The music distribution platform Bandcamp announced in a Reddit post on Tuesday that it is banning AI-generated music and audio. The company stated its desire for musicians to keep making music and for fans to have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.
Bandcamp’s new guidelines specify that music and audio generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted. The platform will also not allow the use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles. This means a track like Drake’s controversial “Taylor Made Freestyle,” which used AI to emulate the voices of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg, would not have been allowed on the service.
As AI music generators like Suno become more sophisticated, synthetic music has become harder to avoid. Songs created with AI tools have even topped charts on Spotify and Billboard. The technology has advanced to a point where AI music can sound real enough that it is difficult to decipher how it was made.
In one high-profile example, a woman named Telisha Jones used Suno to turn her poetry into the viral R&B song “How Was I Supposed To Know.” Her AI persona, Xania Monet, received multiple bids for record deals before signing a deal reportedly worth $3 million.
The legality of AI-generated music remains uncertain. Suno is currently facing lawsuits from major labels Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group. The labels allege the company trained its AI on copyrighted material without permission.
This legal ambiguity has not deterred Silicon Valley investment. Suno raised a $250 million funding round in November, valuing the company at $2.4 billion. The round saw participation from Hallwood Media, the same company that signed Xania Monet.
The legal outlook for artists is concerning. In a recent lawsuit involving the AI company Anthropic, a judge ruled that the company could use copyrighted books it downloaded illegally to train its AI. The judge stated the illegal act was the piracy of the books, not their use for training. Anthropic received a $1.5 billion settlement, a sum considered minor for a company valued at $183 billion.
Unlike streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music, Bandcamp does not pay artists per stream. Instead, it allows artists to sell their music digitally alongside physical products like merchandise and CDs. Bandcamp only makes money from a cut of artists’ sales.
While Bandcamp presents itself as an artist-first distributor, it is still a tech company where the bottom line matters. Viewed optimistically, Bandcamp’s ban may confirm what many artists hope is true: that people are not actually spending money to purchase AI-generated music, at least not on its platform.