I’m gonna jump in as an artist who is on Bandcamp, doesn’t use AI, and is in the middle of a two week track a day competition:
Here’s a playlist of what I’ve done up to today:
This is a noble pursuit but I am curious about the classification criteria.
How would you treat those who used it as a tool for composition, progression ideas compared to those who literally create the entire thing using generative methods?
Because as per the article, impersonating an artist is forbidden. What stops me from asking an LLM “Give me 5 chord progressions and scales that sound like Adele” and glue it together? How could it be detected?
I wouldn’t overthink it. When they say ‘substantially’ they’re basically just banning obvious slop. If you make something people genuinely enjoy you’re not likely to get policed if the track has a little AI assist somewhere in the pipeline
What stops me from asking an LLM “Give me 5 chord progressions and scales that sound like Adele” and glue it together? How could it be detected?
There is in fact nothing stopping you from simply using the exact same chord progressions as her. No AI is needed for this task. You could literally take her sheet music, white out the lyrics and tune, and build your new song directly on top of the existing structure if you wanted. Chords and scales are not protected in any way :p
I’m not sure they have everything in place to actually enforce the policy yet, just laying the groundwork and setting expectations for artists and fans. Agreed it will be interesting to see where/how they draw the line.
I think this whole AI thing will push people towards artists they already know. I’m already seeing myself doing this elsewhere like youtube where I rarely click something I’m not subscribed to because there’s so much slop. It will make it more difficult for new artists to be heard.
No it won’t, you don’t find new music by throwing darts blindly in the wall, look at who produced a band/who the band tours with and thanks on their album. A little googling and you too can have 1800 albums in your Bandcamp collection
I don’t think we disagree, I think irl and network recs (from bands you already like) will become more important. I think algorithmic discovery, which a lot of people currently rely on on spotify/pandora, will diminish.
I do think it will make it harder for new acts to get their stuff out there though.
It’s pretty easy to show video or live proof of you making music, I don’t think it will cause a significant shift in the way you suggest.
I think there’s a difference between asking for chord progressions or tips and tricks to get a certain sounds and telling a LLM to generate a song.
With the former there’s usually zero originality, but I see how it can be useful as a starting point. People who do the latter can go f*ck off, especially if they try to make money off of it.
One obvious feature of “Hi I’m AI” usually is that one artist with no actual profile or link or footprint outside of Bandcamp that has apparently released 10 albums in a year.
Some just aren’t subtle. They can at least start there.
Bandcamp better increase it user support so it can handle false possitives.
Goddamn right!
Ok, I guess. If you want to post AI musics, there’s sites dedicated to that.
Sadly necessary for current platforms, for volume alone. Plus you’d have to deal with artists erasing themselves in protest, which sucks for fans more than it impacts the site.
But I’ve seen this play out before. Art sites are a lot older than music sites, and they had to deal with CGI when CGI was terrible and novel. Any dingus could render fifteen angles of the same static scene using someone else’s models. (A flood of samey songs from an alleged artist feels downright nostalgic.) The obvious backlash overreached, destroying some long-ass comics where the borrowed models were just set dressing for a story. It also stopped a lot of people who wanted to learn animation without first learning modeling, rigging, and texturing. A generation of professionals have sketchy portfolios because Rule 34 sites don’t care where you got Tracer.mdl.
Nowadays, it just… doesn’t matter? There’s still accounts uploading a hundred shots of the same generic scene, but they’re uncommon and unpopular. Humans are pattern-seeking animals, and we grow bored of what a program does for free. Already you have people calling perfectly fine cartoons “slop” because they recognize the line weight. Like if there was a turf war between Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop, and even non-artists could spot the brush density.
Meanwhile, putting effort into CGI is now the dominant form of animating fiction. Accusations that it’s “cheating” have basically vanished. People complain about bad uses, but any decent use is praised, and any great use is invisible. That’s where all of this is headed. If you post the first output generated by an off-the-cuff description, then congratulations on your stick figure; nobody cares. But you can feed anything back into these models. There’s some real half-assed editing and replacement that they’ll happily gloss right over. If you think this solo should sound jazzier, or this dialog needs to happen while walking, or that guy should be reading a newspaper… it’ll freestyle some brass, invent the rest of the hallway, and write the damn newspaper. Or you could still do all of that by hand, but let the robot autotune, motion-track, and spellcheck. There is a gradient between buying an apple pie and inventing the universe.
Truth…and you’re probably correct I’m just being a snob…I will say I definitely find most of my music via the label or producer If not from the band, but I’m old and my music taste is metal
