Good decision. Bandcamp makes money from people who consciously avoided the streaming shitfest in favor of directly supporting the artists. Hardly surprising that their have a strong aversion to AI slop.
AI generated music barred from Bandcamp
261–270 of 751 posts
Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp
#262I support this.
However, what if I use AI to generate a simple sine wave. Then I map it to a keyboard and play it with different notes.
Who's going to define what's ok.
Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I confess I am torn by your comment. I myself wouldn't choose AI for guitar, given that's where I have perfected my craft, and I am able to relate to what you said. However, not as an artist, but as a listener, I have no trouble with a guitar composition made by a machine. John Dewey's famous book talks about shifting the focus from the maker to the experience and that the value of something is not about the artist's…
The making of art is a personal experience, and the beholding of art is another type of personal experience. If we suggest that the two can be separated such that we can behold art without knowledge of the production of it, well I would consider that wrong. There is a reason each piece in a museum is given a plaque telling its medium and brief background. This is because the meaning of a piece is derived from its con…
We don't have to agree, but the biggest problem I find with this take you're now bringing is that it leads to an infinite regress, you can forever expand your knowledge about the origin of something. Then, not to mention, that often we construct from evidence which is already an interpretation with data loss.
The Mona Lisa example actually supports both our positions in my opinion: someone can have a profound experience of it knowing nothing of Leonardo, while someone else has a different profound experience knowing his biography. Neither experience is 'false', they're just different modes of engagement with the same work. Personally, I have even experienced the inverse throughout my life.
Growing up not speaking English, and being flooded with American culture through radio, I was deeply moved by lots and lots of music made by foreigners that sounded like absolute gibberish to me. Later in life, after learning about the meaning of certain songs, I, unfortunately, lost some of my appreciation for it. Some may call that alienation, but to me it was a form of naivety of a child that enjoyed just sound in its pure form without it being tainted by any derived or supplied meaning from its creator that was attached to it through accompanied lyrics.
Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do? AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs. Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it…
> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.
Not necessarily apples-to-apples here. Full songs generated from AI prompts don't crash like a computer program would. You could simply upload the garbage to Spotify and reap the rewards until it got removed (if it even does).
Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp
#265If 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 in…
> 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?
i say this without malice (more as an encouragement to you to do whatever you like): nobody cares about your individual consumption choices. if you want to consume content from a machine that produces the thing you want to consume, that in and of itself has no impact on anyone but you. but you might be missing out on good music (either by someone else, or by your own hand) and ultimately, i wonder if you will value the end product of a musical vending machine.
Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do? AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs. Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it…
> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. This is cliche. Most celebrated artists in the electronic music world can play several instruments, if not expertly, than at least with enough familiarity to understand the nuances of musical performance. Electronic musicians are more akin to composers and probably have more in common with mathematicians and programmers in the way that they…
Electronic music is also very closely related to computer animation. Animated film technology is much more advanced, but a lot of techniques are similar.
Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp
#267/find in page “discovery”, 0 results
A little shocked. The biggest issue with music streaming right now is, imo, discovery. Algorithmic discovery is cute, but there’s a perverse incentive for companies who provide discovery services (ie Spotify) to funnel users to artists that cost less (ie AI generated in-house).
There’s also the fact that flooding the market with AI music slop _also_ makes discovery even harder.
Tried-and-true methods for discovery over the past decades are network effects (artists featuring and collaborating), and niche label A&R. However, Spotify has no interest, or incentive, to allow users to explore these avenues for discovery.
So, kudos to Bandcamp. But with better discovery this wouldn’t be necessary.
Finally, anecdotally, as someone in the top percentile of listeners for several niche genres on Spotify, I’ve yet to hear AI generated music that isn’t crap. Whenever it gets recommended to me by Spotify I reach for my phone, see that I don’t recognize the artist, and then see that they’re self-published on Spotify with a few hundred listeners. I guess if you don’t have any taste you might not notice, but it’s painfully obvious for anyone who is familiar enough to recognize themes, callbacks, and instrumentation within a genre.
Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do? AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs. Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it…
> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. This is cliche. Most celebrated artists in the electronic music world can play several instruments, if not expertly, than at least with enough familiarity to understand the nuances of musical performance. Electronic musicians are more akin to composers and probably have more in common with mathematicians and programmers in the way that they…
You also need to understand how instruments make sound at an engineering level if you want to make timbre-perfect synthesizers which sound like said instrument, for instance
Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp
#269Funny 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 stan…
I switched to Bandcamp a while back because I was sick of Spotify playing the same 100 songs forever. It feels like they have about 2 songs for every artist that they will actually play in any generated playlist.
Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do? AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs. Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it…
> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do? For me, one key difference is that I can cite my stylistic influences and things I tried, while (to my knowledge) commercial musical generation models specifically avoid doing that, and most don't provide chord/lead sheets either -- I would find it genuinely sad to…
I am 100% sure you can't cite all of them