Bandcamp consistently throws Ws
Surprising considers that it’s parent company Epic (yes, of
FortniteUnreal Tournament and GoW fame) has a pro-AI stance.Your info is a bit out of date. Epic already sold off Bandcamp back in 2023 during layoffs. Its owned by Songtradr now, who I personally know nothing about.
Short Wikipedia, so far so good for a company.
I was buying some LPs recently and saw one that caught my attention. I looked them up and almost all their content included some form of AI.
it’s bullshit.
fuck AI.
Great decision Bandcamp, I use Bandcamp to support musicians
YES! YES!! YES!!! I hate having to sift through that tripe when exploring certain genres.
It was being OVERRUN with AI stuff, hopefully this cleans it up
Bandcamp W. One of the platforms I buy music from and surf other than soundcloud. You can find some banger albums by genre on there.
Neat, my current setup is :
- stream from FIP.fr via cvlc
- when I absolutely love a tune, buy on Bandcamp
- if it’s not available or I bought it elsewhere, e.g. old CD, then get from Soulseek
- scp my ~/Music directory on my mobile phone
I tried LMS for few weeks but honestly just plain VLC is enough for me.
Anyway, point is, this decision makes me want to buy from Bandcamp even more.
First I’ve heard of FIP, I’ll have to give it a go
Are Bandcamp still the good guys? I thought they were bought by the big capital and now went down the drain. Artists’ opinions especially welcome
on average, i’m earning 3x as much from bandcamp FLAC sales compared to what i earn off streaming. Hasn’t been ruined so far.
People expected them to get fucked after the acquisition, though the new owners are just going “you keep doing what you’re doing, not gonna change a thing, just give us a cut of your profits”
Touch wood, it’s gonna stay that way.
They fucked the union, though.
The massive layoff that gutted Oakland-based music service Bandcamp hit one group at the company particularly hard: leaders of its nascent union.
As of Monday, Bandcamp has been sold by video game juggernaut Epic Games to Songtradr, a music licensing firm. The acquisition closed with just half of Bandcamp’s employees offered jobs at the Santa Monica-based company.
The job cuts, which SFGATE reported Monday amounted to about 60 of 118 employees, disproportionately hit union leaders, Bandcamp United told SFGATE in a Tuesday press release. Every member of the union’s eight-person bargaining team was laid off, it said, and in sum, 40 of the bargaining unit’s 67 people lost their jobs.
Shit, that I didn’t know about 😭
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I don’t bought a lot of music, but all the independent musicians I follow have a bandcamp store. They also sell merch there.
Were sold by epicc to some other company.
Still doing their regular job and not went to shit.- A user
I haven’t noticed any change since they’ve been bought up. The new owners did bust up an attempt at unionizing, though, so there’s that.
I hope all my fave autistic musicians are not mistaken for AI and deleted under a false-positive detection of being AI. At least my fave’s album releases all pre-date AI music generators. Safe, for now.
I think safer would be to encourage all purely AI-generated be tagged as such, so it can be optionally toggled out of view, and then there’s less incentive for the unscrupulous to simply hide that it’s AI generated. Banning increases the “hide that it’s AI” vibes, not the “don’t do AI” vibes. Prohibition does not prevent. Prohibition makes the good things bad and the bad things worse.
Prohibition of AI does indeed prevent Bandcamp’s servers from being overwhelmed by the storage needs of slop “artists” and the gruel they call their “music”.
I’ve been re-reading LOTR lately and I like to put on Middle-Earth ambience in the background. Do you have any idea how much LOTR themed ambient slop is on YouTube? There are channels with over 100 videos, each exactly a 3-hour slopfest of sounds with HD/4k resolution slop art playing on screen.
Considering the vast majority of real artists might put out 5 hours of music in their entire careers, why the hell would bandcamp want to host hundreds of hours of fake music from a single source and pay for all that storage?
AI is a plague upon humanity. Bandcamp is on the right side of history and I’m happy to have my music on their platform.
I doubt they would just blanket scan all music and ban that which they think is AI (aside from how that’s practically impossible). That’s the kind of thing a lazy big tech company would do. I wouldn’t be surprised if this will just end up being on a report basis, at the very least with human verification once steps like banning would be taken. Because otherwise it would be pretty disastrous for the reasons you mentioned, since it would ban legitimate artists. Not to mention the bar of “substantially AI” would need to be judged by someone.
I’m generally supportive of removing AI from artistic endeavors, but also wildly unfamiliar with bandcamp. I’m looking at it for the first time right now. Does it work like Deezer / Tidal or one of the streaming services where I can listen to things from my phone, or is it more of a website that you use to discover unsigned / smaller acts by clicking through a bunch of things and listening?
An important feature is that you can basically download (and thus, own) the music you pay for (in many formats too).
Bit of both. More on the indi/hobby side of things though.
Major labels have a presence on there too though.
It’s more like old iTunes and the like. No subscription, just buy albums. Artists define the price, and keep the majority of their revenue with some Fridays being Bandcamp Fridays where they get to keep all the revenue. You can download everything you own or you can stream it from the website or app on your phone also.
Only real downside with Bandcamp is that you won’t find some artists there but it all depends on what you listen to and want to find.
I literally thought you meant Bandcamp gets to keep all the revenue on Bandcamp Fridays lmao
Oh shit lol. I should stop responding before having coffee!
Bandcamp is where you go to download/buy stuff for a band you already know and like. I rarely if ever have listened to music through the website itself, nor have I found new bands through it.
That’s nice. But I wonder how they detect them.
There are usually some tells. For AI generated music (AIGM for short) the cover “art” is also AI generated. The vocals/style are different between tracks. Another method that I think was recently made obsolete was that if you opened the track in audacity it looked weird compared to regular music when you looked at the spectrograms because AIGM added some weird unnecessary noise to the music. AIGM “artists” usually don’t have any social media presence, they don’t really exist outside of the internet. No shows/interviews etc. Is it a lot of effort to find out whether something is AIGM? Maybe. Is it worth it? Yes, I don’t want to give money to people who desecrate the art or music.
So you’re saying a milli vanilli would be basically impossible to detect.
Besides, who cares? Isn’t the purpose to enjoy the music? Whether some uses a capella, instruments, electric instruments, autotune, vocaloid or AI… if you like the music, listen to the music. It’s ultimately created by a human using tools.
not the same thing. AIGM is by definition not created by a human.
if i tell you to create a song about a recent breakup i got through, gave you some notes about rhythm and maybe what kind of feel i would like it to have, and then you went ahead and composed the whole song, played all the instruments, provided the vocals, did the mixing and editing and gave me the result, do you think it’s fair to say i made the song?
Same as vocaloid. Or autotune. How far do we go?
Besides, again, who cares. If you like the music, enjoy it, if not, pass.
Besides, again, who cares. If you like the music, enjoy it, if not, pass.
I care. Clearly so do the people in support of this decision on here as well as bandcamp themselves.
I hope you are familiar with survivorship bias.
how is it like auto tune? auto tune corrects your singing, it doesn’t sing for you.
also, humans care? that’s kind of the entire point of art? we care where art comes from. find the best painter in the world, have them make mona lisa’s exact copy, and see if it sells for even remotely similar price as Mona Lisa’s estimated value which is probably around a billion dollars. anyone can “enjoy” an exact copy, no?
no. we care about art because art tells stories. human stories. computers don’t have stories to tell. they can imitate, but the best it can ever be will be as valuable as an imitation: not much.
What does monetary worth have to do with anything? A photo of the Mona Lisa is an exact replica, you could even make it bigger to appreciate the details better. If what you like is the picture, you can have it. If what you want is speculation and tax write offs, then you need the scarcity.
oh ok, so you’re a bot. there’s no way a human being would think like that. someone programmed a bot to defend genAI.
a bigger photo. Jesus.
It’s exploitative trash occupying space that belongs to real artists who actually create real social value.
I disagree on all counts.
It’s not exploitative, it doesn’t exploit anyone.
It’s not trash, and if it were you wouldn’t need to regulate it because people would reject it on the merits.
The space belongs to whoever wants to create art, with whatever tools they want to do it. Gatekeeping and true Scotsman arguments are really grasping.
I don’t know what “social value” is created. A nurse or a fireman create social value. You won’t see them worrying about AI. If AI could put out fires they would definitely be interested.
It’s not exploitative, it doesn’t exploit anyone.
It had to be trained on music created by human artists. Those artists were not compensated.
It’s not trash, and if it were you wouldn’t need to regulate it because people would reject it on the merits.
I would reject if I knew it was AI. I can’t always tell, though.
The space belongs to whoever wants to create art, with whatever tools they want to do it.
The owners of Bandcamp get to set the rules, because they own it.
You can’t always tell, I can’t always tell, bandcamp can’t always tell. And it’s only going to get harder.
I think you might misunderstood what Bandcamp is aiming for here. They’re explicitly trying to still allow it when humans are using it (responsibly) as tools. This is essentially a ban on AI where no human is involved (or not involved enough), where the music produced is focused on quantity over quality (slop). That’s a fine and nuanced distinction for a music distribution platform in my opinion.
Ok, if this is just a spam prevention I think it’s fine. Obviously I didn’t read the article (as tradition mandates).
If AIGM was like VSTs or vocaloids that’d be one thing. But it’s more like imitation of sounds, synthesizing song chunks instead of instruments and voices themselves.
The best way to think of it is something creating an audio file solely by using the Photoshop clone stamp tool across millions of source files.
That’s not how transformer neural networks work…
Sure, but we’re talking generative here, as is the article, and to pretend it’s referring to a tool that’s been standard in libraries and even VSTs for over a decade is either misunderstanding the article or being disingenuous on purpose.
No, I get it. It’s generative. GPT: Generative Pretrained Transformer. Music generators add a diffusion layer, but it’s fundamentally new music being generated, not copies of existing songs.
My point is that it’s just another tool, that automates it even more. It’s not the same, it’s the next step.
A text prompt -> audio is not a transformer in the sense of what people are talking about, and you know it or just don’t care, or don’t wholly understand how these systems work under the hood as well.
What I’m referring to are neural models that take an input audio and are effectively a filter that operates as a neural network. Voice mods, instrument adapters, virtual pedals, amp models… These are all actually transformative. There is actual music and effort going into these. And that is not what Bandcamp is after; those were already in heavy use like 15 years ago.
The things that generate based on text are a transformer in the most technically correct sense but not in the sense of what is meant when people talk about transformative.
They’re fundamentally different purposes and usages. It’s not generated vocals from nothing but the lyrics; it’s someone else actually singing it and then a model transforming the sound to match an intended pre-set trained target, not generalization.
You suck
Well, maybe.
Benn Jordan made an AI model to detect generated music but I thought he wanted to build his own platform…?
Using AI to detect AI? Someone’s head is going to explode.
Exactly my thoughts. Tho I think that purely AI generated music would be somewhat easy to detect? As in compared to original chord progressions with AI lyrics or vice versa
As they should.
On the other hand, if AI music was any good why would I go to bandcamp for it?
How would you even screen for AI music?
With AI, duh
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FUCK YEAH!
Paying monthly subscriptions for music that for most people is essentially the same mix with some deviations will become very costly for listeners over time. Relying on paid streaming services is the ultimate expression of laziness.
