A few months ago I spoke with the frontman of a local Boston band from the 1980s, who recently re-released a single with the help of AI. The source material was a compact cassette tape from a demo, found in a drawer. He used AI to isolate what would've been individual tracks from the recording, then cleaned them up individually, without AI's help.
Does that constitute "wholly or in substantial part"? Would the track have existed were it not for having that easy route into re-mastering?
I understand what Bandcamp's trying to do here, and I generally am in support of removing what we'd recognize as "fully AI-generated music", but there are legitimate creative uses of AI that might come to wholly or substantially encompass the output. It's difficult to draw any lines line on a creative work, by just by nature of the work being creative.
(For those interested - check out O Positive's "With You" on the WERS Live at 75 album!)
Funny to see this right now. Spotify's promotion of AI music bothered me so much that it has actually pushed me to Bandcamp and the practice of buying music again. It's really fun to build a collection knowing you're supporting the artists, download FLAC files, organize your little "collection" page ... Feels like a renaissance in my relationship with music, the most fun I've had since what.cd. Anyway, love this stance they're taking.
Same for me! Switched to Bandcamp + Navidrome and have decided that one of my goals for the year is to find at least 2 albums per month I want to buy.
I will shamelessly promote the bandcampsync [1] CLI tool for automating downloads of your bandcamp library and bandcamp-sync-flask [2] wrapper that I built so I could invoke it from the web on my phone after I buy an album.
I've been reading about Spotify pushing generated music but haven't seen that myself so I'm interested to know in what context it happens. Is it certain music styles? Spotify's own playlists? That smart shuffle feature?
I listen mostly in the old school way, full albums of my favourite artists, so I suppose it would be quite unexpected to stumble into AI music this way.
I’ve been doing the same over the last few months.
The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt.
Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?
Is it easy to get in as a former what cd power user rank? I found my old rippy stickers from what.cd and missed that community so much. Ptp is great and alive though.
Bandcamp continues to be the best place to organically discover new artists. If I'm ever bored I go to their front page and browse by genre. It feels like the digital version of Sam Goody or whichever 90s record store had the headphone kiosks where you could listen to songs before buying the record.
Spotify, on the other hand, induced a level of visceral disgust I'd never felt before when I stumbled across an AI-generated album supposedly made by an artist I enjoy. In this case it was somebody that had been dead for 15 years - they were hijacking her Spotify page to promote it as a new release. I'm not an AI reactionary but I found this absolutely fucking gross. Having AI-generated music for four-hour YouTube videos of anime girls sitting in apartments on a rainy day is fine. Desecrating the body of work of a departed musician is decidedly not.
I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave.
There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai.
I'd pay for some app which allows be to dump all my ableton files into, train some transformer on it, just to synthesize new stuff out of my unfinished body of work. It will happen and all lines will get blurred again, as usual.
Also a musician and I don't think it's that amusing. IMO this isn't an "AI can't be art" discussion. It's about the fact that AI can be used to extract value from other artists' work without consent, and then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace.
> demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own
I'm pretty sure the people at Bandcamp agree with you and that's why they mention future "updates to the policy as the rapidly changing generative AI space develops".
>someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai
And in the mean time, AI will continue to clutter creative spaces and drown out actual hardworking artists, and people like you will co-opt what it means to be an artist by using tools that were trained on their work without consent.
lmao, get over yourself. if you cant create something that competes with AI slop and lowest common denominator AI generation then maybe you need to improve your craft.
you sound like someone from the 1800's shouting about how photography should be banned and not allowed to crowd out hard working painters.
there will be people who enjoy ai art and there will be those that dont. how about to you just do what satisfies you creatively and let people decide what they like.
The main differentiator I've noticed is: how much work is the tool doing, and how much work is the artist doing? And that's not to say that strictly more effort on the part of the artist is a good thing, it just has to be a notable amount to, IMHO, be an interesting thing.
This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn't correlate to good output. Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.
Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component.
And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years.
The various lo-fi channels are also likely carrying heavily AI-generated music and it's actually kind of fine. The 'pieces' seem like undifferentiated background music of a certain mood, which is often what I'm looking for while I'm doing something else.
Previously, search was such a big problem. For instance, I'm not big on hip-hop and so on but I like songs like Worst Comes To Worst by Dilated Peoples. I've searched in all sorts of ways for other songs like that and come up with a handful of examples. Likewise, I want the vibe of Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull during various parts. It's hard to find this kind of stuff.
But Suno.ai can generate that boom-bap vibe pretty easily and it's not the kind of thing where I'm going to put the same song on all the time like I do with the Dilated Peoples one, but it's good enough to listen to while I'm working.
I had this opinion for a long time, but only recently was I personally affected, but that made me even more convinced.
I was listening to my new releases playlist on Apple Music and listened to a track that sounded nice, but also a little generic. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to check, but it had all the signs of something fishy going on like generic cover image, the artist page showed a crazy output of singles last year (all the same generic images), unspecific metadata and - to my surprise - I found other Reddit posts about this artist being AI.
Now, a lot of music is generic and goes through so many hands you can hardly call it a personal piece of art. But even then, there’s always some kind of connection.
I guess that’s why I felt betrayed.
I thought AI generated art was wrong before, but I didn’t expect to feel this mix of anger and disappointment.
For me, music (like all fine art) is about human connection. It's the artist telling me something human and personal. It's not entirely about the aesthetics of the music. The provenance of the art is very important. If I feel that connection with a song and it turns out that the song wasn't made by a person (it hasn't happened yet as far as I know), I have been deceived and would be furious.
A song made by a person using AI as tool (rather than to generate the music) is different. What matters is that the song is actually an expression of humanity, not the tools used to make it.
However, the presence of musical slop means that I am not really willing to buy music anymore unless its either a few years old or I'm buying it at the merch table the artist has at a live performance.
Not a musician (dabble with the guitar from time to time but I do absolutely love music) and don’t make music but one of my best friends growing up has been playing instruments forever. He writes songs and song lyrics. He has started a YouTube channel and shares some of the music he makes, and it sounds really great. I am amazed sometimes how great. But he puts in lots of effort to craft these songs and lyrics. They are not “one-shot” prompts.
If we look at this through the lens of making software with ai, which also allows for creativity, blanket bans may keep lots of quality stuff from being made.
How will the tracks be distinguished? Any ai and you’re out?
This is just a fad. The platforms will soon learn that the vocal minority is not necessarily their best customer. And then they'll slowly / quietly revert their bans or stop enforcing them.
If people listen to music, they like the music, and it can come from wherever. Gatekeeping never works.
Most human derived goods markets need to filter low effort attempts at monetization in general. I'm tired of going to Renn. Faire / Farmer Markets / Artist Alley Markets only to find they've started letting in "Joe Blow with a poorly configured 3d printer #35." These places have become infested with people selling the exact same piles of thingverse trash in a rainbow of colors.
It sucks that a lot of these types of markets are suffering from low numbers of shoppers. They open themselves up to these plastic peddlers in desperation only to drive away customers even more.
After 3D-print slop infested craft fairs, and fake AI-slop products infested Etsy, it's got me to wondering: is this just an evolution in an existing scummy business model?
Consider how easy it would have been, any time in the last decade, to get a booth at any "local hand-made goods craft fair", selling "hand-made" copper jewelry... that you happened to buy in bulk lots off Alibaba. The jewelry was "hand-made"... kind of... by someone else, making far too little money, in sweatshop conditions, following techniques and using machines that enable them to produce hundreds at once, with no QC whatsoever.
Nobody would ever guess you hadn't made the stuff yourself. They would read the lack of QC as evidence for your claim that "each piece is distinct and made to match my artistic vision in the moment." You'd put one or two of each type of piece out on the table at a time, as if those are all you have; yet as soon as one sells, you'd pull another out from the box of hundreds.
I can't say for sure that this ever happens, but judging by the number of people willing to be scummy in the more modern ways... it certainly feels like it could. Honestly makes me hesitant to buy anything from a craft fair. Which is a shame.
With regard to Etsy, hand-made crafts don't scale so a VC-backed startup around them was never going to be able to resist this. Only hope would be a highly moderated and curated Craigslist-style website that was happy to pay the bills, pay some salaries and keep the lights on while maintaining integrity.
Craft fairs, though, no excuse. There should not be profit maximizing at local craft fairs.
If I have an exact idea of what I want something to sound like, and I'm able to use an automated system to create that, is that creative expression? Obviously AI isn't entirely capable of that, but eventually with BCI devices it might be.
I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not interested in monetary gain at all, just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.
AI is not the only way to make synthetic music. If you have an exact idea, you can use virtual instrument plugins for software like Ableton Live to produce music.
I’m a founder of one of these AI music companies and that noise you’re describing (it differs between co’s for us it’s loud vocals, for Suno it’s vocal aliasing/sandiness and mushy instrumentals, etc) is exactly why I think these songs should not be going on Spotify/etc.
We’ll have this (and the corny lyrics issue) mostly fixed in a month or so, then it mostly becomes a recommendations problem. For example, TikTok is filled with slop, but it’s not a problem - their algorithm helps the most creative/engaging stuff rise to the top. If Spotify is giving you Suno slop in your discover weekly (or really crappy 100% organic free range AI-free slop) blame Spotify, not the AI or the creators. There are really high effort and original creations that involve AI that deserve to be heard, though.
I suggest going back and listening to some of the first experimental electronic music. The tools have improved a lot since then and people have used them to do really cool things, even spawning countless genres.
I think the real distinction is whether the output came from the artist's human intention, or whether someone just said "let's just see what happens!"... it's sort of impossible to reach inside the artist's brain to find out where that line is. I suppose the only test is to start with that same intention multiple times and see how widely the output varies.
Wasn't your intention whatever you typed in? That doesn't make you an artist and I don't want to hear the music AI made that you happened to type some words to and hit enter.
Not really. If I plug up and frob-a-knob (real or emulated) eurorack at random to just see what happens, the resulting hour long noise will be described as experimental, boring, profound, piece of trash etc. (e.g. check reviews on Beaubourg by Vangelis) It is not going to be put on the same spot as AI slop.
While intent of course is important, the quantity and manner of taking others' work and calling it my own, I thing, plays even bigger role. If I go "hey check out this Bohemian Rhapsody song I just created using Google Search", I do not think much regard will be given to my intent.
Can’t imagine this policy lasts more than a year or two given the rate that AI tools for music are improving. Once the tech can reliably create high quality dry stems of instruments, backing tracks etc. and automate professional-sounding production work (which most musicians do not currently have access to) everyone is going to be using it even if they won’t admit it publicly.
I've been having fun making stuff in Suno, I'm not a musician but I've always enjoyed "producing tracks" using Abelton and find the Suno + Abelton combo to be real magic on the weekends. I think some of the stuff I made isn't too bad and I'd love feedback on it. For a few weeks I went back and forth about uploading them to my soundcloud and resolve with this: I wouldn't have insisted we only allowed art made with MS paint on deviantART, we didn't even enforce quality (tho we highlighted) - we enforced the type of kindness that leads to learning and growth. I hope we can have places for professionals and places for people to display and play with creativity and art irrespective of the tooling. :)
Whenever I see defences of AI "art" people very often reduce the arguments to these analogies of using tools, but it's ineffective. Whether you use MS Paint, Photoshop, pencil, watercolor etc. That all requires skill, practice, and is this great intersection of intent and ability. It's authentic. Generating media with AI requires no skill, no intent, and very minimal labor. It is an approximation of the words you typed in and reduces you to a commissioner. You created nothing. You commissioned a work from a machine and are claiming creative authorship.
You're barking up the wrong tree. You're trying to tell artists about "skill", when they've spent lots of time (potentially thousands of hours!) getting good at their craft.
I am a musician, in the “accomplished amateur” category. For me, music is a never-ending journey of learning and skill-building, and I’ve come to appreciate that journey as much or more than the destination (= recording or live performance). If you gave me a one-click button to improve my skills, I’m not sure I would click it— I’d rather get there myself.
I’d encourage you to dig deeper into why and how the music that is being created by those tools works.
"If you gave me a one-click button to improve my skills, I’m not sure I would click it— I’d rather get there myself." - Me too! :) I use suno to gen vocals, I use my regular teenage engineering workflow + Abelton to mix and master, I'm WAY better in Abelton than I was even 6 months ago - people have always been able to download photoshop actions and filters etc, as you said, it's more about the creative journey.
The whole problem with this is that the people using generative AI tools are trying to co-opt what "art" is. They're barging into creative spaces and demanding that the real artists treat them as equals. I hope you understand that no group of people would treat you kindly for doing that.
Typed a prompt and hit generate. No response after waiting some time. I scrolled down to existing sample music to get a sense of what it creates and hit play. Not one of the play buttons worked. Ok load up Chrome instead of Firefox, maybe they did some Chrome specific thing? Nope site's still broken and none of the samples under "Suno AI Music Gallery" actually work. There's a javascript error "invalid client" on clicking it. I'm not logged in i guess?
It did work on mobile but that seems like it presents a completely different site.
I think the URL should be suno.com, the link you posted is a different thing? Suno.com is the one I've used, I generally use it for DND type campaigns when I need custom music for scenes or background noises. It does pretty good sound effects and spoken word so sometimes I use it for that as well.
Mostly using it to gen vocals, sometimes stems, sometimes gen samples, then as you'd expect -> wav out -> lay it up in Abelton, add in my teenage engineering stuff - filters -> mix and master -> out
For an example of an AI generated song that's gone viral in the last few days, getting millions of views on Spotify / Youtube, see this post from earlier today:
"Tell HN: Viral Hit Made by AI, 10M listens on Spotify last few days" [1]
It will be interesting to see how/where the line is drawn on "in substantial part", considering that Logic Pro lets you click a button and adjust some sliders to add an (awful, imo) drum/instrument played by AI to your track.
This is IMHO an impossible line to draw. If an established artist uses a GenAI music tool it would be accepted. If somebody unpublished does the same it wouldn’t. Assuming they can even tell the difference, which they can’t.
This seems like a good decision, although, is there a good way to tell if music is AI-generated? I assume that some of the music that's showing up in my Spotify feed is AI-generated but I've never noticed.
At least for the current AI music generators, it's pretty easy to tell by ear that it's AI generated. Everything is just a little off, especially the higher frequencies. Vocals often sound indistinct, like an unholy amalgamation of thousands of people are singing instead of a single person.
I think it would be very difficult for most people to tell that songs are generated by Suno 5. There are some interesting anomalies I can see in the spectrum and mid/side channels, like Suno music often has very little information in the side channel (what happens when you subtract the left and right channels from each other). You also commonly see the eq curve of the rhythm section shift over time throughout the song - like drums will sound normal at the beginning but end up sounding kind of under water by the end, but they are quickly improving these things. But to the layperson, many of these things are completely invisible. The most obvious tell, IMO, is the cadence of the lyrics.
Does this apply to all genres or just highly produced popular music? I would not be surprised if I failed to detect an AI song as background in a television commercial, but it is difficult to imagine that anyone could fail to pick out an AI impersonation were you to slip one in to a record like 'João Voz e Violão.'
So there's really accurate ways to detect "pure AI".
The AI music detectors out there are mainly looking out for production things:
-a flatness to the EQ spectrum that you wouldn't get out a properly mixed and produced piece of audio
-no good stem separation, so no per-source eq (relates to above point)
-change BPM mid-song
-unnatural warbles at the end of every phrase
-vocals will have these weird croaky voice cracks, or sound scratchier and raspier
There definitely are tell-tale signs of "pure AI" in audio, but it becomes a lot more nuanced when any sort of secondary mixing/mastering/compression happens (which is the case 90% is the time in the real world- anything on YouTube/Spotify get's compressed).
> I assume that some of the music that's showing up in my Spotify feed is AI-generated but I've never noticed.
A lot of it is now, and it's frustrating to me. The worst part is that I'm not actually anti-AI-music. There's one or two "groups" ("producers"?) I've found where it's clearly AI but they've put a lot of work into making something worth listening to, but Spotify seems to have a "this sucker will listen to the cheap stuff" flag and now I'm drowning in tracks from people who paid for Suno and think that's enough.
I'm not sure about the flag :D but I've had pretty good results with always making sure to flag every artist in AI suggestions with "don't play". You have to visit the artist profile pages to do it though, so it remains a cat and mouse game, but I think that as long as they don't prevent it by force, doing this tends to improve the AI suggestions (of non-AI music).
Similar to YouTube slop.
If that would stop working, I'd cancel Spotify again.
Speaking of YouTube slop, I think Spotify has had its own system of preferring cheap muzak from labels they support since before GenAI music even took off, I think. Example label: Firefly entertainment (IIRC)
Currently it sounds like it's been through an allpass/comb filter. Complex parts, while spectrally there, do not make much sense as a real sound. Probably audio analog of the "finger salad" of early image models. I do not count of being able to tell one from another in a few months.
It sounds like a moral stance on its face, but honestly they probably wouldn't care if someone posted a reasonable amount of AI-generated music that was high quality enough to gain a following of listeners.
This is likely a stance to prevent an individual from producing thousands of AI generated tracks and attempting to flood the zone for anyone browsing and searching.
There's a lot of music on Spotify for example that tries to latch on to current trends in an attempt to get pulled into search results and recommendations.
One day soon many musicians will be using AI assistance, and many won't tell you for fear of judgment.
It's like that with code and art.
Purely AI anything is garbage. But AI tools in the hands of people who know what they're doing are just faster scaffolding and better plywood to build with. The framing is still mostly human expert.
The same argument applies to AI generated or assisted music. Anyone can write a prompt and get a song. It takes judgement and taste to pick a good song and choose to publish it.
I've encountered a few artists who partially used AI in their music making process and the results have been incredible, I would hate to see them banned when grouped with people making completely AI-generated slop... Perhaps a middle ground could be reached? Allow AI generated audio as long as it undergoes significant processing by humans, for example.
Ok maybe you have the opinion that it's all crap right now. That's fine. But pretend it gets good. Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.
Where does that leave Bandcamp? Do they market themselves as "fresh organic music" and live in that niche? What good does all the rights music companies own do if music generates on the fly?
I suspect a huge amount of lobbying incoming asap to stop this. Perhaps a law against AI generated music that's not owned by the RIAA? You might not like AI generated music but you should be very very cautious of those fighting it.
> Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.
As someone who enjoys live music, I would still need a live band to play this on-the-fly generated music. I guess then you'll trot out AI holograms! but that sounds still as unappealing as your base case.
How would they know? A lot of the new stuff is pretty indistinguishable from regular music with the AI adding imperfections like a recorded album would have.
Irrelevant platform says irrelevant thing. Also let people like or dislike things. Maybe we could pick if we want AI content or not. (it’s a no from me personally ) but I feel like the ban hammer is the tool of petty tyrants and lacks creativity and nuance
We now sort of accepted the idea of “vibe coding”, and, even shared appreciation from people who are using it to resuscitate side projects and things they wanted to do but required a lot of work. (Heck, even Linus Torvalds is doing it).
Is “Vibe Music / Art” any different? For example, I am not a drummer, say I use Suno to program some drums for me so I can record my guitar on top, and finally release that track I’ve been procrastinating.
I think the analogy here holds. Not all vibe coding is good, and not all vibe art is bad.
The difference is that code is functional, and the product is the output of the code, not the code itself, whereas music is the thing in itself. I'm not inherently anti ai-creations, but the bar is higher for style in aesthetic domains than functional ones, so AI art/writing/music/etc needs to be heavily filtered/massaged/etc. Plenty of writers/artists/musicians are using AI like an idea generator/scaffold then recreating/enhancing the outputs and going under the radar, it's just the low effort people that everyone sees.
Sure, the analogy applies. Vibe music, vibe art, and vibe coding, for the original specific use of "vibe" meaning "take whatever the computer spits out and don't try to understand it or make it human-serviceable at all", are all low-effort, and they don't belong alongside the corresponding human work without a clear warning label.
(I also think that "AI-assisted" work should have a clear warning label, but I don't automatically equate "AI-assisted" with full "primarily AI-written".)
What do you mean by warning? Transparency I get it, what made you pick the word warning specifically? I wouldn’t mind disclosing that my drums were AI generated for example, but what would a “warning” text be?
In the labeling sense, it's a warning label, in that it serves to tell people who may wish to avoid something that it is present in the product, much like warnings saying "may contain tree nuts" on products that are potentially cross-contaminated. (As compared to a label that people are likely to seek out, like "100% juice", which is regulated differently to prevent people from using it when it doesn't apply.)
In the computing sense, it's a warning, in that it doesn't stop you from ignoring it if you want to, but some people may wish to `-Werror` / `-D warnings`.
That was precisely what I meant with the use of "sort of". Sorry it wasn't clear to you, I did not mean to take words from those that disagree and I do understand that!
If it solves a problem, good for you but I don't think people should put their vibe coded projects online. They don't have any value.
There are delusional people who create vibe coded pull requests to open source projects and they believe they are actually contributing value. No they only create work for the maintainers that have to review the subpar code.
As for your use case, are there really no royalty free drum beats that you could use? Not to mention you could probably learn to create your own beats in Ableton in one weekend. You are cheating yourself.
Personally, I feel like tech companies have already taken over so much of our lives and culture that I don't want them to take more. Corporations have weaseled their way into almost every facet of our lives at this point. Letting them take over human expression and become a substitute for human creativity just feels beyond the pale at this point. When do people say enough is enough?
A stonemason who creates pieces by hand gathers more respect than one who delegates their craft to a cnc machine. No person who respects their craft will use tools that devalue their relation to their craft. Only those who seek to maximize personal gain of wealth would use such tools. Such a person, who sees merit only in the ends produced, rather than in the means themselves, does not participate in the shared history of their craft, in artistry, or in their own personal development.
For a real musician, AI is already too much. For there to be meaning and soul in their music, is must be derived from the intersection of their skills and imagination, whereby the unconscious can make itself manifest in the utilization of ones virtues. Delegating this process to a black box deprives the art of its unique individual perspective that can only arise out of the finitude of human experience and learning. For though the black box may have superficial knowledge of generalizations of many such perspectives, it smooths out all paths into bland sameness. Thus no real artist of merit has any use for AI, for it is always of a lower degree than the more powerful tool that is their mind.
I would have no problem with that. I wouldn't maybe call the AI an artist though, it wouldn't have sentient knowledge to be an artist. It would be art made by a machine. In fact, we have several of those examples already, and there's lots there are really fun and appreciated out there. This new one just happens to be quite more complex and eerie to digest at first.
Does that constitute "wholly or in substantial part"? Would the track have existed were it not for having that easy route into re-mastering?
I understand what Bandcamp's trying to do here, and I generally am in support of removing what we'd recognize as "fully AI-generated music", but there are legitimate creative uses of AI that might come to wholly or substantially encompass the output. It's difficult to draw any lines line on a creative work, by just by nature of the work being creative.
(For those interested - check out O Positive's "With You" on the WERS Live at 75 album!)
I will shamelessly promote the bandcampsync [1] CLI tool for automating downloads of your bandcamp library and bandcamp-sync-flask [2] wrapper that I built so I could invoke it from the web on my phone after I buy an album.
[1] https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync
[2] https://github.com/subdavis/bandcamp-sync-flask
I listen mostly in the old school way, full albums of my favourite artists, so I suppose it would be quite unexpected to stumble into AI music this way.
The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt.
Don’t miss Spotify one bit.
Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.
Spotify, on the other hand, induced a level of visceral disgust I'd never felt before when I stumbled across an AI-generated album supposedly made by an artist I enjoy. In this case it was somebody that had been dead for 15 years - they were hijacking her Spotify page to promote it as a new release. I'm not an AI reactionary but I found this absolutely fucking gross. Having AI-generated music for four-hour YouTube videos of anime girls sitting in apartments on a rainy day is fine. Desecrating the body of work of a departed musician is decidedly not.
There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai.
I'd pay for some app which allows be to dump all my ableton files into, train some transformer on it, just to synthesize new stuff out of my unfinished body of work. It will happen and all lines will get blurred again, as usual.
Original:
https://suno.com/song/fcc43ad3-af05-4733-85e4-fec7502b82a5
And here are the extensions:
https://suno.com/song/2760efbd-97d3-4072-9993-5ef4b6515472
https://suno.com/song/297415d0-72b3-4084-b263-f4256465c74d
It handled them quite well, I should incorporate a few ideas back already :)
this is incoherent. Publishing a bunch of stuff no one wants is not competition. You're just mad that people actually like AI music.
I'm pretty sure the people at Bandcamp agree with you and that's why they mention future "updates to the policy as the rapidly changing generative AI space develops".
And in the mean time, AI will continue to clutter creative spaces and drown out actual hardworking artists, and people like you will co-opt what it means to be an artist by using tools that were trained on their work without consent.
you sound like someone from the 1800's shouting about how photography should be banned and not allowed to crowd out hard working painters.
there will be people who enjoy ai art and there will be those that dont. how about to you just do what satisfies you creatively and let people decide what they like.
This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn't correlate to good output. Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.
Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component.
And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years.
Previously, search was such a big problem. For instance, I'm not big on hip-hop and so on but I like songs like Worst Comes To Worst by Dilated Peoples. I've searched in all sorts of ways for other songs like that and come up with a handful of examples. Likewise, I want the vibe of Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull during various parts. It's hard to find this kind of stuff.
But Suno.ai can generate that boom-bap vibe pretty easily and it's not the kind of thing where I'm going to put the same song on all the time like I do with the Dilated Peoples one, but it's good enough to listen to while I'm working.
I had this opinion for a long time, but only recently was I personally affected, but that made me even more convinced.
I was listening to my new releases playlist on Apple Music and listened to a track that sounded nice, but also a little generic. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to check, but it had all the signs of something fishy going on like generic cover image, the artist page showed a crazy output of singles last year (all the same generic images), unspecific metadata and - to my surprise - I found other Reddit posts about this artist being AI.
Now, a lot of music is generic and goes through so many hands you can hardly call it a personal piece of art. But even then, there’s always some kind of connection.
I guess that’s why I felt betrayed.
I thought AI generated art was wrong before, but I didn’t expect to feel this mix of anger and disappointment.
For me, music (like all fine art) is about human connection. It's the artist telling me something human and personal. It's not entirely about the aesthetics of the music. The provenance of the art is very important. If I feel that connection with a song and it turns out that the song wasn't made by a person (it hasn't happened yet as far as I know), I have been deceived and would be furious.
A song made by a person using AI as tool (rather than to generate the music) is different. What matters is that the song is actually an expression of humanity, not the tools used to make it.
However, the presence of musical slop means that I am not really willing to buy music anymore unless its either a few years old or I'm buying it at the merch table the artist has at a live performance.
If we look at this through the lens of making software with ai, which also allows for creativity, blanket bans may keep lots of quality stuff from being made.
How will the tracks be distinguished? Any ai and you’re out?
If people listen to music, they like the music, and it can come from wherever. Gatekeeping never works.
It sucks that a lot of these types of markets are suffering from low numbers of shoppers. They open themselves up to these plastic peddlers in desperation only to drive away customers even more.
Consider how easy it would have been, any time in the last decade, to get a booth at any "local hand-made goods craft fair", selling "hand-made" copper jewelry... that you happened to buy in bulk lots off Alibaba. The jewelry was "hand-made"... kind of... by someone else, making far too little money, in sweatshop conditions, following techniques and using machines that enable them to produce hundreds at once, with no QC whatsoever.
Nobody would ever guess you hadn't made the stuff yourself. They would read the lack of QC as evidence for your claim that "each piece is distinct and made to match my artistic vision in the moment." You'd put one or two of each type of piece out on the table at a time, as if those are all you have; yet as soon as one sells, you'd pull another out from the box of hundreds.
I can't say for sure that this ever happens, but judging by the number of people willing to be scummy in the more modern ways... it certainly feels like it could. Honestly makes me hesitant to buy anything from a craft fair. Which is a shame.
Craft fairs, though, no excuse. There should not be profit maximizing at local craft fairs.
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not interested in monetary gain at all, just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.
Your ability to make and share music as you like hasn't been abridged. Bandcamp has chosen not to be a part of it if it's AI-mrdiated.
It sounds like bandcamp is not the right place for what you want to do. There's plenty of ways to do what you're looking for though!
I have to imagine* that we will figure out what that difference is, but it will be difficult and costly.
* I have to imagine that or else I will lose all hope in the future.
https://caniphish.com/blog/how-to-spot-ai-audio
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-modera...
even coded detectors exist https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker?id=09f25ee7913a415...
We’ll have this (and the corny lyrics issue) mostly fixed in a month or so, then it mostly becomes a recommendations problem. For example, TikTok is filled with slop, but it’s not a problem - their algorithm helps the most creative/engaging stuff rise to the top. If Spotify is giving you Suno slop in your discover weekly (or really crappy 100% organic free range AI-free slop) blame Spotify, not the AI or the creators. There are really high effort and original creations that involve AI that deserve to be heard, though.
I suggest going back and listening to some of the first experimental electronic music. The tools have improved a lot since then and people have used them to do really cool things, even spawning countless genres.
Speak for yourself.
That's why I choose to make the distinction by just not caring about any kind of music that uses any kind of AI.
While intent of course is important, the quantity and manner of taking others' work and calling it my own, I thing, plays even bigger role. If I go "hey check out this Bohemian Rhapsody song I just created using Google Search", I do not think much regard will be given to my intent.
Those people don’t tend to have a good understanding of what most humans like and why they like stuff like music.
I’d encourage you to dig deeper into why and how the music that is being created by those tools works.
Typed a prompt and hit generate. No response after waiting some time. I scrolled down to existing sample music to get a sense of what it creates and hit play. Not one of the play buttons worked. Ok load up Chrome instead of Firefox, maybe they did some Chrome specific thing? Nope site's still broken and none of the samples under "Suno AI Music Gallery" actually work. There's a javascript error "invalid client" on clicking it. I'm not logged in i guess?
It did work on mobile but that seems like it presents a completely different site.
"Tell HN: Viral Hit Made by AI, 10M listens on Spotify last few days" [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46600681
-a flatness to the EQ spectrum that you wouldn't get out a properly mixed and produced piece of audio
-no good stem separation, so no per-source eq (relates to above point)
-change BPM mid-song
-unnatural warbles at the end of every phrase
-vocals will have these weird croaky voice cracks, or sound scratchier and raspier
There definitely are tell-tale signs of "pure AI" in audio, but it becomes a lot more nuanced when any sort of secondary mixing/mastering/compression happens (which is the case 90% is the time in the real world- anything on YouTube/Spotify get's compressed).
A lot of it is now, and it's frustrating to me. The worst part is that I'm not actually anti-AI-music. There's one or two "groups" ("producers"?) I've found where it's clearly AI but they've put a lot of work into making something worth listening to, but Spotify seems to have a "this sucker will listen to the cheap stuff" flag and now I'm drowning in tracks from people who paid for Suno and think that's enough.
Similar to YouTube slop.
If that would stop working, I'd cancel Spotify again.
Speaking of YouTube slop, I think Spotify has had its own system of preferring cheap muzak from labels they support since before GenAI music even took off, I think. Example label: Firefly entertainment (IIRC)
This is likely a stance to prevent an individual from producing thousands of AI generated tracks and attempting to flood the zone for anyone browsing and searching.
There's a lot of music on Spotify for example that tries to latch on to current trends in an attempt to get pulled into search results and recommendations.
It's like that with code and art.
Purely AI anything is garbage. But AI tools in the hands of people who know what they're doing are just faster scaffolding and better plywood to build with. The framing is still mostly human expert.
Word on the street here in Nashville is that it's already the case. The songs getting published aren't AI-made, but there's AI assistance.
This seems to fly over the heads of many. art is about taste.
I think you need hard rules to make it not completely subjective.
Ok maybe you have the opinion that it's all crap right now. That's fine. But pretend it gets good. Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.
Where does that leave Bandcamp? Do they market themselves as "fresh organic music" and live in that niche? What good does all the rights music companies own do if music generates on the fly?
I suspect a huge amount of lobbying incoming asap to stop this. Perhaps a law against AI generated music that's not owned by the RIAA? You might not like AI generated music but you should be very very cautious of those fighting it.
As someone who enjoys live music, I would still need a live band to play this on-the-fly generated music. I guess then you'll trot out AI holograms! but that sounds still as unappealing as your base case.
We now sort of accepted the idea of “vibe coding”, and, even shared appreciation from people who are using it to resuscitate side projects and things they wanted to do but required a lot of work. (Heck, even Linus Torvalds is doing it).
Is “Vibe Music / Art” any different? For example, I am not a drummer, say I use Suno to program some drums for me so I can record my guitar on top, and finally release that track I’ve been procrastinating.
I think the analogy here holds. Not all vibe coding is good, and not all vibe art is bad.
(I also think that "AI-assisted" work should have a clear warning label, but I don't automatically equate "AI-assisted" with full "primarily AI-written".)
In the labeling sense, it's a warning label, in that it serves to tell people who may wish to avoid something that it is present in the product, much like warnings saying "may contain tree nuts" on products that are potentially cross-contaminated. (As compared to a label that people are likely to seek out, like "100% juice", which is regulated differently to prevent people from using it when it doesn't apply.)
In the computing sense, it's a warning, in that it doesn't stop you from ignoring it if you want to, but some people may wish to `-Werror` / `-D warnings`.
speak for yourself please, not all of us have
If it solves a problem, good for you but I don't think people should put their vibe coded projects online. They don't have any value.
There are delusional people who create vibe coded pull requests to open source projects and they believe they are actually contributing value. No they only create work for the maintainers that have to review the subpar code.
As for your use case, are there really no royalty free drum beats that you could use? Not to mention you could probably learn to create your own beats in Ableton in one weekend. You are cheating yourself.
I've been attacked for saying I don't hate it, and I witness this everywhere.
It's a tool. Artists and professionals can use tools. They're professionals and know how much is too much.
For a real musician, AI is already too much. For there to be meaning and soul in their music, is must be derived from the intersection of their skills and imagination, whereby the unconscious can make itself manifest in the utilization of ones virtues. Delegating this process to a black box deprives the art of its unique individual perspective that can only arise out of the finitude of human experience and learning. For though the black box may have superficial knowledge of generalizations of many such perspectives, it smooths out all paths into bland sameness. Thus no real artist of merit has any use for AI, for it is always of a lower degree than the more powerful tool that is their mind.
People seem to have an irrational fear of being entertained by AI, equating that to admitting that it is a higher form of intelligence than their own.