The 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 fans to have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by people,” the company said.
Bandcamp’s new guidelines state that music and audio generated “in whole or in part by artificial intelligence” is not allowed, and that it will not allow the use of artificial intelligence tools to imitate other artists or styles.
So if Drake had released “Taylor Made Freestyle” on Bandcamp, it would be in trouble (and maybe it was for his own good).
As AI music generators like Suno become more sophisticated, it becomes harder to avoid synthetic music — songs created with AI tools have top charts on Spotify and Bulletin board. AI music now sounds real enough that it can be hard to decipher how it’s made.
In one high-profile example, Telisha Jones, a 31-year-old in Mississippi, used Suno to turn her (supposedly instrumental) poetry into the viral R&B song “How was I supposed to know.” Her AI persona, Xania Monet, received several offers for record deals before signing with Hallwood Media in a deal reportedly worth 3 million dollars.
The legality of AI-generated music is up in the air. Suno is currently facing lawsuits from majors Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, which claim the company trained its AI on copyrighted material from record labels.
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However, this did not deter Silicon Valley. Suno raised a $250 million Series C round in November that valued the company at $2.4 billion. While the raise was made by Menlo Ventures, Suno was joined by Hallwood Media, the company that backs 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 had pirated the books it fed into its AI models. The company took a $1.5 billion hit on the wrist, which isn’t much for a company valued at $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 such as merchandise and CDs.
Bandcamp only makes money from artists’ cuts of sales — but even if it presents itself as an artist-first distributor, a tech company is still a tech company, and bottom line matters. Viewing Bandcamp’s move optimistically, perhaps 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.
