Keeping Bandcamp Human
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Bandcamp’s mission is to help spread the healing power of music by building a community where artists thrive through the direct support of their fans. We believe that the human connection found through music is a vital part of our society and culture, and that music is much more than a product to be consumed. It’s the result of a human cultural dialog stretching back before the written word.

Similarly, musicians are more than mere producers of sound. They are vital members of our communities, our culture, and our social fabric. Bandcamp was built to directly connect artists and their fans, and to make it easy for fans to support artists equitably so that they can keep making music.


Today we are fortifying our mission by articulating our policy on generative AI, so that musicians can keep making music, and so that fans have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.

Our guidelines for generative AI in music and audio are as follows:

• Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.
• Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.

If you encounter music or audio that appears to be made entirely or with heavy reliance on generative AI, please use our reporting tools to flag the content for review by our team. We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI-generated.

With this policy, we’re putting human creativity first, and we will be sure to communicate any updates to the policy as the rapidly changing generative AI space develops. Thank you.

Source: https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/

 

Respect.

There was a genuine worry when they got bought out that the service would go to shit, but so far I'm cautiously optimistic.

 

Thank you Bandcamp for the right decisions and the great text about music and musicians.

 

salute the truth! good job bandcamp

 

I'm curious to know how they will find it's AI or not, Yes right now for Suno AI we can hear the distortion color that gives up, but what about Suno Studio? and what about someone who use it to make it 50% AI 50% composed? where do they draw the line?

 

I think it is more based on people reporting to Bandcamp what they suspect to be AI music rather than some kind of automatic analysis. I might be wrong though, does anybody know more?

 

Unless there's an automatic tool that can detect AI generated stuff with some 99.0% precision, I don't see how it can work reliably. If they base this judgement on people reports only, it will fail miserably since most of the reports will be from mofos trying to diss a certain track for nefarious reasons no matter whether it's AI or not.

 

There's no further info, seems like they rely on user reports. But as I said in Deezer thread, there should be initiative for every music AI service to have inaudible watermarks like Suno and give access for checking the same, at least to these big companies who chose to tag or opt out AI generated music.

Having said that, I tested some tools that kinda estimate if something is made with AI and in which percents, results were kinda satisfying (uploaded my own music and AI generated one too), but that shouldn't be taken as gospel, much better solution is regulation and total transparency from these services.

 

There is Sound Patrol, but that really looks more at if it exhibits characteristics associated with AI generation and unlicensed use of other music as training material which was diffused.

I'm not sure why anyone would even care in the context of Bandcamp, due to the low amounts of money actually involved. They are probably more interested in not getting bombarded with the amount of files people could generate and then use Bandcamp for hosting them. All of the space and bandwidth will contribute to cost of goods sold by not generating an even remotely proportional number of sales.

 

Good for them. Support this and AI being flagged everywhere generally. We need mass user rejection and investment to fall apart. AI tools are pretty interesting but the whole LLM data centre orientated AI industry needs to fall to bits so the tech can can turn into the quite useful ethically formatted local tools they should have been.

 

it's nice to see hope for having at least one online music platform without AI slop, massive respect to Bandcamp for such bold move

I think the line really should be on amount/ratio of certain AI stuff across whole artist profile,
just like people are using for ex. drum VSTs while being actual guitarists and singers, it's fine I guess if drums will be AI,
on the other hand multiinstrumentalist using AI for vocals is questionable because it will feel way more as a (deep)fake,
also if a bandcamp profile will be full of AI slop albums, it has no place on the platform then

 

I'm afraid with shitloads of AI slop everywhere it's inevitable to switch onto human-made flagged content instead

 

I only listen to old music from before the invention of AI!

 

And besides that, even those distortions can appear when warping something... idk... this "ai ban" sounds more and more like bs... unless some dude uploads 20 songs/day for 6 months, i dont see how it can be detected... and not even this is realistic because some people (like in my case) might just make music and not post it and then, suddenly, post years of work

 

If somehow music streaming services could register a unique vocal signature for each genuine artist (IDK how they're going to do it as it will involve processing millions of tracks and the technology could be very complicated), then they can use AI to figure out if the vocal in a newly uploaded track is of a new genuine artist or an AI based imitation of an old one.However, for instrumental music it could be very hard unless the companies making DAWs come up with a system to integrate inaudible user signatures in tracks with information about the track that could be used in a similar fashion.

 

"If you encounter music or audio that appears to be made entirely or with heavy reliance on generative AI, please use our reporting tools to flag the content for review by our team."

lol....so be a narc? and let feelings and opinions be the determining factor?

its no ones business how anyone creates their art. not the process, not the tools, none of it. one mans "ai music" is another mans aleatoric composition.

worry about your own works.

 

Not that simple too - Synth V can generate vocals that are pretty hard to distinguish from a real singer, and with its limited voice options I'm sure there are tons of songs out there using the same Synth V singers, would be very easy to spot their signature for a program trained to do that. Yet it's not really AI, it's just as valid instrument as any Kontakt library.

 

That's totally and completely great. But I don't see how they are going to separate the "AI" garbage from the rest of the herd.

 

Easily, Suno already have watermarks, make every online prompting service use one and give access to platforms/publishers/etc. to use those watermark checkers, problem solved. AI helpers/tools in plugin's/DAW's aren't exactly the same thing as Suno's "generate full song based on text prompt in seconds" approach and second one constitutes wholly generated outcome, substantial part probably would be just generating one prompt instrumental then slapping vocal on top of it. Logic/Scaler/etc giving you idea for a bassline based on your actual work isn't really an issue or you picking several chord progressions based on something you already have, that's essentially helper, but prompting some online service that gives you full product in matter of seconds is just different kind of game.

 

That would require legislation to enforce and even that is probably not enough. Every "AI" shit-spewwer in the world would be looking to circumvent the "watermarks".