Slop was word of the year 2025 from Merriam-Webster.


: digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence

broadly : a product of little or no value : rubbish

 

Suspicious suspected music uploads should be banned until being thoroughly verified, may sound extreme but The AI degenerates need to be exposed and shut down. A real musician's potential, creativity and livelihood stolen by AI created trash is unacceptable.

 

Last edited: Jan 17, 2026 at 7:21 AM

Have any of you ever considered making music that is actually better than all this AI stuff?

You know, instead of all this talking about how it sucks; why not just prove your point by making a superior product? Is that really so hard?

You have nice computers, expensive monitoring, all the cracked software in the world available, all the years working in studios, etc etc.

Are you all resigned to the fact any non-musically creative person with an internet connection can make something that you can't match or "beat"?

No-one here ever had this big problem when the output from AI sites was terrible. It sounded like Band in a Box. So it should be easy.

It's easy to look at the numbers and say Spotify uploads have gone from 30K songs per day, to 60K since the addition of all the AI junk. How does that actually matter? The only difference is you are seeing how buried your music is along with all the other tracks that are uploaded on a daily basis. Compare it to playing the lottery. More people buying more tickets does not change the probability of your ticket having the correct numbers on it.

 

Last edited: Jan 17, 2026 at 8:50 AM

This was me a year ago, exact argument - its just the natural flow of technology, and there's always friction when it arrives. I was there in 3D graphics when they were brand new and hated by many, i know the parallel well.

I've spent the last year deeply exploring AI art tools - from Midjourney to complex Controlnet tools, online and offline. Even integrating a workflow into a commercial project that generates 300million a year.

I explained my current 26 perspective in an earlier post, and i'm afraid you are deluding yourself by simply comparing it to other tool revolutions. It sounds good in a linked in post, but its pretty ignorant to the reality of where we are and how past revolutions played out.

Ill be clear, the tech is very useful in a multitude of modest ways, mainly supporting established workflows. I'm not anti LLM. But lets also be very clear it is not a new medium or technology like books, TV, Film, Electronic instruments etc, its an output machine that manipulates and analyses data in a highly detailed way. A potentially powerful way to create polished complex 'art'

To make it truly creative its interface and control needs to be as complex as a DAW or 3D package. After 4 years of development its barely at the level of Microsoft paint. Compare it to 3D, 4 years in the 90's give us massive upgrades in tech potential and tools complexity. We have to be really honest, its been very slow going and its creative value and potential for innovation still isn't remotely obvious. Most previous tool innovations were showing new exciting paths even in their primitive early years.

That's the modern state of the creative AI industry - its really not surfacing new voices, ideas, images or sounds, its just surfacing echo's made by non creatives playing with it. Its definitely not a movement or a creative revolution yet. Nothing interesting has appeared in a year. I did make some cool speculative trailers and i have some new potential art styles i really like, but developing these further in AI is a horrible process. The tools are so primitive its laughable.

The one stop shop 'AI can do everything' workflow seemingly isn't appearing any time soon.

This slow development wouldn't be an issue if the version of AI we are being offered wasn't a super dangerous business scam that will have a massive worldwide impact economically and ecologically. The promises, influence and adoption are on a whole new scale. We cant detach the tech from how its being used, even if its useful.

This is what cripples the 'its just another tool revolution' argument - sociopathic people own and run the largest AI companies, all operating in a profit orientated capitalist market, and we have big NEW problems.

• Unethical model training - This is a serious societal problem. Culture feeds the models data, but only a very few will profit from humanities hard work. At best it echo's factories in the industrial revolution - not a great comparison. It didn't need to be like this at all, training could have been regulated and done with creatives.
• Huge data farms - no previous 'tool' needed a vast economy busting budget to verify its value. Ever growing farms are not even needed, the tech can work small scale offline perfectly well if applied in practical moderate ways.
• Obscene levels of very risky investment. This isn't needed to make the tech useful to society right now - the rapid inflation of this new sector is being driven by ego, ambition, hubris and greed, not immediate value to humanity.
• Flooding the internet with unregulated access and output isn't beneficial to anyone - it is not fostering new ideas or art yet, and if it is EVERYTHING still sinks under a sea of mediocrity. NO innovative artistic tool has ever before had such an immediate and overwhelming effect on culture. There's no past model for this.
• Causing worldwide hardware shortages to feed farms (that will be outdated every few years) - Past tech gradually discovered and ramped up its needs, no innovation instantly drained the world around it on a scale never seen before.
• Rushed integration of unproven, unfinished prototypes into company systems by FOMO obsessed executives - new innovation should measurably improve a system before integration, the benefits are not even clear with AI integration, yet the business world and peoples jobs are being experimented on by hustlers and sociopaths.
  
  

My point is - a pretty useful technology has be hijacked in a massively dangerous way, tenuous comparisons to past are not relevant, we are in new territory here.

And i think/hope the techbros hubris will pop the bubble before the economic cost is too high. Not sure about the US getting through this unscathed, pretty much all their economic growth is invested in AI. That's going to hurt bad. (I'm not in US, but i feel for everyone there right now)

 

Last edited: Jan 17, 2026 at 11:17 AM

That's cold and emotionless. It sounds almost “real,” but it's not, and you can hear that. Anyone who has something like this generated by AI probably thinks it's cool. “Making music” and “generating music” or having it created are two completely different things. If you don't sing or play an instrument, you don't make music, and that's probably what Bandcamp wants to convey.

You're also forgetting the overall context, the social aspects of making music together (!), with everything that goes with it.

“If he can do it better...” – just because of the solo strum...?

 

Misses point of all this entirely. At least if it's shit music, it's human made shit music. Just as it always was and always should be. lol

If you have a way of participating in a thread about a topic one would like to voice criticism of without participating in the thread, let us know.

As it should be. Rationalize all you want, but if you didn't come up with those variations yourself, it's not your music. What you are doing is just a variant of simply prompting an AI to, "create me an entire song in the style of so and so... or even yourself".

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jan 18, 2026 at 6:21 AM

Here's an example of how a computer-generated AI music software online program can relieve you of independent thought, independent music-making, songwriting, or learning and playing music, completely replacing your human psychological processes.

Mureka is a paid AI music service, www.mureka.ai/de/
It offers the following:
- Reference - Vocals - Melody ideas
You can enter your own lyrics or have them generated.
Then enter the style, such as - Neo-Golfo, - Future House, or - Psychedelic Rock.
Then select the song gender - Female or - Male.
Then you will be prompted to enter a song title.
Finally, press the "Create" button!

Company Name: SKYWORK AI PTE. LTD. Address: 2 Science Park Drive, #01-08, Ascent, Singapore 118222 Email: [email protected]

When using it, you become a slave to an artificial machine. The allure and curiosity surrounding these machines are strong, and if you use them uncritically, you may become dependent on them or gradually lose your creative abilities.

Certainly, some non-musicians will use these tools to experience a sense of accomplishment, creating a song with zero knowledge or skill. This is precisely where the danger lies, because every skill you possess—from writing, arithmetic, and reading to vocational training—requires learning.

The machine doesn't teach you anything; it simply performs your real-life tasks for you in a magical way, almost like a miracle out of thin air. But this magic is an illusion because, in the long run, it costs you the ability to be creative, to learn and apply things that you yourself have experienced emotionally, with heart and mind, while making music.

This AI machine is cold, it has no feelings or emotions, no love, no grief—no emotional responses, and that is the exact opposite of what you are as a human being. I can do no more than warn and write, and I thank all the other critics who have enlightened me and others with their views and ideas.

 

I nearly never have read a bunch of bullshit idiocy in one single thread. Most of you sound like the Bilderstürmer in the late medieval ages.

I give a sworn testimony to bandcamp that none of my music is or has in any way, shape or form anything generated or assisted by AI in it. Period. Problem solved.

Whereas I think that this move "on suspicion until proven not guilty in our mind" is absolute fascistic. It's pure stupidity and dreaming of having a genius solution to a problem that is not in the slightest understood.

This mankind and the world will be destroyed by the idiotic stupid Dunning-Kruger-experimental-lab-halfbrains.

 

all AI music "producers" should have their own pool and a sandbox place to play around , me thinks

 

One positive. Before people panic (or throw around the word fascist) i'd go and investigate the big music gen tools properly.

Something will become clear pretty quickly.

Because of the narrow training data many less popular genres and countless subgenres are almost impossible to recreate.

For example Suno cant make a remotely authentic underground Techno track - that's not even that small a genre. It can make a bad commercial trance track if you describe and request 'techno'. Its tags are rubbish.

I recently tested Suno's newest model properly and it struggled with a nearly all smaller genre prompts. The output was clueless rubbish a lot of the time. I was actually disappointed, i was hoping to surface some interesting remixes of my own work. I eventually managed a pretty good rave metal interpretation, but that was about it, and not remotely the subgenres i actually wanted.

Unlike image models where you can manually insert a small lora (batch of tagged image data focused on a style or element) to influence the output, I THINK music models need huge batches of densely tagged time consuming data to understand a specific genre. I've noticed none of them let you manually train a musical style.

So the 'is it AI?' issue might (for now) circle around a pretty specific group of popular genres that are being raided for data. Modern Country, 2000's Pop and Indie, K and Anime Pop, AOR, 2000's Metal, commercial House, Hard dance, modern Hip-hop, Trap, and 2000's film soundtracks, seem to be the popular 'really accurate' outputs looking at the user base on Suno. It's core strength is basically recent commercial music.

I seriously don't know if Suno have the time, budget and library to get smaller genres into the system. The financial clock is ticking for a lot of the smaller AI companies, they cant burn investors money forever.

If small genre output is that bad, AI might not stink up all of Band camp. I'm hoping for many underground band camp creators this potential 'report threat' will exist somewhere off on the distant horizon where low effort AI people flood the above commercial genres

Sucks a bit if you love making those genres but for others id maybe just get a beer, settle down and watch the fight from a far.

 

Last edited: Jan 17, 2026 at 5:21 PM

Are you even a real bonafide musician or just someone who plays prerecorded tracks and samples?

 

If you love making music of any kind, what other people make should matter zero to you.

If what some website can crank out in 10 seconds means your next song won't sell and that is all you care about; you should save yourself the time, money, headaches, and all the effort and do the right thing. Just quit. Your motivations are just as bad as people who are trying to use work they didn't make and claim it for their own.

 

This thread is just getting too waylaid, perhaps it needs to be closed as it is not going to be resolved here, tempers may flare and just create a real mess, all the time wasted on this thread could be time spent creating and composing, I've spent an hour reading some of these comments and now I've had enough, it is time to relax.

 

Hundreds of years ago, my ancestors were sitting around a campfire in Scotland. Electricity hadn't been invented yet, and someone was singing a song. Then someone took a hollow stick and poked holes in it with a knife, and he had invented a flute! It went perfectly with the song; it was much more fun.

Then MacDonald, the old warhorse, wondered what he could add. He invented the bagpipes, and they learned a song to thank their creator. After a hard day's work—cutting peat and tending livestock—they had a lot of fun making music in the evenings.

They had no idea that a few hundred years later, people would be arguing about AI, and each of them would be sitting alone in front of their computers instead of singing and dancing with others in the pub.

 

you are being that guy in the 70s whining that synthesizers isnt real music, or the rock bands in the 80s stating that no drum machine was used on their records , are you banning the Akai S series to stop sampling next ? (same goes for autotune, computers, or back then guitars)
music has always been about innovation, whether you are in or not.

 

The SR Copyright (Master) stands for sound recording... if Suno is providing the recording where is the grey area?

 

Copyright law is Copyright law, I explained it as simple straight forward as possible.
If you don't trust me, go do the research yourself then return here and point out where exactly you think I'm wrong.

We'll be here waiting...

 

If the instrumental comes from suno, but you take it, in whole or in stems, add instrumentation, vocals etc.

 

This is maybe a good channel for exploring these kind of issues
https://www.youtube.com/@TopMusicAttorney

but there's a catch

 

AI slop is absolutely quantifiable, it's the flood of low effort prompt-and-publish garbage clogging every platform. The fact that artistic people can use any tool well doesn't mean platforms have to host the 99% who won't. Photography didn't train on millions of stolen paintings. DAWs didn't scrape every song on Spotify without consent. The tool itself has an ethical problem baked into its creation and that's not the same as "new tech scary." AI companies are being sued from left to right over it.
the US Copyright Office has literally ruled that purely AI-generated content can't be copyrghted and you can't claim authorship. That's not "the law is clear" that's more like the law is actively being figured out in real time. just like intellectual property laws were yanked around during the SOPA/PIPA era. Bandcamp avoiding that mess isn't posturing, it's basic risk management.
You're conflating AI-assisted with AI-generated. No one is mad at someone using AI to master a track. They're mad at people typing "make me a lo-fi beat" and calling themselves musicians. AI is not used as a tool by the majority, it's used to spit out the end product.
It's really not about "new tech baaad" but about the braindead usage of it and Bandcamp has no intention of going out of business because of these people who call themselves musicians after typing few words in a prompt box.