The thing is, you aren't entitled to distribution.
Most musicians who make it these days work really hard at doing live shows, or growing a following on tiktok.
once they have an audience - who cares about competition?
And decisions like Bandcamp's above reflects essentially the same view.
'For the love of the game.'
When you don't make any money and no one comes to your shows; when the booking emails go unanswered and the likes on soundcloud remain <10, just remember why you picked up the instrument in the first place. For the love of the game.
As a non-musician, but being into music to an unreasonable degree, I always thought that the best artists are those where I feel that, even if no one bought their records and there were just five people at their concert, they'd still be doing the exact same thing and with the same passion. Audiences notice.
That applies to people spamming AI slop too. People are right to complain about spammers. Platforms are right to try to stop spam, even though everyone knows that spam is a problem that is never going be solved.
> Most musicians who make it these days work really hard at doing live shows, or growing a following on tiktok.
Live shows, by their nature, have almost zero reach. A performance for 40 people takes place once in a single location at a specific time and then it's over. You're either there when it happens or you missed it. A song on youtube or bandcamp can be heard by millions quickly over a few weeks or gradually over years. Social media was a massive boon for musicians.
Sadly, it will get substantially harder to grow a following on tiktok or any other social media platform if those platforms are flooded with AI generated garbage. Real artists will be harder to find. Anyone doing anything new will be drowned out by AI regurgitating everything old. When creative people can't succeed, the creativity they'd inspire in others is lost and everything stagnates.
> will often just opt for whatever is popular.
Are you suggesting that people consume media they don't like? I'm not familiar with anyone that does this. I personally skip if I don't like a song even a little.
They are fundamentally about finding the content that will generate the most revenue. That changes the dynamics quite a bit.
I see this a lot, actually. People put things on in the background, for instance, and don't really care if they like it or not (as long as they don't hate it). They just want noise. Or people just scrolling through their feeds without genuinely liking much in them.
In the old days, this was also how the majority of television was watched. People watched TV out of habit, and frequently watched things they didn't like because choices were limited and often there was nothing they actually like on. Thus all the complaints in the day about how "there's nothing on TV".
People are willing to sacrifice quite a lot of real enjoyment for convenience.
It sounds like music, because it was generated by a model that was trained on actual music.
It is music that has been chewed up and regurgitated. It provides no benefit to the actual artists whose music fed that model.
It is a gift of time and effort, from both the student and teacher. The ability to be inspired by other works and draw from them, not merely imitate them.
You can ask any human musician to make music that is either inspired or outright copied from another artist. They have a moral compass to do so in a way that is not infringing on the works of others.
A music AI model will ingest what is thrown at it, and generate whatever you ask of it. It is a tool, and if it is ingesting human works to be formed into something else, proper attributions and royalties to the sources need to be made.