Bandcamp bans all music made with AI from platform
The platform laid out their position in a new blog post titled ‘Keep Bandcamp Human’
Bandcamp have banned all music made with AI from their platform.
The music service laid out their position in a new blog post titled ‘Keep Bandcamp Human’.
The post begins: “Bandcamp’s mission is to help spread the healing power of music by building a community where artists thrive through the direct support of their fans. We believe that the human connection found through music is a vital part of our society and culture, and that music is much more than a product to be consumed. It’s the result of a human cultural dialog stretching back before the written word.”
The company then says that the blog post is them “fortifying our mission by articulating our policy on generative AI, so that musicians can keep making music, and so that fans have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.”
The subsequent rules are then laid out as follows:
- “Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.”
- “Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.”
At the beginning of last year, Paul McCartney called on the British government to protect artists in the face of a new copyright law that could allow for AI to “rip off” creators.
“You get young guys and girls coming up, and they write a beautiful song, and they don’t own it. They don’t have anything to do with it, and anyone who wants can just rip it off,” McCartney told the BBC.
2025 also saw over 1,000 artists including Kate Bush, Damon Albarn and Annie Lennox contribute to a silent album protesting government plans around AI.
BBC Introducing were also criticised after championing a musician who admitted on air that their music was completely AI-generated.
The music of Midlands based artist Papi Lamour was hailed as “pitch perfect and amazing” on BBC Radio WM’s BBC Introducing Show, which celebrates upcoming musicians across West Midlands and Warwickshire who have submitted their own compositions to the platform.