Bandcamp takes a stance against AI music, banning it from the platform

Music distribution platform Bandcamp announced in a Reddit post on Tuesday that it is banning music and audio generated by artificial intelligence.

“We want musicians to keep making music, and for fans to have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans,” the company said.

Bandcamp’s new guidelines state that music and audio produced “in whole or in part by AI” is not permitted, and that it will not allow AI tools to be used to impersonate other artists or styles.

So, if Drake had released “Taylor Made Freestyle” on Bandcamp, he would have gotten into trouble (and it might have been to his advantage).

As AI music generators like Suno become more sophisticated, synthetic music has become harder to avoid — songs created with AI tools have topped the charts on Spotify and Billboard. AI music now sounds real enough that it can be difficult to decipher how it was made.

In one notable example, Telesha Jones, a 31-year-old Mississippi native, used Sono to transform her (supposedly organic) poetry into a viral R&B hit called “How Was I Supposed to Know.” Her AI “character”, Xania Monet, received several bids for record deals before signing with Hallwood Media in a deal said to be worth $3 million.

The legitimacy of AI-generated music is up in the air. Suno is currently facing lawsuits from three major companies — Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group — alleging that the company trained its AI on copyrighted material from labels.

But that didn’t deter Silicon Valley. Suno raised a $250 million Series C round in November, which valued the company at $2.4 billion. While Menlo Ventures led the increase, Suno saw participation from Hallwood Media, the company backing Xania Monet.

The legal outlook does not look good for artists. In a recent lawsuit, a judge ruled that Anthropic could use copyrighted books it illegally downloaded to train its AI. What was illegal, the judge said, was that Anthropic pirated books that it fed into its AI models. The company got slapped with a valuation of $1.5 billion, which isn’t much for a company worth $183 billion.

Unlike Spotify or Apple Music, Bandcamp doesn’t pay artists per stream. Instead, Bandcamp allows artists to sell their music digitally alongside physical products like merchandise and CDs.

Bandcamp only makes money from its sales from artists — but even if it presents itself as the premier distributor for artists, a tech company is still a tech company, and the bottom line matters. Looking at Bandcamp’s move optimistically, perhaps the company confirms what artists hope is true: No one actually spends money to buy AI-generated music, at least not on Bandcamp.