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.
This platform sees high front page placement / hundreds of votes for AI-written … uh sorry I mean “I used the AI to clean up my notes” … content daily.
I have an allergic reaction to it and flag, but clearly a majority of the hn voting population appreciates it, so if it isn’t banned it will continue.
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. :)
...and now deviantart is deader than dead because overrun with slop.
Anyway I don't think your case is really so bad. As long as the creator at least has put in the effort to listen to their own stuff from beginning to end at least once (yes that's a low bar), you're already miles ahead of people who'd auto-gen 100s of albums and slap them on there in one go. Music is more inherently rate-limiting than image generation where only half a second or less is needed to take in an image superficially.
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.
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.
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.
I like the idea of my money going to the artists. And, you can "buy the catalog", give an artist $150 or so to get ALL their music. I have a couple composers who I adore so that was a no-brainer. If I was going to pay them for most of their work anyway, why not give them the money now?
Great to see this! The flood of AI Music will bring music royalties down to zero which Im all for if it kills AI music(spammers and silly prompt engineer songwriters trying to make a buck go away)! AI trying to mimic humanity all ways needs to die! Who does AI benefit besides those at the very top?
*Note i am hobbyist songwriter (melody and lyrics) since a teen (few decades ago)and use Suno. It makes my songs sound just like everyone elses cookie cutter crap... it has no soul to it.. just the feel of tech billionaires getting filthy rich off destroying society/humanity!
For those who miss Spotify connect capabilities and apps, I've been using Roon (self-hosted, but susbcription required) for my music library for a couple years now and it is absolutely excellent. You get full access to stream your own library and the ability to integrate into Tidal and/or Qobuz for any music you want to hear but don't own a copy of. It's really very good.
It took one obvious, obnoxious, and well infiltrated new music AI slop in the my recommended new music feed to finally turn me completely sour on Spotify. I was a prelaunch US user who had brand loyalty built in from the start. I even met Daniel Ek during the big early hype. Its gone. It has been the listen of last resort for awhile, and I used it for discovery of new releases. It's dead to me now
As someone who's always bought music rather than getting a subscription, welcome to the club!
Do make sure to back everything up, though, I remember when Google Play Music was shut down and I needed to download everything (fortunately it was announced well beforehand so there was no need to rush).
7digital is also pretty good, I've bought a bunch of Saxon and Rainbow albums on there. As awesome as Bandcamp is, many bigger artists don't have a presence there (although King Diamond's entire discography is on there, that's cool).
I switched to buying CDs and vinyl again a couple of years ago, and bought some second-hand hifi equipment.
I still have a family AppleMusic subscription mostly because my kids use it a lot especially in the car, but I want to go back to owning creative works and compensating artists instead of renting.
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.
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]
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.
you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time
This might work for people who like music as wallpaper to help them study or drown out external distractions, but none of it is going to evoke much feeling or stir memories. It's like calling chewing gum food.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It's like the reverse of the product that advertises itself as "AI driven." As if that's supposed to be a selling point. OK, it's AI driven, but is it good?
There may be short term emotional strings to pull. "AI driven!" or "AI free!"
But ultimately, no one will care if it's AI or not if it's good.
So you just want to be lazy and subsidize to the parrot machine the very essence of what it means to be creative.
I am utterly baffled by this recurring comparison between past electronic tools, which actually have a pretty harsh learning curve to be mastered, and a software contraption that overtakes your creative agency.
I see it everywhere, like comparing Midjourney to the shift to digital photography. What are y’all blokes on? How is it possible that even fine minds just lazily accept such a flawed parallel between two completely different technological paradigms?
I don’t think this is an AI issue, but the amount of effort, the thought process and the story telling about the track they made.
Before generative AI, there were already a swarm of people who aimed at maximising the number of track they made within a short time, with abusing marketing. It is not wrong that they can pump up 100 tracks in a year, with a template and a specialised workflow and correct marketing techniques but… what is the story to these music? For many tracks, I only heard the story of:
> I am the most productive person and I can make most of the money because of that.
Quantity wise, for sure, they wins, but quality wise, I failed to imagine a more complex story than things above although they are good to hype the dance floor or a concert. These days, I mostly listen to music I have bought, or made by specific music communities because of their story behind their track despite not as perfect.
Same reasons why don’t I watch many movies since Ironman 3, most of the blockbusters follow the same winning formula rather than trying something new and in depth or unexpected, CGI and product placements all over the place instead of a good story.
AI just emphasised this problem even more since commercial “art” has been testing majorities’ newest lows.
There are differences between using a tool to create art or use it to spam.
> 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.
We've now had this technology for 2 years. Show me one, just ONE track that is purely(!) made by AI you find honestly exciting. Not "commercially successful", mind you, something you, a musician, personally think is actually great. You are referencing Aphex Twin there, and I'm old enough to remember when I first heard "Digeridoo", so, you know, something where you just go "Wow, that's a banger". If you're DJing: something you would actually put on in a club and the crowd would go wild.
Let's cut the crap: there is none. All GenAI is good for is generating stupid memes, shitposting, ads, and generic background music. There is ZERO creative value in purely generative AI. Yes, there are tools leveraging AI models which can help musicians create tracks - entirely different thing. This is also not what Bandcamp is banning here. Most people will freely admit that AI tooling can be used creatively, like what De Staat did with the "Running backwards into the future" music video - that's all fine, really nobody is disputing that fact, although that "look" is now well established and people are mostly bored and annoyed by it, but that's just how it goes.
AI as tool is included inside almost every daw (or can be through VST) and there is no way bandcamp could enforce a strict "non AI has been used in the process" policy. I think it is sane to separate cases where a record is entirely generated by a single prompt vs AI used as instruments/tools.
I’m more hopeful that MIDI completion/in-filling models will be easier for musicians to control and use. But right now, the most popular tools are things like Suno, where you barely have any control and it spits out an entire, possibly mediocre song. It’s the same vein as ChatGPT image generation vs. Stable Diffusion, where you can do much more controllable inpaints with the latter.
There is a difference between Richard D. James hand-training an LLM on foley sounds he recorded himself to put in his latest IDM track, and the script kiddie spamming out 50 AI-generated mixes per day to get that sweet ad revenue on Youtube.
No one is complaining about the first case, because they are outnumbered by the second 100,000 to 1. RDJ isn't gonna use suno.ai no matter how pro-LLM he is.
Note: this is for sake of argument, I am not aware of RDJ using LLMs in any shape or form.
Well that's the issue. We're not seeing "artists" coming along and applying it to their years/decades of creative knowledge. We're seeing the equivalent of some cushy heir to a fortune come in with a drill and say "I can outdo these teams of diggers! We don't need diggers anymore!"
And on the surface the drill is better. But this heir is assuming that all diggers do is diplace dirt. Not thinking about where to dig, how to dig safely,, what to dig for, and where brute force is needed vs a subtle touch (because even in 2025, miners keep shovels with them). That's all going out the window for "hey I made a hole, mission accomplished!".
Instead of working with diggers to enhace their mining, they want to pretend they can dig themselves. That's why no one in the creative space is confident in this.
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.
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.
We're in the very early stages of AI generated art. What will it be like in 10 years time? 20? 50? You might think it won't get much better. I think that's unlikely.
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
It's their platform, they can do whatever they want. Not everything has to be everything for everybody. And if you think they're irrelevant why would bother wasting your time commenting?
They operate internationally which means adhering to a plethora of copyright laws. So, if someone published an AI generated remake of a copyrighted song, they'd be liable. With the vast amount of AI generated music incoming, I think part of this announcement is self-defence.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 80.6 ms ] threadI have an allergic reaction to it and flag, but clearly a majority of the hn voting population appreciates it, so if it isn’t banned it will continue.
Anyway I don't think your case is really so bad. As long as the creator at least has put in the effort to listen to their own stuff from beginning to end at least once (yes that's a low bar), you're already miles ahead of people who'd auto-gen 100s of albums and slap them on there in one go. Music is more inherently rate-limiting than image generation where only half a second or less is needed to take in an image superficially.
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
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 like the idea of my money going to the artists. And, you can "buy the catalog", give an artist $150 or so to get ALL their music. I have a couple composers who I adore so that was a no-brainer. If I was going to pay them for most of their work anyway, why not give them the money now?
*Note i am hobbyist songwriter (melody and lyrics) since a teen (few decades ago)and use Suno. It makes my songs sound just like everyone elses cookie cutter crap... it has no soul to it.. just the feel of tech billionaires getting filthy rich off destroying society/humanity!
Do make sure to back everything up, though, I remember when Google Play Music was shut down and I needed to download everything (fortunately it was announced well beforehand so there was no need to rush).
7digital is also pretty good, I've bought a bunch of Saxon and Rainbow albums on there. As awesome as Bandcamp is, many bigger artists don't have a presence there (although King Diamond's entire discography is on there, that's cool).
I still have a family AppleMusic subscription mostly because my kids use it a lot especially in the car, but I want to go back to owning creative works and compensating artists instead of renting.
"Tell HN: Viral Hit Made by AI, 10M listens on Spotify last few days" [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46600681
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.
This might work for people who like music as wallpaper to help them study or drown out external distractions, but none of it is going to evoke much feeling or stir memories. It's like calling chewing gum food.
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.
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?
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.
https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE
There may be short term emotional strings to pull. "AI driven!" or "AI free!"
But ultimately, no one will care if it's AI or not if it's good.
Before generative AI, there were already a swarm of people who aimed at maximising the number of track they made within a short time, with abusing marketing. It is not wrong that they can pump up 100 tracks in a year, with a template and a specialised workflow and correct marketing techniques but… what is the story to these music? For many tracks, I only heard the story of:
> I am the most productive person and I can make most of the money because of that.
Quantity wise, for sure, they wins, but quality wise, I failed to imagine a more complex story than things above although they are good to hype the dance floor or a concert. These days, I mostly listen to music I have bought, or made by specific music communities because of their story behind their track despite not as perfect.
Same reasons why don’t I watch many movies since Ironman 3, most of the blockbusters follow the same winning formula rather than trying something new and in depth or unexpected, CGI and product placements all over the place instead of a good story.
AI just emphasised this problem even more since commercial “art” has been testing majorities’ newest lows.
There are differences between using a tool to create art or use it to spam.
We've now had this technology for 2 years. Show me one, just ONE track that is purely(!) made by AI you find honestly exciting. Not "commercially successful", mind you, something you, a musician, personally think is actually great. You are referencing Aphex Twin there, and I'm old enough to remember when I first heard "Digeridoo", so, you know, something where you just go "Wow, that's a banger". If you're DJing: something you would actually put on in a club and the crowd would go wild.
Let's cut the crap: there is none. All GenAI is good for is generating stupid memes, shitposting, ads, and generic background music. There is ZERO creative value in purely generative AI. Yes, there are tools leveraging AI models which can help musicians create tracks - entirely different thing. This is also not what Bandcamp is banning here. Most people will freely admit that AI tooling can be used creatively, like what De Staat did with the "Running backwards into the future" music video - that's all fine, really nobody is disputing that fact, although that "look" is now well established and people are mostly bored and annoyed by it, but that's just how it goes.
No one is complaining about the first case, because they are outnumbered by the second 100,000 to 1. RDJ isn't gonna use suno.ai no matter how pro-LLM he is.
Note: this is for sake of argument, I am not aware of RDJ using LLMs in any shape or form.
And on the surface the drill is better. But this heir is assuming that all diggers do is diplace dirt. Not thinking about where to dig, how to dig safely,, what to dig for, and where brute force is needed vs a subtle touch (because even in 2025, miners keep shovels with them). That's all going out the window for "hey I made a hole, mission accomplished!".
Instead of working with diggers to enhace their mining, they want to pretend they can dig themselves. That's why no one in the creative space is confident in this.
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.