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

The music distribution platform Bandcamp announced in a Reddit post on Tuesday that it’s 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 “wholly or in substantial part by AI” is not permitted, and that it will not allow the use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles.

So, if Drake had released “Taylor Made Freestyle” on Bandcamp, he would’ve had a problem (and maybe it would’ve been for his own good).

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

In one high-profile example, Telisha Jones, a 31-year-old in Mississippi, used Suno to turn her (supposedly organic) poetry into the viral R&B song “How Was I Supposed To Know.” Her AI “persona,” Xania Monet, received multiple bids for record deals before signing with Hallwood Media in a deal reportedly worth $3 million.

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

This hasn’t deterred Silicon Valley, though. Suno raised 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 backing Xania Monet.

The legal outlook doesn’t look good for artists. In a recent lawsuit, a judge ruled that Anthropic could use copyrighted books that it downloaded illegally to train its AI. What was illegal, the judge said, was that Anthropic pirated the books that it fed into its AI models. The company got a $1.5 billion slap on the wrist, which isn’t very significant for a company that’s 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 like merch and CDs.

Bandcamp only makes money from its cut of artists’ sales — but even if it presents itself as an artist-first distributor, a tech company is still a tech company, and the bottom line matters. Looking at Bandcamp’s move optimistically, perhaps the company is confirming what artists hope to be true: no one is actually spending money to buy AI-generated music, at least not on Bandcamp.