AI generated music barred from Bandcamp • Hacker News Board

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#391

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

whatsupdog wrote: post #387

Understandable. But the question I don't see anyone asking, and I really want answered, is how will they identity? I'm not a good singer at all. Recently I wrote a song, uploaded the music to Suno and it created nice music and composition. I downloaded the individual layers of music, sent the vocal to another app that changed it to my voice. Put everything together and it sounds like me singing.

Some of the AI applications may sign the data in a purposefully detectable way.

Other than that no idea.

With this said, this may be more of a reason to get rid of the AI trash slop that scammers use to attempt to make money, gum up the platform with, and not actually ban people that make decently good AI based songs.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#392

Post by anigbrowl » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 10:53 PM UTC

don-code wrote: post #123

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…

No I don't think that really qualifies because it's solving an engineering problem. I hang out on an electronic music creators' forum which is stringently anti-AI, but nobody objects to things like stem separation. People are skeptical about AI 'mastering' but don't really object for similar reasons.

What people get mad about is the use of AI to generate whole tracks. Generating rhythms, melodies, harmonies etc via AI isn't greeted warmly either, but electronic musicians generally like experimenting with things like setting up 'wrong' modulation destinations in search of interesting results. I don't think anyone seriously objects to AI-produced elements being selected and repurposed as musical raw material. But this is obviously not happening with complete track generation. It's like playing slot machines but calling yourself a business person.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#393

Post by bossyTeacher » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 10:54 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #249

olivierestsage wrote: post #16

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 stan…

If you came across a song and fell in love with it, only to find out later that it was generated by ai, would you stop loving the song?

This happened to me last month. After the first song, I suspected so I checked the cover and the artist profile. It was AI generated. I enjoyed the album nevertheless. You can find AI music enjoyable. People also hated DJ music before. And recorded music before. And electro amplified live music performances before that. This is just another category of music. Doesn't take away from human music. What people are right to be angry is that the tech was made on the backs of other people's non-remunerated work. Whether a human made a song or not shouldn't be as important as actual living artists being taken advantage of.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#394

Post by notahacker » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 10:57 PM UTC

crucialfelix wrote: post #266

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Probably a good analogy too. Pixar's creative process is quite different from drawing it frame by frame and at least some aspects of it will use have used some sort of generative process, but it's incredibly involved and conscious in a way that typing "video of cute cartoon cat, Pixar style" into a prompt isn't.

Same applies to Bandcamp not having any issues with people making music in a DAW

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#395

Post by neom » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 10:59 PM UTC

IAmGraydon wrote: post #370

neom wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 https://soundcloud.com/john/eager - I put over 16 hours into this track, I'm sure someone who knows about music can point to loads of errors in it, I'm sure it's sloppy in parts, but I put real effort into it and I'm prou…

So I've used Suno a bit in my own musical creations, but would never release something with any sound that was generated via AI. What I do is write and record a song (I'm also in Ableton), then when I'm unhappy with something or don't know where to go next, I throw it into Suno and have it generate some ideas. I use those ideas just as you would use ideas from a writing partner. If I like them, I transcribe them, pla…

Yeah! I think how you are doing it is great! For me making music is about spacing and...I dunno, the sound stage I guess? Sometimes I don't even listen to lyrics I like getting lost in the flow of it, I'm not interested in improving my own singing abilities, but I am interested in improving as a song writer, suno really helps me hear what my words sound like. I can also gen stuff real quickly to throw into my OPZ or OP1 to put together into tracks, it's a lot of fun.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#396

Post by zerox7felf » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 11:00 PM UTC

meindnoch wrote: post #337

newman8r wrote: post #50

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 in…

>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. Luckily there are hundreds of MIDI editor DAWs available. Open the piano roll, and write down the music note by note. Surely, it's…

If you are very good at music theory and have good pitch recognition absolutely, but that is a skill that takes quite a bit of effort to train.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#397

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 11:01 PM UTC

lossyalgo wrote: post #215

marcianx wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it makes some sense to allow leeway for intelligent "signal processing" using AI (separating out individual tracks, clean-up, etc) vs generating new content with AI. Similarly, say, for video editors, using AI to more intelligently rotoscope (especially with alpha blending in the presence of motion blur - practically impossible to do it manually), would be a great use of AI, removing the non-creative tedium o…

It may be a tedious job to spend days rotoscoping but I personally know people who get paid to do that, and as soon as AI can do it, they will have to go find other work (which they already do, on the side, because the writing is on the wall, but there's a ton of people worldwide who do this kind of work, and that's not the only process being delegated to AI).

That's why we don't use machine to dig ditches, we use spoons, because this planet is a work program.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#398

Post by hmokiguess » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 11:02 PM UTC

bombdailer wrote: post #326

hmokiguess wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experie…

But then do we not agree, for if your experience of the music has changed upon learning the meaning of the songs, then it was true knowledge of the meaning of the piece which in the end determined your appreciation for it. And that our experience is not a fixed thing at one moment in time, but can re-occur and is in flux and subject to change in its quality based on knowledge gained. So from this you cannot return to…

"I neither know nor think that I know," as Socrates said. Perhaps that's where we must leave it.

You see knowledge of origins as the path toward deeper appreciation, an asymptotic approach to the artist's soul. I see each encounter with art as its own beginning, where meaning emerges fresh in the meeting of work and listener, never fully exhausted by what came before.

Maybe both are true in their way. The child and the adult don't cancel each other, they're different movements in the same ongoing piece. I lost something when I learned those lyrics, and I gained something too. Neither experience was false.

There is no end to this question, for there is only beginning.

The debate about where meaning lives may itself be unsolvable, which is perhaps why we've been having it for millennia.

Thank you for the exchange. It's sharpened my thinking, even where we remain apart. :)

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#399

Post by array_key_first » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 11:02 PM UTC

anthonypasq wrote: post #120

drittich wrote: post #112

Earlier 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.

[flagged]

In order to find the stuff to listen to you have to... find it. If you had to wade through, say, 1 million AI generated books to find one that isn't, then ALL of your reading would be AI generated.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#400

Post by CapsAdmin » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 11:06 PM UTC

rambojohnson wrote: post #303

BrokrnAlgorithm wrote: post #79

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 ar…

AI takes all of that old school idm and electronic music and repackages it without a human story to tell, ripping off actual musicians in the process. AI didn’t magically ‘make old IDM its own.’ It scraped decades of artists’ work, stripped out the context and intent, and reassembled the surface features. There’s no human arc, no lived constraint, no risk and no culture. What’s being repackaged isn’t a new instrument…

I'm honestly not getting the human story thing when it comes to music and maybe art in general. I mean I get what it means, but I don't think it describes why people enjoy art.

To me, it seems more like people place their own meaning in art. A particular song might remind one individual of the good times they had in their teens, while the actual meaning of the song is completely different.

Bachs 5th symphony (or whatever) might be extremely annoying to someone because they had to listen to it every day at work.

And what exactly is the meaning of jazz fusion? I really like a good solo, but a lot of people hate it, they need to hear a voice. (though I don't particularly like the signature Suno or Udio solo..)

I found this ai track on Spotify that I unironically enjoyed. I listened to it every day while working on reviving an old passion project, which became its meaning to me. The tune, a long with its album with random disparate suno generations was taken down.

I'm not sure if I have a point here, but something is off with the story thing in art to me from a consumers point of view. Maybe from other artists as consumers point of view?