AI generated music barred from Bandcamp
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Spotify, on the other hand, induced a level of visceral disgust I'd never felt before when I stumbled across an AI-generated album supposedly made by an artist I enjoy. In this case it was somebody that had been dead for 15 years - they were hijacking her Spotify page to promote it as a new release. I'm not an AI reactionary but I found this absolutely fucking gross. Having AI-generated music for four-hour YouTube videos of anime girls sitting in apartments on a rainy day is fine. Desecrating the body of work of a departed musician is decidedly not.
It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it.
FTFY.
Do not shift blame here. Spotify is actively complicit in this. Hell, they could sic a few crafty data scientists on this and build an ML model to weed these bad tracks out. It'd be great PR for them ("we're saving artists from stolen revenue and preserving the sanctity of their work") and would be a novel contribution to the field of fraud prevention. The problem is that they're not incentivized to do so.
And, by the way, card transaction fees exist to cover the exact case you're talking about. Card companies make you whole in the case of fraud.
FWIW, so does BC. Stuff gets eventually deleted, but last year there was a leaked pirated copy of an album for sale for over a week, over a month before release.
It had been there for years and hundreds of people had paid for it.
It's being mad that a store sold me a counterfeit rolex, actually. Spotify might claim to just be a "marketplace" like every other platform these days, but they're still the ones hosting that page that passes off slop as legitimate work by another artist. Spotify has a responsibility to govern what is hosted and sold on their platform.
But guess what, they fired Glenn and now the slop runs wild.
But I absolutely don't agree that Bandcamp does recommendations well. To me, it seems like they don't personalize at all. Maybe you're just lucky enough to share the taste of the (at least human) taste makers at Bandcamp. Spotify's pre-enshittification Discover Weekly was miles better than whatever they do. My experience with old brick and mortar record stores was that at best they stocked a little of the music I enjoyed, but didn't have a clue about it. Most often they didn't stock it at all.
I agree with that but I haven't yet seen a system that does recommendations well for me, so I don't see that as a differentiating point.
The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt.
Don’t miss Spotify one bit.
Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.
Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him.
It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.
Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.
most tools do it badly and just accept what the drive gives them in default mode, often with glitches
Like, ripping seems easy to me, you rip with something that supports a checksum database, and if it comes out with a correct checksum then it's right.
Also not everything is in AR/CTDB. Maybe 3% of the 1000+ CDs I've ripped had no records yet, though I do tend towards the obscure. I rip these again with EAC, which is set up to automatically do CTDB submission. (Usually I'm using the redumper tool which has some specialized features.)
Without external verification it's best to dump it twice and ensure they're bit equal, preferably with a different drive to minimize error correlation.
Only issues come from damaged retail discs and dead burned ones.
The industry has collectively decided that since CDs/DVDs are just about converting digital bits into other bits deterministically, there's no value left to differentiate, and everyone started selling absolutely nasty plasticky junk.
The new Sony unit I got was a loud rattly garbage, that even though it did the things it needed to do, made such an awful noise that I had to take it back. The other one I got (don't remember the brand) was no better.
I took that one back too, and I shelved the issue, but it was kind of remarkably terrible experience for me.
Is it a budget issue or sound quality issue?
I say this as my primary CD player is actually a Panasonic DVD player from the year 2000. This is the exception that proves the rule. At the turn of the century many quality DVD players were sold and marketed as primarily CD players with the added capability of being able to sell DVDs.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/317751858636 e.g. £65 doesn't even remotely get you close to listenable in vinyl.
I don't understand this, are you saying higher than ES or lower than ES?
I thought ES was their top "Elevated" Standard?
Also my library card is much better for legacy music exploration. It scales too.
There's a tool called cdparanoia[1] whose goal is to babysit the CD drive and ensure that it gets a complete, perfect, uninterrupted stream of bits off the drive, and will use a lot of tricks to go back and re-read any data that didn't come back cleanly. I always used it with abcde[2], which was a wrapper around it with album lookup, tagging, and ffmpeg support. I highly recommend anyone amassing a CD rip collection take a look at it, both are still packaged in present-day Ubuntu.
[1] https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html [2] https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/
Or you can run EAC in wine.
Make sure you enable its MusicBrainz support. I used to painstakingly input all the band / album / track title metadata but then discovered that people were already doing it for me.
However, then you go down the MB rabbit hole with obscure music that no one has ever inputted. Still, it's a quick and easy way to contribute and then it's available for everyone.
I listen mostly in the old school way, full albums of my favourite artists, so I suppose it would be quite unexpected to stumble into AI music this way.
If you are explictitly looking for music by specific artists, then you get their music obviously.
I love this conspiracy theory. Which track doesn't Spotify pay royalties for? Considering that it licenses 100% of its music from external distributors.
"Why pay royalties if it's just going to be BGM for a massage parlor?" could be their reasoning.
If a corporation can do something that will make them more money than they'd make not doing it you should expect them to do the profitable thing. Corporations don't care about ethics or even the law. Maximizing shareholder value is their purpose. They exist only to take from the many and give to the few. It's not a conspiracy theory to assume that they'll be doing exactly what they are designed to do.
When they do that, let's talk. But that's not what I asked, is it?
https://edm.com/news/spotify-using-ghost-artists-minimize-ro...
As I already wrote elsewhere, no one, including the article's own authors, understood a single thing from the article.
Spotify doesn't produce its own music. It licenses 100% of its music from external distributors. Apart from a few scammy companies there are dozens of companies whose entire repertoire and catalog is ambient/background/noise/elevator/shopping mall music etc. that they commission from ghost composers.
There is literally money being paid to distributors for these tracks. To quote the original article you didn't even read, this one: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
--- start quote ---
Epidemic’s selling point is that the music is royalty-free for its own subscribers, but it does collect royalties from streaming services; these it splits with artists fifty-fifty.
--- end quote ---
Wait, what about "no royalties" crap? Oh, all of that is just "per Pelly". Though I'll admit that there are probably companies that license music for a flat fee (though I assume those would be rare).
Also note: Spotify doesn't pay artists. Spotify doesn't have direct contracts with artists. Spotify pays distributors and rights holders. And then those, in turn, pay royalties based on their contracts with artists. (According to one of the ghost artists interviewed, he is paid significantly more than he would be if he was trying to release music himself, BTW).
So Indiy artists can't directly put their music on Spotify? Sorry I have no idea how this works, I guess that's the point of Bandcamp?
No one can put their music directly on Spotify.
--- start quote ---
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-music...
Distributors handle music distribution and pay streaming royalties.
Work with a distributor to get your music on Spotify.
# Choose a distributor
See our preferred and recommended distributors: https://artists.spotify.com/providers
These distributors meet our highest standards for quality metadata and anti-infringement measures.
Note: Most distributors charge a fee or commission. Each service is unique, so do a little research before picking one.
If you’re a signed artist, your record label likely already works with a distributor who can deliver your music.
--- end quote ---
It used to just be stuff like white noise and rain sounds, but it has expanded to essentially be a modern Muzak replacement.
For situations when people don really want “music” and just need “contextually appropriate aesthetically pleasing sound”
Someone had clearly just set up a few prompts and let the AI get on with it, creating probably hundreds of channels of this stuff.
But unless these tracks are treated differently in Spotify's payout system, they're extremely profitable, and because payments come from a common pool, they hoover up payments which would otherwise have gone to artists people actually like.
This only happens in genres where most listeners don't care about the artists they're listening to, think "chillout", "focus" or "easy listening." That kind of music is a commodity, Taylor Swift (or Metallica or Mozzart or whatever) is not. This has been proven.
My hypothesis is that those genres would otherwise lose Spotify the most money, as people often play that kind of music and never turn it off. Because Spotify pays per listen, the user who attentively listens to their favorite artist a few times a week is much better for them than somebody who has "chillout" playing on their echo 24/7.
Spotify doesn't have deals with artists because Spotify doesn't have direct contract with artists. Only with distributors.
> My hypothesis is that those genres would otherwise lose Spotify the most money,
How would they "lose Spotify money", and how is this different from top artists on Spotify?
No one actually understands what's written in this article, including the authors themselves.
Also note how you didn't provide a single track that Spotify allegedly pays no royalties for.
Literally in the very article everyone links to but is incapable of reading there's even this text:
--- start quote ---
Epidemic’s selling point is that the music is royalty-free for its own subscribers, but it does collect royalties from streaming services; these it splits with artists fifty-fifty.
--- end quote ---
The allegation is that Spotify pays out to entities which are ultimately owned by themselves, or that they get kickbacks in other ways like ad purchases (probably illegal, but hard to prove if you're at all clever about it).
I remember I found a track a few years ago, by the artist Mayhem. No, not the metal band. The background music artist Mayhem. Which only ever released two tracks. One of which, "Solitude Hymns", happened to get featured in one of Spotify's playlists, and managed to rack up more plays than any track by the more famous metal band at the time.
They haven't scrubbed it. Just look it up.
It's not really unsourced. It's just very rarely talked about. I think you may get an article once every 10 years questioning the actual rights holders and distributors.
I mean, you get people in these discussions on HN that don't even know that Spotify (and other streaming services) don't even have direct contracts with artists and everything is going through intermediaries.
> I remember I found a track a few years ago, by the artist Mayhem. No, not the metal band. The background music artist Mayhem. Which only ever released two tracks. One of which, "Solitude Hymns", happened to get featured in one of Spotify's playlists, and managed to rack up more plays than any track by the more famous metal band at the time.
Thank you! You're the only one who could point out a weird track.
41K monthly listeners for the band. The track got 20 million plays because it was featured.
That's where the gray zone begins: was this band with two songs picked because it is cheaper to include (for whatever reason) or was it just lucky (like some other bands that got big through streaming like Glass Animals).
What is hard though, is finding out which aggregator/intermediary/record company collected the payments for mayfly Mayhem's plays. I have not succeeded at that, if you find a way to get that information out of Spotify, do tell me. It's probably actually easier to find out who made the music. MBW managed to find out that at least some of these tracks were made by well-connected Swedish producers, as I recall.
There are a billion ways you could cash in on this. A dead easy one is "music written for hire by a company you own".
Even if Spotify is not doing the slightest thing like this, suggesting that they might is not a conspiracy theory. Quit trying to tar every proposed view of the world you disagree with with that label. You're just making it easier for the actual grand conspiracy theorists.
> Even if Spotify is not doing the slightest thing like this, suggesting that they might is...
...textbook definition of conspiracy theory
Also note how your entire text is just unsubstantiated claims. Including emotionally charged words like "terrorist cell" that give your words so much weight and meaning.
You would not call a prosecutor who accuses someone of "criminal conspiracy" a conspiracy theorist, even though they have a theory that someone is conspiring.
A terrorist cell is just another example of a real type of group which obviously conspires. You're not a conspiracy theorist for believing they exist.
Conspiracy theorists is something we call people who believe in a grand conspiracy, one which, had it been real, would have required superhuman levels of coordination and secrecy. That's the brush you for some mysterious reason want to tar critics of Spotify with.
And for the second time this week, someone demands "evidence" for expressions of distrust.
Funny then that to illustrate your point you use this example: "You would not call a prosecutor who accuses someone of 'criminal conspiracy' a conspiracy theorist". You know what separates criminal prosecutors from conspiracy theorists? They have to provide evidence.
Or this example: "A terrorist cell is just another example of a real type of group which obviously conspires. You're not a conspiracy theorist for believing they exist." Yes, because we have evidence that they exist.
See how this works? A theory with no supporting evidence is a crackpot theory.
For example, I can say anything I want about you. When asked about evidence, I can lapse into demagoguery about terrorist cells or something. Perhaps you are a part of a terrorist cell? Otherwise, why bring them into discussion?
And sure, if you insist I'll refrain from speculating why you're so obsessed with defending a megacorporation and insisting they deserve the benefit of doubt. Feel free to provide evidence to explain. (Remember, by your own standard, your own opinions aren't evidence).
I'm pointing out unsubstantiated claims, often to people who don't know jack shit about music industry (e.g. that's why almost every comment in this thread has a variation of "Spotify doesn't pay artists, Spotify pays rights holders")
Note how you still haven't said anything of substance except emotions and ad hominems. But sure, your position is correct and valid, and not mine.
Since many high volume Spotify users just want “something jazzy” in the background, it helps them reduce royalties.
Spotify doesn't do it because Spotify doesn't produce music and doesn't have direct contracts with musicians.
> Since many high volume Spotify users just want “something jazzy” in the background, it helps them reduce royalties.
How does it help them reduce royalties when they don't produce their own music and license 100% of their music from distributors and rights holders?
1. Spotify doesn't pay artists. Spotify doesn't have direct contracts with artists. Spotify pays rights holder and distributors.
I really wish people who have strong opinions on music industry learned at least the absolute bare minimum about the subject.
2. Again, bringing back to my original comment: where's the evidence for that? E.g. the one and only article everyone links [1] and doesn't bother to understand literally has statements like this:
--- start quote ---
But at the end of the day, [the ghost musician] said, it was still a paycheck: “I did it because I needed a job real bad and the money was better than any money I could make from even successful indie labels, many of which I worked with,” he told me.
...
Epidemic’s selling point is that the music is royalty-free for its own subscribers, but it does collect royalties from streaming services; these it splits with artists fifty-fifty.
--- end quote ---
That doesn't mesh well with the narrative of "Spotify bad, doesn't pay royalties, etc.", does it?
[1] https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
You are still being unnecessarily pedantic. Most of us understand that there are layers to this, but ultimately, what we care about is how much an artist is paid per stream and what streams are being preferred over others.
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-modera...
Partially correct. That only happens if you don't have the loop functionality activated.
Autopilot in, autopilot out.
But still fuck this AI slop.
I have more than enough music made by humans to listen to for the rest of my life without ever turning to algorithmic recommendations.
I will shamelessly promote the bandcampsync [1] CLI tool for automating downloads of your bandcamp library and bandcamp-sync-flask [2] wrapper that I built so I could invoke it from the web on my phone after I buy an album.
I had been using a combination of aria2 and a link scraper plugin for years to download bulk out of bandcamp because of how fast their API will time out.
Thanks for sharing your work!
Rate Your Music (RYM) has been invaluable for me in discovering loads of music, I'd highly recommend it
I looked up an artist there (Dio), and then an album (Holy diver). Neither page helped me find "similar" music
You can also click on any one of the band/album's genres and look at the charts.
Maybe I should set that goal as well, for 2025 I had 120 ;)
Love bandcamp, love navidrome! And if you are on Android and don’t mind using closed source, paid (one-time) software, Symfonium is pretty much the best mobile player you can get for selfhosted streaming.
If I think I'm talking with a person and it turns out that I'm talking with a machine, I've been duped and will likely be angry about it.
Another way to think about it is that when it comes to art, "the ends justify the means" doesn't really work because the whole point is more the means than the ends.
Maybe if a person generated 50,000 songs, not even listening to them, you could have a point. Although, even in that case, regardless of the lack of an "artist's intention," there is the interpretation of what people will take from that thing. And that interpretation is often different from what the author originally had in mind. Hell, most people don't know the author of most movies, TV shows, and the like they watched. In other words, to me, it's more about what people take from that thing, as opposed to "Oh, what that sentient being was trying to communicate?"
And I do believe a sufficiently advanced AI model would be able to mimic or synthesize human knowledge/worries/dramas in such a profound way that, regardless of "intention to communicate," it would be able to create things that people would relate to and take deeper meaning from.
Also: the very dataset where that thing was trained wasn't trained on an alien dataset, with an alien culture and the like, all originating from poems written by real people, movies by real people, etc., etc. The model learned from human culture; therefore, whatever it produces is a reflection of that culture, which people could and most likely will relate to, and, hell, they are already doing that.
But even taking the argument at face value, "Oh, human creation," someone might have used AI, but they were still involved in all parts of the creation process, like writing the lyrics, curating the data, and the very fact of them choosing a song and saying, "Hey, I liked that, I will share it with people," would already be a communication.
Of course. My interpretation is an important part as well, but that comes from me, not the artist, so is a bit different. Well, maybe I should say that the meaning and importance of a song is in the confluence of the artist and myself. I did want to clarify something, though -- I'm not really talking about the "artist's intention" here. That's a different thing, too.
The emotional communication I'm talking about happens even if I have no idea what the artist's conscious intention was, or even if I don't know who the artist is.
> And I do believe a sufficiently advanced AI model would be able to mimic or synthesize human knowledge/worries/dramas in such a profound way that, regardless of "intention to communicate," it would be able to create things that people would relate to and take deeper meaning from.
Perhaps so! But that kind of simulacrum is something I have absolutely no interest in. In fact, I find the idea of it a bit repulsive.
> someone might have used AI, but they were still involved in all parts of the creation process, like writing the lyrics
If an artist actually created the thing, then it's not an AI generated song. It's a human created song that may have involved AI as a tool. I'm talking more about if a human just describes the song they want to an AI and the AI creates the rest.
That said, I'm particularly averse to AI vocals, because vocals are particularly intimate for me. A song that has a machine as a singer is a song I'll reject even if the rest was created by a human.
> the very fact of them choosing a song and saying, "Hey, I liked that, I will share it with people," would already be a communication.
Technically true, but that's nowhere near the kind of communication I'm talking about. That has little value to me unless the person sharing it and myself know each other very, very well. Then, it's a communication/connection between that person and me, which can make it a great thing even if the song wouldn't resonate with me on its own.
I mean, art is inherently about human experience and emotion. Each of us resonates with certain types of art and doesn't resonate with other types. All I'm trying to do here is explore and maybe explain what resonates or not with me. I am in no way saying that anybody else should share my tastes.
If a prompt returned the most perfect song, I would still not care to listen as that to me has completely divorced any human element that I would be interested in. Would not find it to be inspiring nor aspirational no matter how "good" it sounded so the models themselves could get exponentially better, but the manner in which it was created will prevent me from ever listening or caring about. It will always be hollow and lifeless.
Again, this is personal preference. If it makes others happy, that's great. In other many other mediums, I'm probably fine with that reduction in human-ness (where others may not be).
Do you run and grab your phone to id the artist before you decide to tap your foot?
Art is interesting and challenges you because you choose to have that reaction to it. Part of the reason for making that choice comes from what you believe about the origin of the art.
The concept that there is some hidden quality to human made art strikes me as the same line of thinking that lead people to try to measure the weight of the soul.
Art is someone making creative choices. It's someone putting a bit of themselves and their own lived experiences out there because they wanted to share it.
I used to enjoy Lostprophets before the news about the singer SAing children came out. You cannot disconnect your relationship with the artist from the art.
This has only happened once. The rest of the time, I will be listening to a radio playlist as I work when a song comes on that makes me go "Wait a minute." Checking the song's cover art, clearly AI. Artist page? 30 singles in 2025, every one with AI cover art. The bio reads like a Suno prompt (and probably is). The uploader then gets tossed in the proverbial bin.
The above has been happening more and more often. To the point where it's about 30% of the songs I hear on the radio playlist, as of this week. I'm in the process of migrating over to Deezer as a consequence. They label AI-generated music and do not recommend them or include them in radio playlists.
Edit: Not the exact same artist, but I searched a generic song name to find an AI slopper. This one AI-inserting himself into pictures with women for cover art is the same idea as the one putting himself in pictures with celebrities like Ariana Grande. https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kEPAFHKkMPF1...
I have this discussion all the time about written stories. At some point AI will start creating very good and possibly great written works. Do we ignore them because they are AI? I would hope not.
Of course, it's not exactly the same situation, but if I listen to a song and appreciate that the vocalist sounds cool and they're doing some technically difficult things, I am definitely less impressed to find out it's a computer program. And it also means I can't find other songs with that vocalist's same artistic sense because they don't have one, they're a computer program who can sound like anything.
If a robot ai basketball team was authentic enough to have hoodwinked me into thinking it was a real entertaining team then it has become a different question than whether or not I would knowingly participate as a spectator in an AI basketball league.
I have less than zero interest in art that isn't made by humans.
This whole discussion reminds me of Milli Vanilli from the 90s. They were hugely popular with a few songs and then people found out it wasn't actually them singing. It was a big scandal and the songs because unpopular instantly. I was always a bit confused by the crash because it's not like the song on the radio changed at all.
If you find out that the relationship is based on a lie, then the relationship can switch from "great" to "horrible" instantly.
Most of the music I like is loops pasted together in some DAW. Sure, it requires taste to make a good song but if AI figure out how to replicate that taste can crank out catchy tunes I wouldn't have a problem with it. I can only guess though that too much of a good thing will lead to be getting bored with it ... maybe.
It's not like most pop music isn't formulaic. I enjoy the currently popular songs from K-Pop Demon Hunters but they're so cliche, if they turned out to be AI generated I wouldn't be surprised :P
BUT I also recognize that is NOT how most people feel, and that's fine.
In case you'd like to take a look, shameless self promotion: https://aaronholbrook.bandcamp.com/music
I have to go through my back catalog, and add all my music, but I appreciate your perspective and for wanting to support artists!
So validating to know someone enjoyed my work enough to buy it.
Thank you to everyone who's taken a listen, and thank you to the person that bought it!
<3
I am vindicated in my choice to use an ipod with an aux jack every time Android Auto can't decide whether to connect over USB or bluetooth and just doesn't play audio until I restart the phone and the car...
I like the idea of my money going to the artists. And, you can "buy the catalog", give an artist $150 or so to get ALL their music. I have a couple composers who I adore so that was a no-brainer. If I was going to pay them for most of their work anyway, why not give them the money now?
*Note i am hobbyist songwriter (melody and lyrics) since a teen (few decades ago)and use Suno. It makes my songs sound just like everyone elses cookie cutter crap... it has no soul to it.. just the feel of tech billionaires getting filthy rich off destroying society/humanity!
Do make sure to back everything up, though, I remember when Google Play Music was shut down and I needed to download everything (fortunately it was announced well beforehand so there was no need to rush).
7digital is also pretty good, I've bought a bunch of Saxon and Rainbow albums on there. As awesome as Bandcamp is, many bigger artists don't have a presence there (although King Diamond's entire discography is on there, that's cool).
I still have a family AppleMusic subscription mostly because my kids use it a lot especially in the car, but I want to go back to owning creative works and compensating artists instead of renting.
There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai.
I'd pay for some app which allows be to dump all my ableton files into, train some transformer on it, just to synthesize new stuff out of my unfinished body of work. It will happen and all lines will get blurred again, as usual.
And in the mean time, AI will continue to clutter creative spaces and drown out actual hardworking artists, and people like you will co-opt what it means to be an artist by using tools that were trained on their work without consent.
This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn't correlate to good output. Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.
Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component.
And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years.
Edit: I would also add the caveat that, the more work the tool does, the less room the artist has to actually be creative. That's my main beef with AI imagery: it literally all looks the same. I can clock AI stuff incredibly well because it has a lot of the same characteristics: things are too shiny is weirdly the biggest giveaway, I'm not sure why AI's think everything is wet at all times, but it's very consistent. It also over-populates scenes; more shit in the frame isn't necessarily a good thing that contributes to a work, and AI has no concept at all of negative space. And if a human artist has no space to be creative in the tool... well they're going to struggle pretty hard to have any kind of recognizable style.
That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.
I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art."
But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.
AI is the same.
The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder, but there's a lot of hand-made art - especially on fan sites like Deviant Art - which has some basic craft skill but scores very low on original imagination, unusual mood, or unique personality.
The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.
Some people are better at that than others, and more willing to dig deep into the medium and not take it at face value.
For me, the artist, sure. I've not yet had a day where Affinity Photo just doesn't have the juice, and I don't see the appeal. Photoshop, for all it's faults, doesn't have bad days.
That's the difference between the artist and the artists' tool. A difference so obvious I feel somewhat condescending pointing it out.
> I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art." ... But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.
"People were wrong about a completely different thing" isn't the slam dunk counterpoint you think it is.
Also as someone else in that space at that time, I genuinely haven't the slightest idea what you mean about photoshop not being real art. I knew (and was an) artists at that time, we used Photoshop (of questionable legality but still) and I never heard this at all.
> The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder,
Understatement of the year.
> The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.
The difference is the lack of intent. A "person" mashes up what resonates with them (positively or negatively) and from those influences, and from the broader cultures they exist in, creates new and interesting things.
AI is fundamentally different. It is a mash up of an average mean of every influence in the entire world, which is why producing unique things is difficult. You're asking for exceptional things from an average machine (mathematical sense not quality sense.).
Usually this means I have forgotten to eat, or that I need to take a step back and consider whatever I’m doing at a deeper level. Once I recognized that the “keep trying and trying and nothing works” days vanished for good.
Yeah, no. Competent artists are not generalizable as "unconscious", solely "mashing up" influences or input, or even working with "signifiers": many are exquisitely aware of their sources; many employ diverse and articulated methodologies for creation and elaboration; many enjoy working with the concrete elements of their medium with no concern for signification. Even "technique" does not have a uniform meaning across different fields and modes.
It has full image generation mode, it has an animation mode, it has a live mode where you can draw a blob of images and it will refine it 2-50 steps only in that area.
So you are no longer doing per line stroke and saved brush settings, but you are still painting and composing an image yourself, down to a pixel by pixel rate. It's just that the tool it gives is WAY more compute intensive, the AI is sort of rendering a given part of a drawing as you specify as many times as you need.
How much of that workflow is just prompting a one-shot image, vs photoshopping +++ an image together until it meets your exact specifications?
No, the final image cannot be copyrighted under current US law in 2026, but for use in private settings like tabletop RPGs...my production values have gone way up and I didn't need to get a MFA degree in The old Masters drawing or open a drawing studio to get those images.
I'm pretty sure the people at Bandcamp agree with you and that's why they mention future "updates to the policy as the rapidly changing generative AI space develops".
AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.
Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it so you didn’t have to learn how to sing on key. There are many innovations in music over time that make it easier and less gatekeepy to make music.
We are just moving from making music as a rote activity similar to code, to making music like a composer in much the way that you can create software without writing code. It’s moving things up a level. It’s how the steady march of innovation happens.
It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle, now it’s to find what you love about it and makes it worth it for you and to focus on that part. Banning the new types of art is only going to last as long as it takes for people to get over their initial shock of it and for good products to start being produced with it.
But the parent poster is, presumably, human! Humans have the right to take inspiration like that from other humans (or machines)! Why do we seem so keen on granting machines the right to take from us? Are we not supposed to be their masters?
For me, one key difference is that I can cite my stylistic influences and things I tried, while (to my knowledge) commercial musical generation models specifically avoid doing that, and most don't provide chord/lead sheets either -- I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't
So much of music composition is what "feels right" and is instinctual. Artists aren't consciously aware of probably most of their influences. They can cite some of the most obvious ones, but the creative process is melding a thousand different vibes and sounds and sequences you've heard before, internalized, and joined into something new, in a way only your particular brain could.
Let music historians work on trying to cite and trace influences. That's not something artists need to worry about.
Thus already doing much better than the average Suno producer
E: More seriously, this strikes me as a motte-and-bailey where "Artists cannot list every single influence they have or provide an explicit motivation for every single creative choice" is treated the same as "artists cannot list influences or justify creative choices at all"
I guess the difference is proprietary code is mostly not used for training. It's going to be trained on code in the public. It's the inverse for music, where it's being trained on commercial work, not work that has been licensed freely.
This is cliche. Most celebrated artists in the electronic music world can play several instruments, if not expertly, than at least with enough familiarity to understand the nuances of musical performance.
Electronic musicians are more akin to composers and probably have more in common with mathematicians and programmers in the way that they practice their craft, whereas musical performers probably have more in common with athletes in the way that they practice their craft.
Same applies to Bandcamp not having any issues with people making music in a DAW
But if it is possible it's probably going to be a lot more involved than just '"video of cute cartoon cat, Pixar style" into a prompt'.
Though relatively old in the AI world (2023), it's still quite interesting.
In case you can't access the article, the prompt used is:
> 35mm, 1990s action film still, close-up of a bearded man browsing for bottles inside a liquor store. WATCH OUT BEHIND YOU!!! (background action occurs)…a white benz truck crashes through a store window, exploding into the background…broken glass flies everywhere, flaming debris sparkles light the neon night, 90s CGI, gritty realism
People don't understand that about music either. We may use sequencers and automation, but the work happens in real time, and it is an instrument that we are playing. It's just that we work at a higher level than just playing something on a keyboard.
Not necessarily apples-to-apples here. Full songs generated from AI prompts don't crash like a computer program would. You could simply upload the garbage to Spotify and reap the rewards until it got removed (if it even does).
It's the same with background music when I work. But like as a specific example, that's a specific track I quite listening to, and it's 100% AI generated. Can you really say it doesn't have any character?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJUvNVCqtpI
>> The world is messy, and human music reflects that
Are you familiar with the term "elevator music"? It doesn't need to be messy or have any character to it - it just has to cover the noises of the elevator moving up and down its shaft.
>>d that human-created music seems offensive to you,
I literally never said that, please stop implying so.
Put a different way, if I'm listening to music on random, and Led Zeppelin finishes, do I want there to be a chance of pink noise or elevator music playing after that song? Not really, but if "it's all on Spotify," then it could happen
Not music.
>waves crashing on the beach
Also not music.
>It's the same with background music when I work.
You do you. I like good music when I work, not "background music". The better the music, the more fun it is to work. YMMV.
>But like as a specific example, that's a specific track I quite listening to, and it's 100% AI generated. Can you really say it doesn't have any character?
Maybe it's not only the AI-generated music that is lacking in character.
>Are you familiar with the term "elevator music"? It doesn't need to be messy or have any character to it - it just has to cover the noises of the elevator moving up and down its shaft.
And if it's pretty bad music, then it makes me anticipate getting out of the elevator even more, but most likely I'll be listening to music that I like in my earbuds while I'm in the elevator. And I've been in some fancy elevators with actually nice non-AI generated music.
>>>without anyone trying to impart anything on them.
>> that human-created music seems offensive to you,
>I literally never said that, please stop implying so.
Okay, maybe I read more into it than you were expressing, but it seems like having a human put effort into relating an experience is just too distracting for some people, or something... I took it as "offensive" because you seem to just want a machine to sanitize what someone else wrote and regurgitate it out in a non-distracting way. If that's what you want, nobody here is stopping you from having it, but we can form opinions based on what you write about yourself. You are free to do the same, and yes, I'm sure I can be seen as kind of an asshole sometimes. Maybe I should write a song about it, I'd call it "Ballad of an Internet Asshole", and I'm sure a lot of people would relate to it.
This is already what pop music, EDM and some other genres have been about for decades. Most of it is slop made with overused similar chord progressions and beats. The very fact that we can easily separate music into genres is a proof most of the music we produce nowadays is super generic and follows very basic repetitive patterns.
There is AI slop but there is human slop too and it tends to be very successful.
Neither of those things are really true, though. They made it possible to make poor music without learning those things, I suppose, but not make good music.
> Banning the new types of art
Nobody is seriously talking about banning AI generated music. What you're seeing is a platform deciding that AI generated music isn't something that platform is into. There are a lot of different platforms out there.
Doesn't seem like a good way to measure a "good song".
I think in this context, the term "intentional music" or "earnest music" applies better. People who just wants "music that sounds good" already has mainstream stuff. Many who want a more niche sound deliberately look to support humans in that endeavor. Not yet another billionaire label who puts out "safe" but "boring" stuff. Except it's worse now.
Personally, I don't buy this "AI models are learning just like we do." It's an appeal to ignorance. Just because we don't fully understand how a human brain learns, one can't claim it's the same as a statistical model of ordered tokens.
But even if it were true, I'm alright with drawing a line between AI learning and human learning. The law and social conventions are for humans. I want the ability to learn from others and produce original works that show influences. If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me, but I can accept it because it came from a universal human right I also enjoy. But an AI model doesn't have human rights. For models, the law and social conventions should still favor humans. The impact on the creative community and future creative endeavors should be balanced against the people who create and use the models.
I don't know how to do that with LLMs in a way that doesn't prevent the development of these amazing models. Maybe the government should distribute a portion of the revenue generated by the models amongst all citizens, to reflect how each model's value came from the written works of those citizens.
I don't know about that. America shows us that laws and social conventions are for corporations. Humans are just entities to extract profit from.
But I've seen the discussion here on that's and we're pretty far away from being able to have a good discussion on that. Let along bridging the two topics together.
This is a rather sad take. If someone learned from my art or music and did something new and more popular, I would be happy! I had influence, I mattered. That new more popular work takes nothing away from my previous work. In fact, when I do science I'm doing it explicitly for this reason, to build on.
For me, creating music is not about "being the best" or "making more money than some other artist." It's about telling the stories I want to tell. An AI would not tell my stories, ever. It might produce things that somewhat similar, but it won't tell a human story, just a shallow imitation.
On the flip side, AI can be immensely useful. For example, stemming means that DJs or visualizer applications can do more with music. Perhaps AI can be used to create interesting new effects, or interesting new instruments or sounds. It can give ideas and help with inspiration.
I honestly have a hard time seeing AI actually driving musicians out of business because it can't tell a story. And it can't do that because it hasn't lived a life. Yes, I can see it producing low quality ad-jingles or low quality filler tracks like you see in spotify, so some people will be impacted. But we're long past time for some form of universal basic income to deal with this. It's not just artists that need a basic income at this point.
>That would suck for me, but I can accept it because it came from a universal human right I also enjoy.
I would imagine the vast majority of other humans agree with me. I'm not just gonna betray humankind because some 1s and 0s "learned" how to write music. Who cares, it's silicon.
Is "gatekeepy" how we're referring to skill now? "Man I'd like to make a top-quality cabinet for my kitchen, lame how those skilled carpenters are gatekeeping that shit smh"
From this statement, I doubt you've written any music worth listening to, or any code that's not trivial.
Don't confuse music with muzak. What you get from an "AI" is muzak. It will never, ever have the same depth, warmth, or meaning as a human translating human emotions and experience into music and lyrics.
There have already been AI-created #1 hits.
Sure, there’s music that has all of the attributes you lay out as “requisite” for “good” music, but this is classic moving of the goalposts. It’s how people always justify that AI is not here yet, because there’s this facet of it that’s not human enough.
A lot of the music people listen to is devoid of the depth, warmth and meaning you mention, even without AI involvement. It’s written and produced by tens or hundreds of people and there’s no single visionary behind it. It’s a product.
Similarly, there can be AI assisted music that has just as much depth, warmth and meaning as a human, BECAUSE a human is involved in the decision-making of that music.
Do you believe that if someone uses a sample, or uses a prebuilt drum loop, that their music automatically is bad? What level of assistance is acceptable? Where do you draw the line?
It's an old story, but it was a fabricated one.
The only reason this sort of tracks is that a lot of people today don't listen to music, they just put it on as background noise to drown out the silence. It seems to pay off for some producers, but I don't think there's big money there, or a real threat of replacing artists.
By and large, the general public has shown that they notice the vapidness, blandness, and incongruity of GenAI music, and don't much care for it apart from seeing it as an interesting curiosity.
You didn't, and I never claimed that you did - I wrote that I doubt you have. If you had written non-trivial code, or written any music worth listening to, then I doubt you would have the same conclusions.
>A lot of the music people listen to is devoid of the depth, warmth and meaning you mention, even without AI involvement.
I agree, and it will be forgotten, and that's fine. Not every song is a winner. I guarantee that #1 AI generated hit will not be thought about a year after it comes out. Yes we're still listening to hits from the 1960s that real people created because they express human experience that isn't easily fabricated by a machine.
> lukevp 13 hours ago | parent | next [–]
Where did I claim in my post to have written music worth listening to or nontrivial code? Seems like you’re just insulting me in particular instead of providing a counter-argument. There have already been AI-created #1 hits.
Sure, there’s music that has all of the attributes you lay out as “requisite” for “good” music, but this is classic moving of the goalposts. It’s how people always justify that AI is not here yet, because there’s this facet of it that’s not human enough.
A lot of the music people listen to is devoid of the depth, warmth and meaning you mention, even without AI involvement. It’s written and produced by tens or hundreds of people and there’s no single visionary behind it. It’s a product.
>Similarly, there can be AI assisted music that has just as much depth, warmth and meaning as a human, BECAUSE a human is involved in the decision-making of that music.
AI-boosting nonsense
>Do you believe that if someone uses a sample, or uses a prebuilt drum loop, that their music automatically is bad?
Generally, yes. I abhor Kanye and his ilk. YMMV.
Yes, when I make music, I am taking inspiration from all of the other artists I've listened to and using that in my music. If someone listens to my music, they are getting some value from my contribution, but also indirectly from the musicians that inspired me.
The difference between that and AI is that I am a human being who deserves to live a life of dignity and artistic expression in a world that supports that while AI-generated music is the product of a mindless automaton that enriches billionaires who are actively building a world that makes it harder to live a life of stability, comfort, and dignity.
These are not the same thing any more than fucking a fleshlight is the same as being in a romantic relationship. The physical act may appear roughly the same, but the human experience, meaning behind it, and societal externalities are certainly not.
If someone trains a machine on my work and it means you can get the benefit of my labor without knowing me, interacting with my work or understanding it, or really any effort beyond some GPUs, that feels bad. And, it's much more of a risk to me, if that means anything.
Agreed. My goal, my moral compass, is to live in a world populated by thriving happy people. I love teaching people new things and am happy to work hard to that end and sacrifice some amount of financial compensation. (For example, both of my books can be read online for free.)
I couldn't possibly care less about some giant matrix of floats sitting in a GPU somewhere getting tuned to better emulate some desired behavior. I simply have no moral imperative to enrich machines or their billionaire owners.
Sure, but so does the homeless guy living on the streets right now because computers and the internet automated his job - and yet here you are using the very tools ("mindless automatons") that put him out of work.
The invention of the shipping container put nearly every stevedore out of a job. But it made it radically cheaper to ship things and that improved the quality of life of nearly everyone on Earth.
I suspect that for most stevedores, it was a job where the wages provided dignity and meaning in their life, but where the work itself wasn't that central to their identity. I hope that most were able to find other work that was equally dignified.
That's certainly less true for musicians, poets, and painters where what they do is central to the value of the work and not just how much they can get paid.
There's no blanket technology-independent answer here. You have to look at a technology and all of its consequences and try to figure out what's worth doing and what isn't.
I think shipping containers are a pretty clear win. I think machine learning for classification is likely a win.
It's not at all clear to me that using generative AI to produce media is a win. I suspect it is a very large loss for society as a whole. Automating bullshit drudgery is fine. Most people don't want to do that shit anyway. But automating away the very acts that people find most profoundly human seems the height of stupidity to me.
Do you really want to live in a world where more people have to be Uber drivers and fewer people get to make art? Do you want to live in that world when it appears that the main people who benefit are already billionaires?
In fact, the theoretical turn in 20th century art was due in part to the invention of the camera. What's the point in continuing down the path of representational art if the camera can recreate a scene with infinitely more realism than the best painter?
Many of the same criticisms that people have of photography as art are being used against AI today, like that it's too easy, that it's soulless, or that the machine is the real artist.
You say that as if it's a given that that's a good thing.
> Many of the same criticisms that people have of photography as art are being used against AI today, like that it's too easy, that it's soulless, or that the machine is the real artist.
I made none of those criticisms.
Plenty of people miss taking care of their horses, but we still drive cars.
The vast majority of humans do not, in fact, think making art is "the most profoundly human" thing. They are about socializing, they care about their family, they want to go on fun vacations and have fun experiences. Most people do not spend their free time painting.
I observed, which is entirely likely to be true, that on average people probably find more personal fulfillment in the work of being an artist than the work of hauling crates off a ship.
Yes, we humans are clever creatures and will extract as much upside and value as we can out of any situation. That does not at all mean that all jobs are thus equivalent in all respects.
> they want to go on fun vacations and have fun experiences.
And how many of those vacations are to places with incredible architecture and rewarding art museums? How many of those fun experiences are music, plays, and movies?
Certainly, family and socializing are important avenues of meaning as well. Those aren't mutually exclusive with wanting to live in a world full of art made by others who care about it.
It's not about putting the genie back in the bottle, it's about helping folks realize that the vague smell of farts in the air IS the genie--and this particular genie only grants costly monkey paw wishes that ultimately do more harm to the world than good.
Your instrument is the computer and designing sound. You still have to have talent and musical ear to make this music.
The volumes of production are really scales of magnitude of difference between a human producing music, and a computer.
With a script and generator 1 individual could oversaturate the whole marketplace overnight rendering it impossible for other individuals to be found let alone extract any value.
Also, I don't know if you've ever done music production for fun but you don't really just setup only a prompt. It takes a significant amount of time to actually produce something. Time setting up a DAW system and export an empty track, and submitting it. An empty track.
Let alone actually doing all the microoptimizations by ear and trial to produce any catchy tune. Meanwhile a statistical approach doesn't even have to understand what's it's doing, could as well be white noise for all it matters.
Normally the copyright is owned by the creator. Algorithms can't own copyrights, so there is no copyright. There is already legal history on this.
This is an argument that the AI should be allowed to benefit, not the person prompting it.
I've never heard an artist confident in their own ability complain about this because they're not threatened by other competent human artists knocking them off never mind an AI that's even worse at it.
AI not going to out-compete anyone on volume by flooding the marketplace because switching costs are effectively zero. Clever artists can probably find a way to grease controversy and marketing out of finding cases where they are knocked off, taking it as a compliment, and juicing it for marketing.
But I liked the Picasso quote when I was younger and earlier on in my journey as a musician because it reminded me to be humble and resist the desire to get possessive -- if what I was onto was really my own, people would like it and others could try to knock it off and fail. That is a lesson that has always served me very well.
What do you think about The Prodigy?
Why are people mad? Don't they understand that you can't stop progress? Fssss... /s
You still need to invest significant time and effort to make it work.
As a new artist you have to compete against 60+ years of music history - much of it really good music too.
Now it’s that the listener has to compete with 60x absolute slop to find something good.
Kinda, sorta. Good music is reflective of the society and era it was produced in and that matters. I regularly listen to music, from all over the world, that was composed (and some, recorded) 100+ years ago, music that was recorded 50+ years ago, and music that was recorded last month. None of them are a substitute for the other because each has a unique voice expressing things that were unique about the time and place they were made in.
So, in a sense, they aren't in competition with each other. But also, there are only so many hours in a day and there isn't enough time in your life to listen to all the worthy music that humans have made. Hard choices are necessary. In that sense, they are in competition with each other.
Whenever I look at popular artists on streaming platforms, I see 'remixes' where people just slowed down the particular original song and added reverb or some other silly effect to it. I don't think AI existing or not will change the behaviour of people trying to make a quick buck. If they aren't using AI, they'll use a different tool as they did before.
Sure, you just can't upload the resulting track directly on Bandcamp, but you're free to "creatively prompt" on SUNO all you want, they'll even host your "music".
It's also a matter of resources. People uploading gigabites of AI generated slop a day isn't really what Bandcamp is about.
This is something people spent a lot of time on, is trained lovingly on only their own stuff, and makes for some great music.
It's "AI" but in an almost unrecognizable way to us now: its not attached to some product, and its not about doing special prompting. It is definitely pop/electronic music, but it follows from a tradition of experimentation between what we can control and what we can't, which is here their bespoke stochastic program.
It is not about how the computer or the model enables us, which is so silly. (As if art is simply about being able to do something or not!) Its about doing something with the pieces you have that only those pieces can do.
And since it's from 2019, it's not quite the same thing. I like it, unlike the current wave of unwanted LLM slop.
It's original. Of course if 1000 people were doing the same with minimal creative effort and passing it off as something else, that would ruin it.
I get Kate Bush and Dead Can Dance vibes, filtered through a mechanical chorus with a bit of glitched breakbeats.
It's empathically not the forgettable, bland averaged pastiches that LLMS emit on lazy command. Even if it's not your favourite, I'm sure that it's something.
Every thread on HN that touches on the topic has countless people talking about how LLM generated code is always bad, buggy and people that utilize them are inexperienced juniors that don't understand anything.
And they're not completely wrong. If you don't know what you're doing, you'll absolutely create dumster fires instead of software
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Steam-updates-AI-disclosure-fo...
I think it's also about money. Places code and code samples are stored tend to be large companies that are in tech and on the AI hype wagon. Bandcamp is not one of those places.
An apt analogy would be like a shared drawing taking merge requests and having to spend 30 minutes looking at every single merge request zoomed in to see if there was a microscopic phallus embedded somewhere.
It is completely fair for an open source project to have their own standards, and you are also free to fork it so you can accept as many AI PRs as you want.
None of these options are available for someone that wants to sell AI generated music. There are really only 2 marketplaces to sell your own music and if both of them banned AI, then you are effectively locked out of the entire market.
I have dozens of little programs and websites that are AI generated and do their job perfectly.
Eventually that'll change, as artists and musicians continue to experiment with AI and come up with novel uses for it, just as digital artists did with tablets and digital painting software, and just as musicians did with keyboards and DAWs.
In terms of how well it works, the quality of AI music is far better than art or code. In art there are noticeble glitches like multiple fingers. For code, it can call non existent functions, not do what it is supposed to do, or have security issues or memory leaks. From what I can tell, there is no such deal breaker for AI music.
More subjective tells: drums are hissy and weak, lyrics are generic or weird like "Went to the grocery store to buy coffee beans for my sadness", weirdly uniform loudness and density from start to finish, drops/climaxes are underwhelming, and (if you've listened to enough of them) a general uncanny feel to them.
I've generated about 70 hours of AI music and have listened to all of the songs at least once, so it's become intuitive for me to pick them out.
Some examples for listening for the hiss filter:
https://suno.com/s/qvUKLxVV6HDifknq (Easiest to hear at 0:00 with the inhale)
https://suno.com/s/QZx1t0aii0HVZYGx (Really strong at 0:09)
Some examples for more hiss and other (subjective) tells like weak drums:
I guess what I'm getting at is that, since programmers are typically more inclined than the average person to understand how AI works, programmers are therefore ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding those pitfalls and structuring their workflows to minimize them — to play to the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs. A “fancy” autocomplete v. a “fancy” linter v. something pretending to be a junior programmer are all going to have very different rates of success.
The issue hindering art and music is that most people using generative AI for art and music are doing so analogously to the “something pretending to be a junior programmer” role instead of the “fancy autocomplete” or “fancy linter” roles. That is: they're typically using AI to generate works end-to-end, whereas (non-vibe-coder) programmers are typically using AI in far narrower scopes, with more direct control over the final output. I think the quality of AI-based art and music will improve as more narrowly-scoped AI-driven workflows catch on among actually-skilled artists and musicians — and the result will be works that are very different from existing works, rather than works that only cheaply imitate some statistical average of existing works.
Compare this to music where you are free to choose and listen to whatever you want, or stare at art that moves you. IF you don
At work most people are force to deal with code like SalesForce or MSFT garbage, not the same experience at all.
Why would people care about code coming from an industry that has been bleeding them dry and making their society worse for nearly 20+ years?
In the first place, I do not regard a copyright notice and license on AI generated code to be valid in my eyes, so on those grounds alone, I cannot use it any more than I could merge a piece of proprietary, leaked source code.
You cannot ignore a credible/plausible claim from a third party.
It's not simply the case that the output has a public-domain-like status.
Also, there's quite a lot of pushback against AI-generated code, but also because unlike music, normal people have no interest in and aren't aware of the code.
When it comes to code, I don't think anyone cares how the sausage is made, and only very rarely do people care by whom. The only question is "does it work well?"
Art is totally different. Provenance is much more important - sometimes essential. David is a beautiful work, but you could 3d print or cast a replica of "David". No one would pretend that the copy is the same as the original though - even if they're indistinguishable to the untrained eye - because one was painstakingly hand sculpted and the others were cheaply produced. This sense of provenance is the property that NFTs were (unsuccessfully) trying to capture.
It's difficult to pin down the line. Ultimately it's up to the individual to define them. "The relationship to art, and this kind of painting, to their work, varied with the person entirely."[1]
[1]: https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/03/31/berkeley-voices-transfo...
No and no.
If you raise and teach a child and they generate a painting, are you the artist?
Music has its history in IP, royalties, and most things need to be paid for in the creation of music or art itself.
It’s going to be much easier for devs to accept AI when remixing code is such a huge part of the culture already. The expectation in the arts is entirely different.
Artists are constantly getting inspiration from one another, referencing one another, performing together or having their works exhibited together...
While there are some big name artists who are famously protective of the concept of IP, those artists have made headlines exactly because when they litigate they seem so unreasonable compared to the bedroom musicians and pub bands and church choirs and school teachers and wedding DJs and millions of other artists and performers whose way of participating in "the culture" is much less tied to ownership.
while programmers have to rush it these days or they lose their jobs. Programmers don't have much of say in their companies.
I think the fears were understandable then, and are understandable now. I also think that, just as the fears around synthesizers didn't come to fruition, neither will the fears around AI come to fruition. Synthesizers didn't, and generative AI won't, replace musicians; rather, musicians did and will add these new technologies into their toolsets and use them to push music beyond what was previously understood to be possible. Synthesizers didn't catch on by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as instruments in their own right; so will generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as an instrument in its own right.
The core problem right now is that AI (even beyond just music) ain't being marketed as a means of augmenting one's creativity and skills, but as a means of replacing them. That'll always be misguided, both in the practical sense of producing worse outputs and in the philosophical sense of atrophying that same creativity and skills. AI doesn't have to produce slop, but it will inevitably produce slop when it's packaged and sold and marketed in a way that actively encourages slop — much like taking one of those cheap electric keyboards with built-in beats and songs and advertising it as able to replace a whole band. Yeah, it's cool that keyboards can play songs on their own and AI can generate songs on their own, but that output will always be subpar compared to what someone with even the slightest bit of creativity and skill can pull out of those exact same tools.
but generative AI didn’t catch on by "imitating instruments." It caught on by imitating artists, which streaming platforms and record labels then repackage and outsell you with. false analogy.
i.e. complaining about training on copyrighted material and getting it banned is not sufficient to prevent creating a model that can create music that outsells you. Because training isn't about copying the training material, it's just a way to find the Platonic latent space of music, and you can get there other ways.
dropping wiki links and math jargon avoids the ethical / market reality here.
No, that's the whole problem. The systems are capable of outselling the artist whether or not they're trained on the artist. So you can't prevent it by complaining about the training data.
My bad. As the first part of my comment suggested, what I meant to say here was "imitating instruments and the performers thereof".
> which streaming platforms and record labels then repackage and outsell you with
But that's the thing: it doesn't seem very likely that they'd ever succeed at actually outselling very many actual musicians, for the same reason those cheap keyboards that can play pop songs at the press of a button don't actually replace any actual musicians: not just because the quality sucks compared to even amateur performers, but because even if the quality didn't suck, the end result is about as interesting to the audience as a karaoke backing track or musak playing in an elevator. If anyone can press a button to make some statistical average of popular music, then that's gonna get real boring real quick, while the actual musicians will be making actual, novel music. It's just like what happened to the “vaporwave” and “nightcore” genres: they got flooded with “new songs” that are just slowed down / sped up (respectively) versions of existing songs, and nobody bothered seeking out those songs unless they were really into vaporwave/nightcore for their own sake or they were trying to put together one of the umpteen bajillion “anime girl studying while listening to lo-fi beats” playlists out there.
That is:
> false analogy.
Then here's another “false” analogy for you: just like with synthesizers, just like with vaporwave/nightcore, just like with all sorts of other musical phenomena where all of a sudden people with no skill could very easily and cheaply make musical slop, this new AI-driven wave of slop will, too, consume itself until it's yet another layer of background noise against which the actual musicians distinguish themselves and push the boundaries of music. It's a wildfire burning away yet another underbrush of mediocrity and creative stagnation, and while it's absolutely terrifying and dangerous in the present, it paves the way for a healthier regrowth in the aftermath.
Let me guess: you're an amateur musician. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it makes it much easier to be amused about this topic.
> There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own.
What are you talking about? Which "tech kit" got demonized by whom? Of course, there were always controversies around techniques like sampling or whatever, or conservatives in the UK demonizing rave culture, but otherwise, I have no idea what you're referring to.
Nobody listens to techno - Eminem
AI needs to make music that sells. The same way Scorsese and Brando sell the Godfather. until it can do that literally nobody will care.
What’s being repackaged isn’t a new instrument, it’s other people’s careers. I’m not sure what part of that is supposed to be amusing.
To me, it seems more like people place their own meaning in art. A particular song might remind one individual of the good times they had in their teens, while the actual meaning of the song is completely different.
Bachs 5th symphony (or whatever) might be extremely annoying to someone because they had to listen to it every day at work.
And what exactly is the meaning of jazz fusion? I really like a good solo, but a lot of people hate it, they need to hear a voice. (though I don't particularly like the signature Suno or Udio solo..)
I found this ai track on Spotify that I unironically enjoyed. I listened to it every day while working on reviving an old passion project, which became its meaning to me. The tune, a long with its album with random disparate suno generations was taken down.
I'm not sure if I have a point here, but something is off with the story thing in art to me from a consumers point of view. Maybe from other artists as consumers point of view?
Or Beethoven's 9th. For different reasons...
But my experience as an artist talking to non-artists about art, I don't think the sentiment that art without a struggling artist, purpose, story to tell, human arc, etc, is not real art is a true sentiment. First of all, because it's not true, because people apply their own meaning and form their own unique relationship with an artist. (The saying don't meet your heroes come to mind.)
Note that I'm not talking about AI at all here. I'm 100% for banning purely generated AI on soundcloud, bandcamp, spotify, etc. What I really want is to filter out art created by people who has put profit as first priority and thrown away any shred of artistic integrity.
But this is an impossible feat, because who am I to judge that someone else's favorite artist is devoid of artistic integrity?
yes, listeners project their own memories onto music, no one’s disputing that. but that doesn’t make the creator, context, intent, or labor irrelevant. treating music as interchangeable stimulus is how you end up defending systems that strip human work of attribution, risk, and livelihood while still feeding on the cultural residue artists created in the first place.
While I personally like it when people put their heart and soul into something, even if the result is technically not very great, it's society who is the ultimate judge of whether that creation benefits them or not.
I know that the track I'm currently listening to is superior in every way to some modern pop song. The artists have practiced for decades, they have their own unique style I can recognize in other tracks. But I also know that 99.999% of people don't give a shit and think it's noisy music, and depending on your perspective, they're correct.
I can imagine that this is true for a lot of people. There are certainly folks out there who see music as an interesting sensory stimulus. This song makes you dance, this one makes you cry, this other one makes you feel nostalgic. To these people, the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel. It's a strange, solipsistic way of engaging with art, but who am I to judge?
I personally don't connect to music—or any other art—that way. The process that goes into making a piece of music is as important to me as the music itself. The people who make that music are even more important. I don't believe in separating art from the artist. In fact, I find the whole idea of separating art and artist to be fundamentally rotten.
Here's an admittedly extreme example, but it's demonstrative of how I personally relate to music. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement), some of the musicians I used to love as a teenager were outed as sexual predators. When I found out, I scoured my music library and deleted all their work. The music was still the exact same music I fell in love with all those years ago, but I could no longer listen to it without being reminded of the horrible actions of the musicians. Listening to it was triggering.
And so to me, music is not just a series of sounds that make me feel good. There are humans behind those sounds, and I care deeply about those humans. They don't need to be perfect—everyone fucks up from time to time—but they need to demonstrate some level of human decency. And they certainly can't be machines, because machines aren't people.
I love machines. I've spent my life building them, programming them, and caring for them. But machines aren't people, and therefore I don't care about the art they make. Maybe one day machines will be able to make art in the same way humans do: by going out into the world, having experiences, making mistakes, learning, connecting with others, loving and being loved, or being rejected soundly, and understanding deeply what it means to be a living thing in this universe. A generative AI model doesn't do that (yet!) and so I'm utterly uninterested in whatever a generative AI model has to say about anything.
>Maybe one day machines will be able to make art in the same way humans do: by going out into the world, having experiences, making mistakes, learning, connecting with others, loving and being loved, or being rejected soundly, and understanding deeply what it means to be a living thing in this universe.
I think this is a good description of the process of how some art is created, but not all? Some art is a pursuit of "what is beautiful" rather than "what it means to be human" ie a sensory experience, some art is accidental, some art just is. For some art knowing the person behind is important, to me; for some not; for some it adds to the experience; for some it removes from it.
I would also highlight some small contradiction:
>I can imagine that this is true for a lot of people. There are certainly folks out there who see music as an interesting sensory stimulus. This song makes you dance, this one makes you cry, this other one makes you feel nostalgic. To these people, the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel. It's a strange, solipsistic way of engaging with art, but who am I to judge?
>Here's an admittedly extreme example, but it's demonstrative of how I personally relate to music. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement), some of the musicians I used to love as a teenager were outed as sexual predators. When I found out, I scoured my music library and deleted all their work. The music was still the exact same music I fell in love with all those years ago, but I could no longer listen to it without being reminded of the horrible actions of the musicians. Listening to it was triggering.
That seems to me a case of "the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel".
As can I, but a gorgeous sunset is not art. It's beauty.
First, art is, I think, one of the most enjoyable activities we have. One evidence is a lot of people forego higher salaries to choose an art job (although being a job carries additional responsibilities and some inconveniences compared to doing it as a hobby). It's a shame to see it diminished, when I believe we should be diverting efforts to automate other stuff.
Second, most AI art I've seen has been quite substandard compared to human art. We still don't know very well what human emotions are, the origin of sentience and qualia, etc.. But I think humans still lead here in having and probably understanding emotions. While for other tasks most implementation detail is irrelevant (e.g. in code, that it works tends to be most important, vs. minute choices in style), in art every detail is particularly relevant. Knowing this, it bothers me usually when I see this art that it doesn't carry the same knowledge of context and nuance a human would have.
Third, There's also the effect of making me question whether each piece of artwork was made by a human or AI, that didn't exist before. It does carry a bit of a magical feeling I think knowing a real person made every piece of artwork prior to 2018 or so (I think algorithmic art[1] is fine in this regard, because it tends to be more clearly algorithmic, and the involvement of the artist in coding is significant), that is now gone or at risk. Even the thought of imagining say their work day or what they had for lunch or talked to coworkers or friends is pleasant to me (at the risk of romanticizing it too much).
I suppose if AI art actually understood human nature, and specially the specific context of each art piece, better than us some of my arguments might be diminished. But the negatives so far seem to outweigh the positives, and I would like to e.g. give preference to content that doesn't use AI art.
(It is, admittedly, also the case that we lost a similar amount of craftsmanship when the industrial revolution happened, and in return we were able to support a larger population, and greater material conditions for most people. Every object now isn't carefully handcrafted. I think it's different because well, now material conditions are relatively abundant, and second there's no such insatiable, significant and irreplaceable demand for art as there were to common industrialized objects (take shoes for example), at least not to the same extent or vital significance. That is, the ability to have a shoe at all far outweighs it being carefully handcrafted, I believe; while experiencing a poorly made AI movie or artwork might be actually worse than none at all (or simply an older human made movie), and it also gets more cumbersome to evaluate for ourselves whether AI was employed or not. Also, while say shoes only last a limited time and need to be constantly produced, good artwork can last indefinitely (using digital storage), and even if you account for cultural change and relevance, can still last a really long time, motivating investing more into it.)
I'm quite sure that if we're still around in 500 or so years, we'll still be enjoying say Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (probably as a digital reproduction). Current AI art will probably be largely discarded, so seems largely an unwise investment. Actually this kind of applies to code as well. It seems plausible Linux could still be used in 500 years from now (see how we still value finding Unix v4 50 years after), or at least of some interest. Those durable intellectual goods don't seem like wise places to invest anything but the best of us :) (at least in the cases it's not disposable)
The arguments above also don't seem to apply say in concept stages, or say for bland corporate diagrams that will be disposed of in 1 day, and which a huge quantity is needed. I think the main criteria I would evaluate is (1) Was it enjoyable to produce (for the artist(s))?; (2) Will it have a significant (artistic) impact on who is experiencing it?; (3) Will it last a long time?
[1] W.r.t. algorithmic art (and digital in general) (take bytebeat[2] for example), which is a field I really love, I am not any kind of absolutist about it. I know there tends to be extremely more degrees of freedom for human expression in a manual piece than in an algorithmic piece, so I see it more as a complement and not a substitute for more conventional art. I'd never give up ever hearing human musician player music for bytebeat, just bytebeat is a lovely experimental other dimension of expression. Writing a prompt seems a too few degrees of freedom and context, and too much of an uniform context that is less rich than humans can provide.
Always has been :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpUj9zpOiP0
(And honorary mention)
There may be short term emotional strings to pull. "AI driven!" or "AI free!"
But ultimately, no one will care if it's AI or not if it's good.
Before generative AI, there were already a swarm of people who aimed at maximising the number of track they made within a short time, with abusing marketing. It is not wrong that they can pump up 100 tracks in a year, with a template and a specialised workflow and correct marketing techniques but… what is the story to these music? For many tracks, I only heard the story of:
> I am the most productive person and I can make most of the money because of that.
Quantity wise, for sure, they wins, but quality wise, I failed to imagine a more complex story than things above although they are good to hype the dance floor or a concert. These days, I mostly listen to music I have bought, or made by specific music communities because of their story behind their track despite not as perfect.
Same reasons why don’t I watch many movies since Ironman 3, most of the blockbusters follow the same winning formula rather than trying something new and in depth or unexpected, CGI and product placements all over the place instead of a good story.
AI just emphasised this problem even more since commercial “art” has been testing majorities’ newest lows.
There are differences between using a tool to create art or use it to spam.
We've now had this technology for 2 years. Show me one, just ONE track that is purely(!) made by AI you find honestly exciting. Not "commercially successful", mind you, something you, a musician, personally think is actually great. You are referencing Aphex Twin there, and I'm old enough to remember when I first heard "Digeridoo", so, you know, something where you just go "Wow, that's a banger". If you're DJing: something you would actually put on in a club and the crowd would go wild.
Let's cut the crap: there is none. All GenAI is good for is generating stupid memes, shitposting, ads, and generic background music. There is ZERO creative value in purely generative AI. Yes, there are tools leveraging AI models which can help musicians create tracks - entirely different thing. This is also not what Bandcamp is banning here. Most people will freely admit that AI tooling can be used creatively, like what De Staat did with the "Running backwards into the future" music video - that's all fine, really nobody is disputing that fact, although that "look" is now well established and people are mostly bored and annoyed by it, but that's just how it goes.
What does Bandcamp really mean? Perhaps sampling others voices and music is barred, not these mini-AIs that are everywhere ?
Algorithmic progression generation IS IN USE for years, sorry you didn't mention, or perhaps you don't listen that much to everyday radio. Markov chains, constraint solvers, and rule-based harmony live in many VSTs... the fact there are so many "experimentors" out dare winding knobs to match a pleasurable pattern, does not change the fact they be 100% ignorant about the 'deux ex machina'.
I'm surrounded by producers having absolutely no clue about the vast amount of actual AI and actual probabilistic algorithms that make their "unique" sounds possible. And all of them are 100% ignorant of what AI means when they say it, because they don't mean a specific thing.
How is this not AI? Or one needs an transformer-based model to call it AI? This whole story did not start an year or two ago, you may be late for history class though. The fact there's been this moving marketing concept of what "AI" actually is, does not change the reality of most modern music (including acoustic) at some point of the production process getting artificially enhanced by honestly super-complex systems that are intelligent enough to do what otherwise would take 20x more effort to get right.
Good thing that's not what Bandcamp is doing, then. To spare you a click, here's the exact wording:
"Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp."
No one is complaining about the first case, because they are outnumbered by the second 100,000 to 1. RDJ isn't gonna use suno.ai no matter how pro-LLM he is.
Note: this is for sake of argument, I am not aware of RDJ using LLMs in any shape or form.
And on the surface the drill is better. But this heir is assuming that all diggers do is diplace dirt. Not thinking about where to dig, how to dig safely,, what to dig for, and where brute force is needed vs a subtle touch (because even in 2025, miners keep shovels with them). That's all going out the window for "hey I made a hole, mission accomplished!".
Instead of working with diggers to enhace their mining, they want to pretend they can dig themselves. That's why no one in the creative space is confident in this.
I had this opinion for a long time, but only recently was I personally affected, but that made me even more convinced.
I was listening to my new releases playlist on Apple Music and listened to a track that sounded nice, but also a little generic. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to check, but it had all the signs of something fishy going on like generic cover image, the artist page showed a crazy output of singles last year (all the same generic images), unspecific metadata and - to my surprise - I found other Reddit posts about this artist being AI.
Now, a lot of music is generic and goes through so many hands you can hardly call it a personal piece of art. But even then, there’s always some kind of connection.
I guess that’s why I felt betrayed.
I thought AI generated art was wrong before, but I didn’t expect to feel this mix of anger and disappointment.
For me, music (like all fine art) is about human connection. It's the artist telling me something human and personal. It's not entirely about the aesthetics of the music. The provenance of the art is very important. If I feel that connection with a song and it turns out that the song wasn't made by a person (it hasn't happened yet as far as I know), I have been deceived and would be furious.
A song made by a person using AI as tool (rather than to generate the music) is different. What matters is that the song is actually an expression of humanity, not the tools used to make it.
However, the presence of AI-generated music means that I am not really willing to buy music anymore unless it's either a few years old or I'm buying it at the merch table the artist has at a live performance.
And I think it is entirely feasible that at some point -- how far away, I don't know -- AI becomes superior to us in its appreciation of life and living.
Does that constitute "wholly or in substantial part"? Would the track have existed were it not for having that easy route into re-mastering?
I understand what Bandcamp's trying to do here, and I generally am in support of removing what we'd recognize as "fully AI-generated music", but there are legitimate creative uses of AI that might come to wholly or substantially encompass the output. It's difficult to draw any lines line on a creative work, by just by nature of the work being creative.
(For those interested - check out O Positive's "With You" on the WERS Live at 75 album!)
Justifiable because there were some filters. That may not even have been "AI". They may have been some deterministic algorithms that the software maker has to label "AI" because they otherwise think it won't sell...
I'm not familiar with the music business, but I'm a Sunday photographer. There's an initiative to label pictures that had "generative ai" applied. I'm not a professional, so I don't really have a horse in this race. I also enjoy the creations of some dude I follow on Instagram which are clearly labelled as produced by AI.
But in between, the situation isn't as clear cut. As photographers, we used to do "spot removal", with pretty big "spots" for ages [0]. You just had to manually select the "offending" "spot", try to source some other part which looked close enough. Now you can use "object removal" which does a great job with things like grass and whatnot but is "generative ai". These are labelled AI, and they are.
I can understand someone arguing that what required a lot of skill is now more accessible. And I guess that's true? But that just sounds elitist.
So what's the issue with "AI"? Do you enjoy the result? Great! Do you hate it? Move to the next one. Does that particular "artist" produce only thins you hate? Skip them!
--
[0] my point is about "artistic" pictures, not photojournalism or similar where "what was" is of utmost importance. Note that even in those cases, selective cropping only requires your feet and nobody would label as "edited". But I specifically don't want to open that can of worms.
The output does depend on training works, even if you are just fixing grammar errors. But the document is obviously a derivative of your own writing and almost nothing else. A grammatic concept learned from vast numbers of worsk is probably not a copyright infringment.
Similarly, a part extraction concept learned from training sets such as pairs of mixed and unmixed music, and then applied to someone's own music to do accurate part extraction, does not seem like an infringing use. All features of the result are identifiable as coming from the original mixed audio; you cannot identify infringing passages in it added by the AI --- and if such a thing happened, it would be an unwanted artifact leading us to re-do the part extraction in some other way to avoid it.
If you want to be some neutral universal third party sure. If you're OK with taking a position, the arbitrariness actually makes it much easier. You just draw the line you want.
Creativity demands limitation, and those limitations don't have to be justified.
Saying "I'm against fully AI generated music" is at least precise, and doesn't throw out detecting cancer along with the AI bandwagon term.
Have you heard of machine learning?
ML voice recognition is still far superior to AI-based voice recognition. At its best, Gemini is still less accurate at parsing speech than Dragon Naturally Speaking circa 2000.
It’s still AI, but it’s not the AI system generating something
Not if you agree with dictionaries and Wikipedia:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making.
This is why it is to these generative AI companies' benefit that 'AI' becomes a catchall term for everything, from what enemies are programmed to do in video games to a spambot that creates and uploads slop facebook videos on the hour.
Was this demo his, or someone else’s IP? If he is cleaning up or modifying his own property, not a lot of people have a problem with that.
If it is someone else’s work, then modifying with AI doesn’t change that.
I think they just don’t want AI generated works that only mash up the work of other artists, which is the default of AI generated stuff.
A harder set of hypotheticals might arise if music production goes the direction that software engineering is heading: “agentic work”, whereby a person is very much involved in the creation of a work, but more by directing an AI agent than by orchestrating a set of non-AI tools.
Similarly, say, for video editors, using AI to more intelligently rotoscope (especially with alpha blending in the presence of motion blur - practically impossible to do it manually), would be a great use of AI, removing the non-creative tedium of the process.
It's not clear where the line is though. I was quite impressed with Corridor Crew's (albeit NVidia+Puget-sponsored) video [1] where they photographed dolls, motion-captured human actors moving like the dolls, and transferred the skeletal animation and facial expressions to those dolls using GenAI. Some of it required nontrivial transformative code to accommodate a skeleton to a toy's body type. There's a massive amount of tedium being removed from the creative process by GenAI without sacrificing the core human creative contribution. This feels like it should be allowed -- I think we should attempt to draw clearer lines where there are clearly efficiency gains to be had to have less "creative" uses be more socially acceptable.
But we also live with arbitrary lines elsewhere, as with spam filters? People generally don't want ads for free Viagra, and spam filters remain the default without making "no marketing emails" a hard rule.
The problem isn't that music Transformers can't be used artfully [1] but that they allow a kind of spam which distribution services aren't really equipped to handle. In 2009, nobody would have stopped you from producing albums en masse with the generative tech of the day, Microsoft's Songsmith [2], but you would have had a hard time selling them - but hands-off distribution services like DistroKid and improved models makes music spam much more viable now than it was previously.
[1] I personally find neural synthesis models like RAVE autoencoders nifty: https://youtu.be/HC0L5ZH21kw
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research_Songsmith as ...demoed? in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg0l7f25bhU
One is trained with a set of pairs which match words with images. Vast numbers of images tagged with words.
The other is trained on a set of photographs of exactly the same scene from the same vantage point, but one in daylight and the other at night. Suppose all these images are copyrighted and used without permissions.
With the one AI, we can do word-to-image to generate an image. Clearly, that is a derived work of the training set of images; it's just interpolating among them based on the word assocations.
With the other AI, we can take a photograph which we took ourselves in daylight, and generate a night version of the same one. This is not clearly infringing on the training set, even though that output depends on it. We used the set without permission to have the machine extract and learn the concept of diurnal vs. nocturnal appearance of scenes, based on which it is kind of "reimagining" our daytime image as a night time one.
The question of whether AI is stealing material depends exactly on what the training pathway is; what it is that it is learning from the data. Is it learning to just crib, and interpolate, or to glean some general concept that is not protected by copyright: like separating mixed audio into tracks, changing day to night, or whatever.
> The question of whether AI is stealing material depends exactly on what the training pathway is; what it is that it is learning from the data.
No it isn't. The question of whether AI is stealing material has little to do with the training pathway, but everything to do with scale.
To give a very simple example: is your model a trillion parameter model, but you're training it on 1000 images? It's going to memorize.
Is your model a 3 billion parameter model, but you're training it on trillions of images? It's going to generalize because it simply doesn't physically have the capacity to memorize its training data, and assuming you've deduplicated your training dataset it's not going to memorize any single image.
It literally makes no difference whether you'll use the "trained on the same scene but one in daylight and one at night" or "generate the image based on a description" training objective here. Depending on how you pick your hyperparameters you can trivially make either one memorize the training data (i.e. in your words "make it clearly a derived work of the training set of images").
What people get mad about is the use of AI to generate whole tracks. Generating rhythms, melodies, harmonies etc via AI isn't greeted warmly either, but electronic musicians generally like experimenting with things like setting up 'wrong' modulation destinations in search of interesting results. I don't think anyone seriously objects to AI-produced elements being selected and repurposed as musical raw material. But this is obviously not happening with complete track generation. It's like playing slot machines but calling yourself a business person.
I want a friend to message me like "Hey, there's some interesting stuff happening in the AI music scene, check out these tracks".
But everything I've seen is pastiche, either novelty songs (hit song as different genre, or famous monologue from popular movie as pop song) or generic background music meant for algorithmic streaming playlists.
Has it done this? Or does it just make things that sound like what it's trained on?
I mean, even if it's just a pastiche machine, I do believe that people could use it to make new and interesting music, just like they did with sampling.
But yeah, music is so accessible and there is so much new music all the time that if all, or most, of what AI is being used for is to make even more of the same stuff we're already awash in then banning it is necessary curation.
It is German but there is really funny remixes combining Mallorca Party music (a German music genre of its own) with anti fascist themes. They manage to make fun of both without being IMHO totally alienating both subcultures, which could count as art. IMHO such things would not really be possible without AI. Would be really disappointed if this disappeared from BC.
One is when it attempts to generate vocals without a lyrics prompt. It's gibberish but just on the edge of comprehensibility. Sometimes it'll be entirely spoken word with no accompaniment. Very uncanny.
Another is transitioning between vocals and instrument in the same melody line. Like a humanesque voice holding a steady note at the end of a verse which seamlessly transitions into a saxophone sound and proceeds into a solo. Or vice versa, an instrumental morphing into a voice.
Finally is when the generation goes wrong and it starts spitting out absolute nonsensical sounds with no rhythm or melody, in a uniquely fragmented way I can't really describe. It feels like seeing the musical matrix, the inner thoughts of the AI.
Now I've written all that out and had a think about it, I'm tempted to sample these oddities and try to make something more structured out of them.
I think there's something cool here, seamless morphing between sounds was one of the things they were trying (and failing, obviously) to do at IRCAM way back when. Finally we might be able to morph in something approaching perceptual space.
(and glitch is always interesting too, of course)
Cantabile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantabile
1. Pretty sure you can do all this already, it just takes some skill in certain programs and maybe recording special samples.
2. When the AI does it, it might sound weird and new, but I feel the lack of artistic vision makes these more artifacts than art. Even if it sounds interesting, there's no meaning to it.
You could regard AI as being literally just a very advanced form of sampling. I've seen and heard some very creative uses of AI tools, and it would be a terrible shame if that baby got thrown out with the bathwater.
Arguably this is a return to a more traditional way of experiencing music from before the invention of recorded music. Before this, music was an entirely transient and often communal experience. Once the musician stops playing, the music is over. Songs from these times have largely unknown authors, and likely don't even have any single author or for that to even be a coherent concept. They were simply part of the shared culture that many had contributed to. Now music is owned by specific people and you can play back their performance as much as you like (for an increasingly insignificant price).
This tech may be a negative thing for the market of recorded music, but it needs to be argued that recorded music is the only authentic way to experience music, and that this is why that's how most people experience music currently, rather than that being an historical anomaly due to the technology available. Once you step away from treating music like it's only valid when it's a product for a market, the problems of AI music seem a lot less catastrophic.
What is meant by "AI Music" is not works by Iannis Xenakis or certain Autechre albums.
We should be defining all this better but we won't. It is also that there is no "AI music" equivalent of the amen break to invent new forms of art. The cultural structures and norms that made that possible no longer exist.
It really is the difference though between art and porn. A blurry distinction on paper but quite obvious in practice. Quite obvious in motivation.
(*) and before, but that’s an obvious example
It sucks that a lot of these types of markets are suffering from low numbers of shoppers. They open themselves up to these plastic peddlers in desperation only to drive away customers even more.
Consider how easy it would have been, any time in the last decade, to get a booth at any "local hand-made goods craft fair", selling "hand-made" copper jewelry... that you happened to buy in bulk lots off Alibaba. The jewelry was "hand-made"... kind of... by someone else, making far too little money, in sweatshop conditions, following techniques and using machines that enable them to produce hundreds at once, with no QC whatsoever.
Nobody would ever guess you hadn't made the stuff yourself. They would read the lack of QC as evidence for your claim that "each piece is distinct and made to match my artistic vision in the moment." You'd put one or two of each type of piece out on the table at a time, as if those are all you have; yet as soon as one sells, you'd pull another out from the box of hundreds.
I can't say for sure that this ever happens, but judging by the number of people willing to be scummy in the more modern ways... it certainly feels like it could. Honestly makes me hesitant to buy anything from a craft fair. Which is a shame.
Craft fairs, though, no excuse or reason. There should not be profit maximizing at local craft fairs. They're a bellwether for the degradation of culture.
I've seen exactly this a few times in Madrid already, right next to the "dude with bad 3D printer #35"-type stands. A friend of mine loves finding the Aliexpress product page right in front of them.
People want to feel a meaningful connection to others. One facet of that is wanting to own objects that were made by an actual person who put craft into creating the object and who cares about the owner being happy with it.
Virtually everyone, not just rich hipsters, wants this. People seek it out and are happy to pay a lot extra for it.
However, "made with care" (and not just "by hand possibly in a sweatshop") is a fairly intangible property and hard to distinguish from just looking at the object. Instead, you really need some amount of provenance tracking to tell the "made by someone who gives a shit" from the slop.
Maker fairs, Etsy, farmer's markets, and many other venues exist basically to offer up that claim of trusted provenance. But the very large price difference between what you can sell a made-with-care object for versus the very low price you can make an indistinguishable object using factories, sweatshop labor, or AI makes those venues a honeypot for scammers who want to sell, essentially, fake meaning.
I keep feeling like the ultimate answer to everything going on in the current zeitgiest is some kind of real trust tracking system so you know where a piece of media or object actually came from.
The funny thing is that what makes the scammer version a scam is that they go through exactly the same process but then try to pass the products off as their own artisinal work, presumably because they think that will net them more money. But in reality most people browsing for tat at a market aren't going to pay more or less for local artisinal versus imported artisinal versus mass produced, they just enjoy the experience of browsing the different stalls and chatting with vendors and feeling like they have connection with their local merchants. So the scam was wholly unnecessary, the vendor didn't need to make up a story, they just needed to be open to chatting with their customer. They're shooting themselves in the foot by lying about their products because if/when they're found out then they lost the trust, which is the actual product they are selling. People who choose local markets over chain stores or online shopping are doing it exactly because they are looking for a more trustworthy experience, so when you take that away you have nothing to sell.
> Boom we did: https://hangout.fm/
clicks link, scrolls down one screen
> Let’s get something started! Create your own hangout or craft a new song
> Big purple "(sparkles) Generate music" button
E.g. how is this worse and needs to be removed: https://youtu.be/L3Uyfnp-jag?si=SL4Jc4qeEXVgUpeC but crap that top pop artists vomit out into the world doesn't
It should!
Is anyone here aware of one? I might give it a go if not.
If they're not doing it already, I think some metadata analysis, going by things like upload patterns, would also work well.
Can you give a few examples?
For example, how to detect that the song I linked is AI compared to say, anything Taylor Swift produces, or to any overly produced pop song or an electronic beat.
If it's instrumental only, especially electronic music then I don't think I could tell.
* N-gram analysis of lyrics. Even good LLM's still exhibit some weird pattern's when analyzed at the n-gram level.
* Entropy - Something like KL divergence maybe? There are a lot of ways to calculate entropy that can be informative. I would expect human music to display higher entropy.
* Plain old FFT. I suspect you'll find weird statistical anomalies.
* Fancy waveform analysis tricks. AI's tend to do it in "chunks" I would expect the waveforms to have steeper/higher impulses and strange gaps. This probably explains why they still sound "off" to hifi fans.
* SNR analysis - Maybe a repeat of one of the above, but worth expanding on. The actual information density of the channel will be different because diffusion is basically compression.
* Subsampling and comparing to a known library. It's likely that you can identify substantial chunks that are sampled from other sources without modification - Harder because you need a library. Basically just Shazam.
* Consistency checks. Are all of the same note/instrument pairs actually generated by the same instrument throughout, or subtly different. Most humans won't notice, but it's probably easy to detect that it drifts (if it does).
That's just offhand though. I would need to experiment to see which if any actually work. I'm sure there are lots more ways.
This will likely have a lot of false positives on a lot of genres. E.g. I suspect genres like synthpop and trance (and a lot of other electronic music) will likely hit a lot of those points with regards to music and sampling.
Lyrics are also not a given (when they are likely curated by humans). E.g. compare the song I referenced (https://dumpstergrooves.bandcamp.com/track/he-talked-a-big-g...) to, say, Taylor Swift's current most listened to song: https://genius.com/Taylor-swift-the-fate-of-ophelia-lyrics I'd chose the AI one in a heart beat :)
I wonder if a combination of all of those may work for a subset of songs, but I don't think you can do it with any confidence :(
Thats a solid point. Pretty much all of my ideas are probabilistic. I suspect you're right and it will have to work a bit like spam detection, where each "fail" for a test is seen as one indicator that adds to a score. Then above a threshold score it's flagged for further review and sent to a "spam" folder where a human can judge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMYm2d9bmEA
I also remembered a friend telling me about someone talking about a method to detect AI music. I forget the specifics (I haven’t watched the video, was only told about it) but I remember the channel.
I have an allergic reaction to it and flag, but clearly a majority of the hn voting population appreciates it, so if it isn’t banned it will continue.
Anecdotally, though, these articles seem to have a disproportionate number of, “Wow, this article is so interesting & insightful”-class comments. I really have come around to accepting that a big part of the audience here enjoys what LLM’s produce given hn-ish prompts.
I’d rather see the prompt!
Oh look, another one this morning at #3:
If I wanted to publish my writing, people would focus on that, and not the content of the writing. If I run it through Kimi K2, people will focus on my ideas.
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays
I'm still sad about the company's sale to Epic and then Songtradr, but glad to see that the service hasn't turned to garbage yet.
I usually buy stuff on release day, but when I find older albums (or the rare ones I preorder), I wishlist them to get on BC Friday
I’d encourage you to dig deeper into why and how the music that is being created by those tools works.
And I would much prefer to hear your music over machine-generated music even if the generated music is technically better performed.
Typed a prompt and hit generate. No response after waiting some time. I scrolled down to existing sample music to get a sense of what it creates and hit play. Not one of the play buttons worked. Ok load up Chrome instead of Firefox, maybe they did some Chrome specific thing? Nope site's still broken and none of the samples under "Suno AI Music Gallery" actually work. There's a javascript error "invalid client" on clicking it. I'm not logged in i guess?
It did work on mobile but that seems like it presents a completely different site.
Those people don’t tend to have a good understanding of what most humans like and why they like stuff like music.
But that is allowed on bandcamp? It's not allowed if it's mostly done with AI.
Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.
You painting a piece of art or composing a song was really the functional output of billions of cells coordinating in unison, 100% subconsciously, and the thoughts that arose out of your subconscious were entirely (or mostly, to avoid free will debate) out of your control. Your output was the product of billions of years of stellar and biological evolution on top of millennia of human history and influence. You created nothing.
Soon you will have to grapple with the reality of what really drives your enjoyment of media, and part of that will be realizing that the human-ness never mattered at all.
Is beautiful nature scenery not beautiful because it wasnt hand-crafted painstakingly by a creative human? Of course it is. There is no intuition for the vast swaths of time it took to form, that is a modern human conceptualization that came long after we already found nature to be beautiful.
We have a biological pattern recognition tuned for beauty regardless of its origin. And there is nothing inherently unbeautiful about elegant software that can produce beautiful "art". Nor is there any justifiable, defensible, or intellectually honest way to argue that the human/effort element in art matters in any way besides perhaps portraying and conveying social status.
Every individual has a unique experience, and assimilates different things from their experiences depending on their personal tastes and culture. That is profoundly different from a model which assimilates the output of hundreds of thousands of individuals. A model has no creative, or artistic voice. Your argument is anti-humanistic, nihilistic nonsense, and also trivially verifiably wrong given no model today has produced music or art of any value.
Your argument implies creativity is confined to humans or brains. So no creativity existed before that? Weird. Lucky for us that evolution spawned creativity then!
If you could answer that question then that should help me understand, since you say it is trivial to verifiably prove my position wrong
>Soon you will have to grapple with the reality of what really drives your enjoyment of media, and part of that will be realizing that the human-ness never mattered at all.
is a good point that many media consumers will at some point have to come to grips with. There is a sense, almost accelerationist, in which the machine-generation of vast amounts of enjoyable media (let's not pretend none of it will be enjoyable) forces people to reconsider what drives their engagement with art/entertainment, what value there really is in sitting still for 2 hours to watch a movie or listen to music no matter how good. (As you can see all over this comment section most people have staggeringly naive ideas about art)
With AI art... there is no passion, there is no pain, there is no emotion, there is no sex, there is no feeling, there is no reason. When Blaze Foley sang If I Could Only Fly or Nina Simone sang Stars or Bardot sang Je t'aime or Morricone wrote Se telefonando or Vermeer painted Zicht op Delft or Orozco painted his Epic of American Civilization or Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage or Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Cheever wrote The Swimmer there was a magnificent concentration of real feeling and a real reason that each of these things were made.
Could you imagine someone prompting a model, receiving the result, and then saying, as Cheever did about The Swimmer:
>It was a terribly difficult story to write. I couldn't ever show my hand. Night was falling, the year was dying. It wasn't a question of technical problems, but one of imponderables. When he finds it dark and cold, it has to have happened. And by God, it did happen. I felt dark and cold for some time after I finished that story.
---
To me, the reason for art is feeling, and the problem is that most things don't really provide feeling - if they do, it is a cheap and one-dimensional feeling. Almost all art and music and literature (and food, wine, architecture, poetry, photography, theatre, dance) that people consume today is _good enough_. It is correct, it satisfies. You listen to some hours of good-enough music on Spotify and the music is all correct and you come across "Chill77"'s AI-generated Papaoutai cover and you think that it is good. After all, it seems to have fooled a number of genuine Stromae fans. But the real function of art is not to satisfy. It is to reduce you to tears or silence or lust or anger or some beautiful cocktail of feeling. Of course, in the right context, with enough supporting factors, anything can produce emotion, but the best art needs little or nothing to make you feel. Bad art and good art are all around us, but the great is rare. That rarity is why people enjoy AI art: they forget the last time they felt, the AI is good, and that is enough.
The sad thing, of course, is that to make the great you must make a hell of a lot of bad and a fair amount of simply good art. And then there are those who have no delusions of grandeur but just make art for the sake of it. AI art cheapens those things; it makes them a trivial undertaking. The architect who would have become great on the completion of his two hundred and seventh building can now generate the first two hundred and six with the push of a button. The woman making fliers for her dance club - each one no great work of art, but certainly made with care and love, sees now that her work is useless and stops. We all lose.
But I don't consider using AI all that different to using a camera. A photographer still has plenty of work to do with composition and framing, the lighting, the subject mater, even timing. I still consider a photographer an artist.
I think an AI artist will have a lot to consider as well. To distinguish themselves from other AI artists.
Update: When I say the AI tools are not there yet, its precisely because I can't seem to get the AI to take feedback or instructions. I can't adjust the lighting to create the mood I want, I can't tweak the framing.
B: Having spent some time trying to make songs with Suno, I can assure you it takes more skills than I have...
I still sing songs like that, only now I’ve got almost an hour of dumb songs that Suno has made, like my kid asked “what if we just put in gibberish and the word poop a lot?” As kids do, and we got this absolutely bizarre Europop song where a dude sings his heart out about poopy poop, and my kids now sing this tune. It’s been nonstop laughs. My daughter is into Harry Potter and we made a song together just about her turning her hair green in potions class, with harpsichord and a theremin. We’re having a great time. I’m never going to be an artist and never going to try to make money off this stuff. I’m just making weird little bespoke memories with me and my kids.
Because ultimately that is what is being marketed/sold right.
In reality its more about the candler maker seeing gaslighting down the road. You are not going to compete.
https://soundcloud.com/john/eager - I put over 16 hours into this track, I'm sure someone who knows about music can point to loads of errors in it, I'm sure it's sloppy in parts, but I put real effort into it and I'm proud of that effort.
To me, this is the most legitimate way for music makers to use AI. If you go look at the credits for almost any professional recording artist, they all work with one or more writers and producers to get their music dialed in. Us normies can't really afford to have Max Martin come over and write with us, and I think using AI in the way I mentioned is a suitable alternative. I really fail to see the difference, honestly.
On barging into creative spaces and how that should be viewed, I suspect you and I would find we feel the same. I was personally involved in building and shaping deviantart and how we tackled these ideas, so what you see there today is influenced by my(and scott, eric angelo etc) thinking on this matter.
Anyway I don't think your case is really so bad. As long as the creator at least has put in the effort to listen to their own stuff from beginning to end at least once (yes that's a low bar), you're already miles ahead of people who'd auto-gen 100s of albums and slap them on there in one go. Music is more inherently rate-limiting than image generation where only half a second or less is needed to take in an image superficially.
If you don't like the AI workflow, humans are already offering that workflow to the richest and most successful among us. The new tech is kind of leveling the playing field in that sense. When you think about how AI is applied in other fields, it's basically on the way to giving everyone CEO powers, allowing them to delegate vague directives into action. Whether there's room for 8 billion CEOs on earth remains to be seen.
I personally think barriers to entry in certain industries are features, so we aren't drowned in a sea of careless whims and can more easily find products made with love, dedication, and well articulated intent.
I don't hold it much hope for this track because everything else I've heard on suno and udio are rubbish, but the 1 minute preview I have is enticing me to spend 8 bucks just so I can experiment a bit more.
I feel somewhat conflicted by my fascination because I have a great love for music and I wholeheartedly support efforts to restrict AI music crap.
But as the tools mature, the creative possibilities to make new sounds with finer control and granularity will make the process more ... creative - with greater human input.
I'm sure we'll end up with new styles and maybe even new genres that originate from prompts, and hits too. Is this a good thing to look forward to? I can see my future listening habits become strictly human only, but dang, the start of my new track sounds so dope!
I applaud Bandcamp's stance here and I will always look for ways to meaningfully support real musicians.
The big secret right now is Suno will output good stuff but then it’s tortuous to get the lyrics to line up if you want to change anything, or add a word, it screws up the entire flow of the song all the way through. I spent 5 minutes making a 6 minute long power metal style song about a Druid fighting a dragon, then two hours unsuccessfully trying to get one with slightly more coherent lyrics and it output like 8 songs that sound terrible in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. The one song I tortured into existence took me 5 hours of work after getting a rough draft.
That said, being able to instantly make a song to tell my kids they need to clean the living room before we open presents and them singing the chorus happily for weeks after is just this great unique memory we have. Bespoke songs just for us is one of the coolest things ever and no amount of grumbling from anyone can dissuade me from it.
There is lots of good music still being created these days, but you'll never find it by just hitting next on streaming sites because 99% of the content had about 5 minutes of effort put in before being uploaded.
Personally, I like making the kind of songs I enjoy listening to myself, across all kinds of genres. Next time, I want to mix a few completely different genres and see how that turns out. It's like a creative hobby were you just enjoy the process.
As for changing the lyrics, yeah, that’s taken me hours as well. You really need to get the lyrics right from the start. I’m not sure this kind of detailed editing can easily be done with such AI tools anytime soon.
I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not interested in monetary gain at all, just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.
I have to imagine* that we will figure out what that difference is, but it will be difficult and costly.
* I have to imagine that or else I will lose all hope in the future.
https://caniphish.com/blog/how-to-spot-ai-audio
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-modera...
even coded detectors exist https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker?id=09f25ee7913a415...
We’ll have this (and the corny lyrics issue) mostly fixed in a month or so, then it mostly becomes a recommendations problem. For example, TikTok is filled with slop, but it’s not a problem - their algorithm helps the most creative/engaging stuff rise to the top. If Spotify is giving you Suno slop in your discover weekly (or really crappy 100% organic free range AI-free slop) blame Spotify, not the AI or the creators. There are really high effort and original creations that involve AI that deserve to be heard, though.
I suggest going back and listening to some of the first experimental electronic music. The tools have improved a lot since then and people have used them to do really cool things, even spawning countless genres.
Thankfully, most of it doesn't reach your Spotify feed. I think most of it is garbage, but I'd fight for the right of people to continue posting it. All things algorithmic have this exploration/exploitation, diversity/fidelity tradeoff and Spotify has theirs tuned very heavily toward exploitation/fidelity. I think there is a cool opportunity for someone to put the tradeoff dial into users hands.
It sounds like bandcamp is not the right place for what you want to do. There's plenty of ways to do what you're looking for though!
Your ability to make and share music as you like hasn't been abridged. Bandcamp has chosen not to be a part of it if it's AI-mediated.
Or, I can make a barebones recording of musical ideas - of melodies, harmonies and the overall song structure - then upload it to Suno and inspire its robotic session musicians to play it in the style I ask. Quicker to make, faster to iterate upon, and can even be used as the basis for resynthesizing the track using more traditional methods.
Half-finished tracks, ideas that were only in my mind or existed only as badly recorded piano-bashed drafts, now (almost) fully fleshed out. It's immensely satisfying, and has made me even more creative as I use this tool to understand and explore musical styles I'm less familiar with.
i say this without malice (more as an encouragement to you to do whatever you like): nobody cares about your individual consumption choices. if you want to consume content from a machine that produces the thing you want to consume, that in and of itself has no impact on anyone but you. but you might be missing out on good music (either by someone else, or by your own hand) and ultimately, i wonder if you will value the end product of a musical vending machine.
> nobody cares about your individual consumption choices
Not sure if I agree though - mentioning that I use gen AI for any use case can cause some very hostile reactions.
Luckily there are hundreds of MIDI editor DAWs available. Open the piano roll, and write down the music note by note. Surely, it's not that hard if you can hear it in your head.
Just like we don't call anyone who can use a microwave a chef. The chef may use a microwave, but they don't use it exclusively and they've spent the time to learn other tools and techniques.
A lot of people including myself enjoy music because it's so intimately human, the flaws and all. It's someone putting a bit of themselves into every piece they create, and people look for things that resonate with them.
AI music however is purely about consumption. It's not something made to be remembered or cherished. And the more you integrate it into your music, the less and less of yourself you put into it and the less reason for anyone to bother. I could just ask whatever AI to generate generic rock music inspired by the beatles and remove you from the equation entirely and have the same experience. Everything gets amalgamated into the exact same thing with all of the imperfections sheared away.
Art-music is made by humans as a way of expressing yourself and making human connections.
Utilitarian-music can be made by humans or machines and is there to serve a purpose. Background music for the elevator or while you’re on hold. An ambient soundscape that you play in an airport terminal. It’s not meant to move people, it’s just there to fill silence.
While intent of course is important, the quantity and manner of taking others' work and calling it my own, I thing, plays even bigger role. If I go "hey check out this Bohemian Rhapsody song I just created using Google Search", I do not think much regard will be given to my intent.
That's why I choose to make the distinction by just not caring about any kind of music that uses any kind of AI.
It's like that with code and art.
Purely AI anything is garbage. But AI tools in the hands of people who know what they're doing are just faster scaffolding and better plywood to build with. The framing is still mostly human expert.
Word on the street here in Nashville is that it's already the case. The songs getting published aren't AI-made, but there's AI assistance.
This seems to fly over the heads of many. art is about taste.
A lot of it is now, and it's frustrating to me. The worst part is that I'm not actually anti-AI-music. There's one or two "groups" ("producers"?) I've found where it's clearly AI but they've put a lot of work into making something worth listening to, but Spotify seems to have a "this sucker will listen to the cheap stuff" flag and now I'm drowning in tracks from people who paid for Suno and think that's enough.
Similar to YouTube slop.
If that would stop working, I'd cancel Spotify again.
Speaking of YouTube slop, I think Spotify has had its own system of preferring cheap muzak from labels they support since before GenAI music even took off, I think. Example label: Firefly entertainment (IIRC)
This is likely a stance to prevent an individual from producing thousands of AI generated tracks and attempting to flood the zone for anyone browsing and searching.
There's a lot of music on Spotify for example that tries to latch on to current trends in an attempt to get pulled into search results and recommendations.
-a flatness to the EQ spectrum that you wouldn't get out a properly mixed and produced piece of audio
-no good stem separation, so no per-source eq (relates to above point)
-change BPM mid-song
-unnatural warbles at the end of every phrase
-vocals will have these weird croaky voice cracks, or sound scratchier and raspier
There definitely are tell-tale signs of "pure AI" in audio, but it becomes a lot more nuanced when any sort of secondary mixing/mastering/compression happens (which is the case 90% is the time in the real world- anything on YouTube/Spotify get's compressed).
We would need AI free places now that AI is so easy and cheap to produce.
If we look at this through the lens of making software with ai, which also allows for creativity, blanket bans may keep lots of quality stuff from being made.
How will the tracks be distinguished? Any ai and you’re out?
If people listen to music, they like the music, and it can come from wherever. Gatekeeping never works.
As of yet Bandcamp hasn't tried to become an 'everything is here' kind of distributor, but rather more tailored to small, niche, quality &c. artists, and not consumers. Kind of the opposite to Spotify.
I'm sure there genuinely are lots of people out there who would enjoy AI-generated music, but I very much doubt there's a huge crowd of them on Bandcamp, if for no reason other than ideological.
This isn't true, there's a wide array of reasons people might listen to the music.
The most obvious problem here is that, since AI allows creation with zero effort or time, it has the ability to absolutely flood every creation market it touches.
It's not possible to find out that you actually hate AI generated music and actually love Queen when you're forced to listen to 1.2 million songs before you find Queen. Or, whatever new artist equivalent.
It's the same issue on video platforms. Is there non-slop content on Instagram Reels? Yes. Can you find it? Uh... no. So you're gonna be watching slop and you're gonna like it, because that's all you know.
I have nothing against AI - my computer is doing text-to-image training most nights. However, the kind of videos it was showing me are only entertaining if they’re real. I don’t care to see a fake dog scare away a fake bear from a kid, and I doubt others do either.
However, most people probably can’t tell and think it’s real. That’s only going to get worse. I don’t know where that leaves us.
Music? I’m not sure where I land.
Having short form content that captures users without having to pay shares to content creators seems to a believable goal for the service
Discovery of a new stuff- the niche, the unknown. Some part-time band from another side of the globe with 10k listens, but whose music is something that makes ME feel.
This didn't really work all that well before streaming came about- record stores in my city were small, and their selection included either the classics, or the current top-10. Friends and radio helped a bit, but not so much with the really obscure pieces or even entire genres.
So on one hand, with self-hosting Navidrome I can't be happier and have actually started discovering the music I've long stince forgotten or just the less popular pieces of the musicians that I already enjoy (because you buy and rip the entire CD, not just the most popular song of the album, and those songs are then being played at random).
The only problem is how to find something new? Do I go to internet radio-stations somewhere? Or to curated playlists? Or maybe there's an open recommendation system somewhere?
"Tell HN: Viral Hit Made by AI, 10M listens on Spotify last few days" [1]
> 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.
Which is balanced. It means that you can still use Illugen to generate a drum sample for instance, but you can't just generate a whole track on SUNO and just upload it on Bandcamp.
For making house/4x4 type music, it's actually pretty fun. Once you chop something and repitch it enough, no algorithm can pick up on what song it is you are sampling if the AI track is way off from the original piece.
No way would I actually try to monetize it, though.
- stream from FIP.fr via cvlc - when I absolutely love a tune, buy on Bandcamp - if it's not available or I bought it elsewhere, e.g. old CD, then get from Soulseek - scp my ~/Music directory on my mobile phone
I tried LMS for few weeks but honestly just plain VLC is enough for me.
Anyway, point is, this decision makes me want to buy from Bandcamp even more.
https://media.ccc.de/v/gpn23-153-tschss-spotify-und-co-self-...
you can scroll through the slides to get the idea
> We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI generated.
It's going to really suck when someone eventually gets removed based on false positives... Similar problem to auto DMCA false positives.
We now sort of accepted the idea of “vibe coding”, and, even shared appreciation from people who are using it to resuscitate side projects and things they wanted to do but required a lot of work. (Heck, even Linus Torvalds is doing it).
Is “Vibe Music / Art” any different? For example, I am not a drummer, say I use Suno to program some drums for me so I can record my guitar on top, and finally release that track I’ve been procrastinating.
I think the analogy here holds. Not all vibe coding is good, and not all vibe art is bad.
I've been attacked for saying I don't hate it, and I witness this everywhere.
It's a tool. Artists and professionals can use tools. They're professionals and know how much is too much.
People seem to have an irrational fear of being entertained by AI, equating that to admitting that it is a higher form of intelligence than their own.
For a real musician, AI is already too much. For there to be meaning and soul in their music, is must be derived from the intersection of their skills and imagination, whereby the unconscious can make itself manifest in the utilization of ones virtues. Delegating this process to a black box deprives the art of its unique individual perspective that can only arise out of the finitude of human experience and learning. For though the black box may have superficial knowledge of generalizations of many such perspectives, it smooths out all paths into bland sameness. Thus no real artist of merit has any use for AI, for it is always of a lower degree than the more powerful tool that is their mind.
John Dewey's famous book talks about shifting the focus from the maker to the experience and that the value of something is not about the artist's inner struggle but about the work's capacity to generate lasting experiences. This also ties well into Roland Barthes' essay about reading and how language is a living thing. He puts forward the notion that meaning lives in the reader, not in the writer. Audiences is what turns it into an experience.
Again, this isn't to devalue the effort or that the inner struggle isn't commendable, this is to say that artistic value can exist beyond that.
The issue with the reduction of art to experience is that it ignore that our knowledge shapes our experience, and so the more we know about an artist and their process, the more different our experience of their art will be.
If one sees the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, they might not think much of it if all they know is that it's very popular. Another who knows why the Mona Lisa is particularly popular, because of its historic theft, has a different experience of it. And the person who knows of Da Vinci's life, who has read his journals, knows of his elaborate painting process and sophisticated details and meaning supplied in his paintings, why that person derives much more joy out of the work than one who merely sees it as a visual appearance producing merely a arbitrary liking/disliking.
Perhaps you might enjoy an AI composed track, but would you not enjoy it more if instead that track were human produced, particularly if you held more knowledge of the people making it?
As for meaning living in the reader, that cannot be true, for a person can find meaning in tea leaves or moving clouds. True meaning, as intentional, is not derived, but supplied, and it is the goal of every reader to behold the authors vision. That one fashions a different interpretation for themselves over the authors intentions is of necessity, for no two minds will see alike, but to look only for the reflection of oneself in art and not look beyond, why that is the death of art, for art is the revelation of the soul.
The Mona Lisa example actually supports both our positions in my opinion: someone can have a profound experience of it knowing nothing of Leonardo, while someone else has a different profound experience knowing his biography. Neither experience is 'false', they're just different modes of engagement with the same work. Personally, I have even experienced the inverse throughout my life.
Growing up not speaking English, and being flooded with American culture through radio, I was deeply moved by lots and lots of music made by foreigners that sounded like absolute gibberish to me. Later in life, after learning about the meaning of certain songs, I, unfortunately, lost some of my appreciation for it. Some may call that alienation, but to me it was a form of naivety of a child that enjoyed just sound in its pure form without it being tainted by any derived or supplied meaning from its creator that was attached to it through accompanied lyrics.
Who is more correct, the child or the adult? If you suggest the child, then what do you say to the adult who objects on the grounds of the meaning of the sounds uttered? The adult would say that though the sounds are pleasant to the ear, they are not good to the mind. Thus, rather than affirming the child's vision, they would reject the pleasant sounds with poor meaning in favor of higher quality ones which are as equal in their harmonic value as with the greater quality in their meaning.
As for the infinite regress, that only proves the value of knowledge all the greater, for if we can expand our knowledge on the origins of something continually, so too can our appreciate of the thing grow in proportion. This only leads to a richer and deeper appreciation for life. In this way I can reread or rewatch a show in time and see more and know more than in my first experience, and so grows my appreciation for the details that I missed the first time. And this may only occur if the subject at hand is of good quality in the first place, for else when we descend further into the details and meaning we would be dissapointed at its lack. But that which is rich in meaning lacks none and may reveal itself new with every experience. This is why knowledge of the good is required, and why AI and lackluster artists may only produce pleasant sounds.
You see knowledge of origins as the path toward deeper appreciation, an asymptotic approach to the artist's soul. I see each encounter with art as its own beginning, where meaning emerges fresh in the meeting of work and listener, never fully exhausted by what came before.
Maybe both are true in their way. The child and the adult don't cancel each other, they're different movements in the same ongoing piece. I lost something when I learned those lyrics, and I gained something too. Neither experience was false.
There is no end to this question, for there is only beginning.
The debate about where meaning lives may itself be unsolvable, which is perhaps why we've been having it for millennia.
Thank you for the exchange. It's sharpened my thinking, even where we remain apart. :)
(I also think that "AI-assisted" work should have a clear warning label, but I don't automatically equate "AI-assisted" with full "primarily AI-written".)
In the labeling sense, it's a warning label, in that it serves to tell people who may wish to avoid something that it is present in the product, much like warnings saying "may contain tree nuts" on products that are potentially cross-contaminated. (As compared to a label that people are likely to seek out, like "100% juice", which is regulated differently to prevent people from using it when it doesn't apply.)
In the computing sense, it's a warning, in that it doesn't stop you from ignoring it if you want to, but some people may wish to `-Werror` / `-D warnings`.
If it solves a problem, good for you but I don't think people should put their vibe coded projects online. They don't have any value.
There are delusional people who create vibe coded pull requests to open source projects and they believe they are actually contributing value. No they only create work for the maintainers that have to review the subpar code.
As for your use case, are there really no royalty free drum beats that you could use? Not to mention you could probably learn to create your own beats in Ableton in one weekend. You are cheating yourself.
speak for yourself please, not all of us have
As a small platform like BandCamp you do not want to be flooded by cheaply generated AI copies of existing songs / genres - this would alienate both artists and customers and could endanger the whole platform. You also don't want to expose yourself to internal complaints and external copyright claims because someone uploaded hundreds of "Popular work X in the style of popular band Y" songs.
The AI slop avalanche will pass by and probably leave behind some cool stuff. In the meantime, it seems like a sensible option for BandCamp to step aside and evaluate their position in a year or two.
Izotope Ozone uses AI to mix and master - for some reason that’s okay but you can’t actually generate the sounds with AI? Or what if I generate the notes with AI then use my own synth presets is that allowed?
At a certain resolution it's not actually the artist doing the work.
I commented because there is an artist on bandcamp with the name Izotope which I assumed was why they mentioned Izotope in the first place.
Case in point, the other day I made a comment on reddit. I spent about 10 minutes writing it. I used proper grammar, bullet points, clean formatting, and em dashes, as I've been doing for many years.
I immediately got downvoted and sent multiple PMs about "not posting AI slop".
I didn't use AI at all to write that comment. It just looked like AI because it was well formed and researched. So am I supposed to add errors just to make it look "human"? But also, how do I even prove I wrote it without AI?
I'm not entirely sure how to solve this problem.
So far I've resisted giving in. Something about "those AI bros can grab my ellipses from my cold, dead typing fingers." But I have already caught myself deliberately leaving in a typo when checking over an e-mail before sending it, thinking it makes it less likely to set off AIdars, which is very strange for a perfectionist like me.
I don't have the solution ready either, but if I had to guess, it would be a return to more heavily moderated, closed communities where people have a reasonable expectation to be interacting with real people. It's not foolproof but maybe more manageable. We had trolls and stupid bots on Usenet and IRC as well, after all, and it kind of worked.
Other than that no idea.
With this said, this may be more of a reason to get rid of the AI trash slop that scammers use to attempt to make money, gum up the platform with, and not actually ban people that make decently good AI based songs.
Ok maybe you have the opinion that it's all crap right now. That's fine. But pretend it gets good. Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.
Where does that leave Bandcamp? Do they market themselves as "fresh organic music" and live in that niche? What good does all the rights music companies own do if music generates on the fly?
I suspect a huge amount of lobbying incoming asap to stop this. Perhaps a law against AI generated music that's not owned by the RIAA? You might not like AI generated music but you should be very very cautious of those fighting it.
As someone who enjoys live music, I would still need a live band to play this on-the-fly generated music. I guess then you'll trot out AI holograms! but that sounds still as unappealing as your base case.
This might work for people who like music as wallpaper to help them study or drown out external distractions, but none of it is going to evoke much feeling or stir memories. It's like calling chewing gum food.
A little shocked. The biggest issue with music streaming right now is, imo, discovery. Algorithmic discovery is cute, but there’s a perverse incentive for companies who provide discovery services (ie Spotify) to funnel users to artists that cost less (ie AI generated in-house).
There’s also the fact that flooding the market with AI music slop _also_ makes discovery even harder.
Tried-and-true methods for discovery over the past decades are network effects (artists featuring and collaborating), and niche label A&R. However, Spotify has no interest, or incentive, to allow users to explore these avenues for discovery.
So, kudos to Bandcamp. But with better discovery this wouldn’t be necessary.
Finally, anecdotally, as someone in the top percentile of listeners for several niche genres on Spotify, I’ve yet to hear AI generated music that isn’t crap. Whenever it gets recommended to me by Spotify I reach for my phone, see that I don’t recognize the artist, and then see that they’re self-published on Spotify with a few hundred listeners. I guess if you don’t have any taste you might not notice, but it’s painfully obvious for anyone who is familiar enough to recognize themes, callbacks, and instrumentation within a genre.
But I think Bandcamp has some value for being a place where anyone can publish their music. The statement is basically "We're banning AI because we don't like it." I feel like this is creating a rift or a battle where one was totally unnecessary. People who publish slop are probably also people who like music and buy music themselves. Whenever there's a guideline like this there will be false positives in enforcement. There's already tons of non-AI slop on bandcamp (plunderphonics, plagiarized stuff, 30 minutes of 10 people playing random notes on their instruments cacaphonic contemporary classical, ambient that's one chord for 60 minutes, etc). And the only people who this affects are the 10 people using Bandcamp's terrible music discovery services (I'm one).
Also, it's kind of antithetical to the purpose of Bandcamp. As you say, a place where anyone can publish music - but that's true for Spotify et al. these days, too. Bandcamp was always about a more direct connection to the artists, so it makes sense that they want their site to be about actual flesh-and-blood artists who have put sweat into their work.
I think you need hard rules to make it not completely subjective.
We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI generated.
By the end of 2026 the AI/no-AI thing is debate is going to be dead because there will be no way to know the difference. This is almost true right now, it just is going to take the general public a while to catch up.
One distinction which could be made: I would like to see bands that are humans because I want to physically attend and enjoy concerts. If the "artist" has never played a concert I don't want to listen to them. Which expands a whole new grey area..
The real value AI has for music is discovery. I've been using Gemini and ChatGPT to build playlists based on music I already like, and discovering lots of fun new tracks. I can be really specific about what kind of music I like and don't like. I can show it a playlist I already made, and ask it to make one like it, but with completely different artists. It's insanely useful!
But these kinds of tools would just expand how many different artists Spotify has to pay from my streaming, and that doesn't do the same thing as shoving cheap mass-produced slop down our throats, so it isn't surprising what they offer us.
Real musicians play real instruments, not samples
Real musicians play real instruments, not AI-generated slop
All of the above is bullshit y’all
Real musicians play with anything they want.
Bandcamp’s first policy will become an enforcement nightmare in the short term and irrelevant the long term.
I’m still waiting for someone to create something really good with AI - meaningful, impactful, emotionally gripping - not just novelties. Same problem as AI text slop - by the nature of its training, it regresses to the mean
Also: how much time/effort/money one spends creating art is unrelated to quality. Spending 40 hours recording and producing a mediocre song does not make it “better” than a mediocre song generated in a few seconds by AI or any other tool
However, what if I use AI to generate a simple sine wave. Then I map it to a keyboard and play it with different notes.
Who's going to define what's ok.
So many creator platforms are becoming slop factories.
> In the past year alone, [customers] spent $208 million on 14.6 million digital albums, 11.2 million tracks, 1.55 million vinyl records, 800,000 CDs, 250,000 cassettes, and 50,000 t-shirts.