It sucks that a lot of these types of markets are suffering from low numbers of shoppers. They open themselves up to these plastic peddlers in desperation only to drive away customers even more.
Consider how easy it would have been, any time in the last decade, to get a booth at any "local hand-made goods craft fair", selling "hand-made" copper jewelry... that you happened to buy in bulk lots off Alibaba. The jewelry was "hand-made"... kind of... by someone else, making far too little money, in sweatshop conditions, following techniques and using machines that enable them to produce hundreds at once, with no QC whatsoever.
Nobody would ever guess you hadn't made the stuff yourself. They would read the lack of QC as evidence for your claim that "each piece is distinct and made to match my artistic vision in the moment." You'd put one or two of each type of piece out on the table at a time, as if those are all you have; yet as soon as one sells, you'd pull another out from the box of hundreds.
I can't say for sure that this ever happens, but judging by the number of people willing to be scummy in the more modern ways... it certainly feels like it could. Honestly makes me hesitant to buy anything from a craft fair. Which is a shame.
Craft fairs, though, no excuse or reason. There should not be profit maximizing at local craft fairs. They're a bellwether for the degradation of culture.
I’d encourage you to dig deeper into why and how the music that is being created by those tools works.
Typed a prompt and hit generate. No response after waiting some time. I scrolled down to existing sample music to get a sense of what it creates and hit play. Not one of the play buttons worked. Ok load up Chrome instead of Firefox, maybe they did some Chrome specific thing? Nope site's still broken and none of the samples under "Suno AI Music Gallery" actually work. There's a javascript error "invalid client" on clicking it. I'm not logged in i guess?
It did work on mobile but that seems like it presents a completely different site.
Those people don’t tend to have a good understanding of what most humans like and why they like stuff like music.
Speak for yourself.
While intent of course is important, the quantity and manner of taking others' work and calling it my own, I thing, plays even bigger role. If I go "hey check out this Bohemian Rhapsody song I just created using Google Search", I do not think much regard will be given to my intent.
That's why I choose to make the distinction by just not caring about any kind of music that uses any kind of AI.
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've been attacked for saying I don't hate it, and I witness this everywhere.
It's a tool. Artists and professionals can use tools. They're professionals and know how much is too much.
People seem to have an irrational fear of being entertained by AI, equating that to admitting that it is a higher form of intelligence than their own.
For a real musician, AI is already too much. For there to be meaning and soul in their music, is must be derived from the intersection of their skills and imagination, whereby the unconscious can make itself manifest in the utilization of ones virtues. Delegating this process to a black box deprives the art of its unique individual perspective that can only arise out of the finitude of human experience and learning. For though the black box may have superficial knowledge of generalizations of many such perspectives, it smooths out all paths into bland sameness. Thus no real artist of merit has any use for AI, for it is always of a lower degree than the more powerful tool that is their mind.
(I also think that "AI-assisted" work should have a clear warning label, but I don't automatically equate "AI-assisted" with full "primarily AI-written".)
In the labeling sense, it's a warning label, in that it serves to tell people who may wish to avoid something that it is present in the product, much like warnings saying "may contain tree nuts" on products that are potentially cross-contaminated. (As compared to a label that people are likely to seek out, like "100% juice", which is regulated differently to prevent people from using it when it doesn't apply.)
In the computing sense, it's a warning, in that it doesn't stop you from ignoring it if you want to, but some people may wish to `-Werror` / `-D warnings`.
If it solves a problem, good for you but I don't think people should put their vibe coded projects online. They don't have any value.
There are delusional people who create vibe coded pull requests to open source projects and they believe they are actually contributing value. No they only create work for the maintainers that have to review the subpar code.
As for your use case, are there really no royalty free drum beats that you could use? Not to mention you could probably learn to create your own beats in Ableton in one weekend. You are cheating yourself.
speak for yourself please, not all of us have
Spotify, on the other hand, induced a level of visceral disgust I'd never felt before when I stumbled across an AI-generated album supposedly made by an artist I enjoy. In this case it was somebody that had been dead for 15 years - they were hijacking her Spotify page to promote it as a new release. I'm not an AI reactionary but I found this absolutely fucking gross. Having AI-generated music for four-hour YouTube videos of anime girls sitting in apartments on a rainy day is fine. Desecrating the body of work of a departed musician is decidedly not.
The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt.
Don’t miss Spotify one bit.
Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.
I listen mostly in the old school way, full albums of my favourite artists, so I suppose it would be quite unexpected to stumble into AI music this way.
If you are explictitly looking for music by specific artists, then you get their music obviously.
I will shamelessly promote the bandcampsync [1] CLI tool for automating downloads of your bandcamp library and bandcamp-sync-flask [2] wrapper that I built so I could invoke it from the web on my phone after I buy an album.
I think you need hard rules to make it not completely subjective.
"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.
As someone who enjoys live music, I would still need a live band to play this on-the-fly generated music. I guess then you'll trot out AI holograms! but that sounds still as unappealing as your base case.
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.
I have to imagine* that we will figure out what that difference is, but it will be difficult and costly.
* I have to imagine that or else I will lose all hope in the future.
https://caniphish.com/blog/how-to-spot-ai-audio
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-modera...
even coded detectors exist https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker?id=09f25ee7913a415...
We’ll have this (and the corny lyrics issue) mostly fixed in a month or so, then it mostly becomes a recommendations problem. For example, TikTok is filled with slop, but it’s not a problem - their algorithm helps the most creative/engaging stuff rise to the top. If Spotify is giving you Suno slop in your discover weekly (or really crappy 100% organic free range AI-free slop) blame Spotify, not the AI or the creators. There are really high effort and original creations that involve AI that deserve to be heard, though.
I suggest going back and listening to some of the first experimental electronic music. The tools have improved a lot since then and people have used them to do really cool things, even spawning countless genres.
It sounds like bandcamp is not the right place for what you want to do. There's plenty of ways to do what you're looking for though!
Your ability to make and share music as you like hasn't been abridged. Bandcamp has chosen not to be a part of it if it's AI-mediated.
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?
If people listen to music, they like the music, and it can come from wherever. Gatekeeping never works.
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.
Previously, search was such a big problem. For instance, I'm not big on hip-hop and so on but I like songs like Worst Comes To Worst by Dilated Peoples. I've searched in all sorts of ways for other songs like that and come up with a handful of examples. Likewise, I want the vibe of Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull during various parts. It's hard to find this kind of stuff.
But Suno.ai can generate that boom-bap vibe pretty easily and it's not the kind of thing where I'm going to put the same song on all the time like I do with the Dilated Peoples one, but it's good enough to listen to while I'm working.
And in the mean time, AI will continue to clutter creative spaces and drown out actual hardworking artists, and people like you will co-opt what it means to be an artist by using tools that were trained on their work without consent.
you sound like someone from the 1800's shouting about how photography should be banned and not allowed to crowd out hard working painters.
there will be people who enjoy ai art and there will be those that dont. how about to you just do what satisfies you creatively and let people decide what they like.
I'm saying that you shouldn't call photographs paintings because they aren't paintings. I don't particularly care if people make AI "music" or "art" and I don't particularly care if they consume it (people have been consuming awful media for the entire history of humanity, they aren't going to stop because I say so), but if you give me a ham sandwich and call it a hamburger I am going to be annoyed and tell you that it isn't a hamburger and to stop calling it that because you're misleading people who actually appreciate hamburgers.
AI "art" isn't art. I don't care whether you like it. It's like fractals or rock formations or birdsong - it may be aesthetically appealing to some people, but that isn't the definition of art.
Nothing can compete with AI slop when the ratio is 100000:1 AI slop vs real music.
Look at Google search results... they're not all AI slop yet, but they're 100000:1 content mills vs useful results.
This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn't correlate to good output. Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.
Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component.
And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years.
Edit: I would also add the caveat that, the more work the tool does, the less room the artist has to actually be creative. That's my main beef with AI imagery: it literally all looks the same. I can clock AI stuff incredibly well because it has a lot of the same characteristics: things are too shiny is weirdly the biggest giveaway, I'm not sure why AI's think everything is wet at all times, but it's very consistent. It also over-populates scenes; more shit in the frame isn't necessarily a good thing that contributes to a work, and AI has no concept at all of negative space. And if a human artist has no space to be creative in the tool... well they're going to struggle pretty hard to have any kind of recognizable style.
I'm pretty sure the people at Bandcamp agree with you and that's why they mention future "updates to the policy as the rapidly changing generative AI space develops".
Original:
https://suno.com/song/fcc43ad3-af05-4733-85e4-fec7502b82a5
And here are the extensions:
https://suno.com/song/2760efbd-97d3-4072-9993-5ef4b6515472
https://suno.com/song/297415d0-72b3-4084-b263-f4256465c74d
It handled them quite well, I should incorporate a few ideas back already :)
this is incoherent. Publishing a bunch of stuff no one wants is not competition. You're just mad that people actually like AI music.
ad hominem has no place on HN.
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.
For me, music (like all fine art) is about human connection. It's the artist telling me something human and personal. It's not entirely about the aesthetics of the music. The provenance of the art is very important. If I feel that connection with a song and it turns out that the song wasn't made by a person (it hasn't happened yet as far as I know), I have been deceived and would be furious.
A song made by a person using AI as tool (rather than to generate the music) is different. What matters is that the song is actually an expression of humanity, not the tools used to make it.
However, the presence of AI-generated music means that I am not really willing to buy music anymore unless its either a few years old or I'm buying it at the merch table the artist has at a live performance.
> In the past year alone, [customers] spent $208 million on 14.6 million digital albums, 11.2 million tracks, 1.55 million vinyl records, 800,000 CDs, 250,000 cassettes, and 50,000 t-shirts.
ai music will be the future and create curated music for every user, specific to their tastes at that moment, for pennies.
suno already matches 99% of music in quality and creativity. the last 1% and beyond will come soon enough.
Does that constitute "wholly or in substantial part"? Would the track have existed were it not for having that easy route into re-mastering?
I understand what Bandcamp's trying to do here, and I generally am in support of removing what we'd recognize as "fully AI-generated music", but there are legitimate creative uses of AI that might come to wholly or substantially encompass the output. It's difficult to draw any lines line on a creative work, by just by nature of the work being creative.
(For those interested - check out O Positive's "With You" on the WERS Live at 75 album!)
Justifiable because there were some filters. That may not even have been "AI". They may have been some deterministic algorithms that the software maker has to label "AI" because they otherwise think it won't sell...
If you want to be some neutral universal third party sure. If you're OK with taking a position, the arbitrariness actually makes it much easier. You just draw the line you want.
Creativity demands limitation, and those limitations don't have to be justified.
adriand•1h ago
echelon•1h ago
It's like that with code and art.
Purely AI anything is garbage. But AI tools in the hands of people who know what they're doing are just faster scaffolding and better plywood to build with. The framing is still mostly human expert.
gs17•1h ago
Word on the street here in Nashville is that it's already the case. The songs getting published aren't AI-made, but there's AI assistance.
RobotToaster•1h ago
sheeh•1h ago
This seems to fly over the heads of many. art is about taste.
RevEng•44m ago
gs17•1h ago
A lot of it is now, and it's frustrating to me. The worst part is that I'm not actually anti-AI-music. There's one or two "groups" ("producers"?) I've found where it's clearly AI but they've put a lot of work into making something worth listening to, but Spotify seems to have a "this sucker will listen to the cheap stuff" flag and now I'm drowning in tracks from people who paid for Suno and think that's enough.
moritzwarhier•1h ago
Similar to YouTube slop.
If that would stop working, I'd cancel Spotify again.
Speaking of YouTube slop, I think Spotify has had its own system of preferring cheap muzak from labels they support since before GenAI music even took off, I think. Example label: Firefly entertainment (IIRC)
free_bip•1h ago
IAmGraydon•44m ago
oscaracso•25m ago
micromacrofoot•1h ago
This is likely a stance to prevent an individual from producing thousands of AI generated tracks and attempting to flood the zone for anyone browsing and searching.
There's a lot of music on Spotify for example that tries to latch on to current trends in an attempt to get pulled into search results and recommendations.
spcebar•1h ago
RobotToaster•1h ago
112233•58m ago
d3rockk•50m ago
-a flatness to the EQ spectrum that you wouldn't get out a properly mixed and produced piece of audio
-no good stem separation, so no per-source eq (relates to above point)
-change BPM mid-song
-unnatural warbles at the end of every phrase
-vocals will have these weird croaky voice cracks, or sound scratchier and raspier
There definitely are tell-tale signs of "pure AI" in audio, but it becomes a lot more nuanced when any sort of secondary mixing/mastering/compression happens (which is the case 90% is the time in the real world- anything on YouTube/Spotify get's compressed).