can’t walk or even leave my bed. Even though I have Yamaha keys, I don’t have a table that goes across my bed, so it sits on the floor. I don’t have a guitar anymore because I lost everything while I was in the hospital here in France fighting for my life. The point is, that we all have our individual stories and our collective stories. My songs, words and even the words that influence any ai music comes from emotions and life.
But what are you saying then? The singer or the musician is more important than the writer? Or that I, a singer/songwriter am not considered a human artist if I am using ai as collaborative tool, or if I use synthetic vocals or instrumentals?
How do we define what is music or art or not? Who gets to make this assumption?
I also find this a bit of the pot calling the kettle black when the entire music and film industry is fake. It’s all hypocrisy.
Once upon a time, musicians were against synthesizers. Now we got auto-tune, samples, and all kind of ai software that we use for mastering, etc. Don’t even start on the Botox and all kind of crazy body modifications.
You’re making a mistake to just ban it all. Music isn’t just defined by instrumentals or vocals. My words come from lived experience, a place deep in my soul.
I did have 2 songs on your site that I created using ai as a tool, but I have removed them even though I wrote the lyrics, melody, did significant mastering, post editing, etc. (sorry to be repetitive) Yet you have just ignorantly issued a blanket ban on all music created using ai as a tool, whether it be with synthetic voices or instrumentals but the human lyricist or the person who created the melody, etc seems to not be important in this equation.
You’re not hurting me personally, but I’m saddened at the witch hunt that ai has become.
I also wanted to add that I’ve used ai to cover a few of my older songs, wanting to experiment with different sounds and vibes. That’s called artistic innovation. It’s all part of the creative process.
i commented on this yesterday, but i just wanna say it again. thank you so much. the current state of art feels utterly hopeless and to have at least a single place to go to, where i can trust things and enjoy actual human made art is a lifechanger. in a world where it feels like you can’t trust anything i can always trust bandcamp to make the right choices. thank you.
And next you ban all electronic music, because “no human has play an instrument”. This is pathetic and silly, and all “artists” yelling this is an good step do not understand what music, art and creativity is. Bis L.
THANK YOU BANDCAMP
So my question, those of us who use AI to modify our works in FL studio, voice changer, then ran through a DAW with AI to help us auto sync, auto tune, metronome, AI mastering are just sol? I mean DAWs today are full of AI development tools, you are excluding anyone from creating and mastering with AI. It sure does seem like you are excluding a major portion of the modern workflow people have. I wonder how this will affect this site when you have to go back to not using a computer(You can’t do anything in windows 11 without intrusive AI “helping you”) or a modern DAW, you have to go back to taping your recordings and not fixing them with AI implementation. This is a Modern Day witch hunt that surely won’t come back and bite an already diminishing site. I guess spending 10k a day in a studio or you can’t sell on bandcamp to make pennies anymore, not like many people make any money at all on bandcamp in the first place. I really believe this is manufactured postering for a slim portion of hyper fixated cry babies all for the sake of brownie points that will end is mass reporting and crying because someone sounds better then and more put together then others. Anti AI is nothing more then a fantasy in the current modern workflow.
“you are excluding anyone from creating and mastering with AI. ”
no. mastering is not generative AI.
Generative AI is any AI that generates an output, that included DAWS aka GAWs and mastering tools. Generative AI is implemented is in everything currently. I see you should look this up. What you are talking about a LLM and GPT. What i’m talking about is discrimination.