Music distribution platform Bandcamp announced in a Reddit post on Tuesday that it is banning AI-generated music and audio.
“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 generated “in whole or in part by AI” are not allowed, and disallow the use of AI tools to imitate other artists or styles.
So, if Drake is released “Taylor Made Freestyle” on Bandcamp, they’ll have problems (and maybe for his own happiness).
As an AI music generator like sun become more sophisticated, it becomes harder to avoid synthetic music — songs created with AI tools top of the chart on Spotify and Billboard. AI music now sounds real enough that it can be difficult to decipher how it was created.
In one notable example, Telisha Jones, a 31-year-old in Mississippi, used Suno to turn her (supposedly organic) poetry into a viral R&B song.How Should I Know?.” Her AI “persona”, Xania Monet, received multiple offers for a record deal before signing with Hallwood Media in a deal reportedly worth a fortune. $3 million.
The legality of AI-generated music is up in the air. Suno is now facing lawsuit from three major labels – Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group – stated that the company is training AI on copyrighted material from these labels.
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However, this does not stop Silicon Valley. Suno rose a $250 million Series C round in November, which valued the company at $2.4 billion. While the raise was led by Menlo Ventures, Suno saw participation from Hallwood Media, the company that backed Xania Monet.
The view of the law does not look good for the artist. In a new lawsuit, the judge ruled that Anthropic can use illegally downloaded copyrighted books to train its AI. What is illegal, the judge said, is that Anthropic pirated books fed into its AI model. The company got a $1.5 billion slap on the wrist, which is not very important for a company that price at $ 183 billion.
Unlike Spotify or Apple Music, Bandcamp doesn’t pay artists per stream. However, Bandcamp allows artists to sell their music digitally alongside physical products such as merchandise and CDs.
Bandcamp only makes money from a cut of the artist’s sales – but despite being an artist’s first distributor, a tech company is still a tech company, and that’s the most important thing. Looking optimistically at Bandcamp’s move, it’s possible that the company is confirming what artists hope is true: no one is actually spending money to buy AI-generated music, at least not on Bandcamp.