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I really hope someone makes a music platform in the future that is verified as human-made. Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of i

I really hope someone makes a music platform in the future that is verified as human-made. Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it. Tie it to in-person concerts and it might actually work as a business, as well as logistically – maybe the company can be a record producer in disguise and physically meet every musician they host.

1123581321 4mo ago
That would be interesting and could start simply. CDBaby was what, $20 per record and self-serve. Maybe each record on this new platform costs $200 and is accompanied by an employee-uploaded video of the artist uploading the record.
wiremine 4mo ago
> Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it "art is in the eye of the beholder." I listen to a lot of EDM, which can be very mechanical, but I personally have strong emotional connection to. I personally would welcome AI-generated music as an alternative to human-made. To be clear: I do agree a "human-verified" system would be great, but I don't think it would be black and white. And I would guess that eventually AI music will be better than a lot of human made music.
- keiferski 4mo ago
  You will probably be able to listen to machine-generated music on most major platforms. I just hope there’s one which excludes all of that. Personally I think it’s a bit like cultural junk food: it has the appearance of real food, but leaves one hungry afterward. Which really isn’t all that surprising – music isn’t just some random collection of patterns, it’s intimately tied to real culture. Current AI software is only ever going to copy and regurgitate human culture, not make meaningful creations from scratch.
  - dominotw 4mo ago
    junk food is a common misconception about electronic music with ppl who have only listened to trash versions of it on social media.
    - keiferski 4mo ago
      I don’t mean electronic music writ large, I mean AI generated music. Electronic music is probably my favorite genre, broadly. But there’s a human behind the machine, not a random collection of patterns. To use a concrete example: NIN is about 1000% more interesting because of who Trent Reznor is, and not because it’s merely good music. This disconnect is much more of an issue with say, country or bluegrass or jazz. To divorce those from the musician and their cultural context is to miss the whole point.
      - someguyiguess 4mo ago
        There's a human behind AI-generated music too. A human writes the prompts. Your distinction seems rather arbitrary.
        keiferski 4mo ago
        Typing “make me an electronic guitar song about a bad breakup” is a whole lot different than learning to play the instrument yourself and conveying your own emotions from your real experience into a song that you write and perform. If you can’t see how these are fundamentally different things, I don’t know what to tell you.
        esikich 4mo ago
        Do you really think that's the only way to do it? I spend hours refining the output, slicing things up, redoing certain parts, tossing it into the DAW and compressing, adding effects, etc. I mean, if you think one shot prompts are the only way to use AI to make music fine, but you're being intentionally obtuse.
        neutronicus 4mo ago
  - neutronicus 4mo ago
    I agree with the other poster. I think it's very difficult to guide this missile so that it blows up AI-generated music and doesn't blow up EDM. My own taste in music is pretty junk-food-y I guess. Electronic music and not the pretentious kind. Dubstep, electro. Give me something that goes wub-wub. Incidentally, I think this experience mostly isn't one about human connection? Like, there is some circuit in my brain that likes that sound and wants to be tickled. I can play classical piano to a mediocre standard. I listen to it and enjoy it occasionally. But, honestly, what I feel like my spirit needs is something that goes wub-wub and I think that space is densely seeded enough that maybe we can scale back human involvement in producing it.
    - keiferski 4mo ago
      Sure that’s fair, and maybe my ideal platform doesn’t really work for electronic music and works better for singer-songwriters that perform live. Which is fine - I just like the idea of a platform that guarantees that a real person made this music.
- kstrauser 4mo ago
  I made (what would eventually get called) EDM in high school and a lot of what I enjoyed was dismissed as “not real music”. It’s not a musician playing it, but a computer! Unless a guitarist was plucking strings or a pianist hitting the keys, it wasn’t “real”. Doesn’t matter how carefully crafted it was: it’s only real if you couldn’t hit “play”. Sorry, Mike Oldfield. Hate to break it to you that you’re a fake musician. I agree with you. I do enjoy some live musicians jamming on a stage, but for a lot of the genres I frequently listen to, I’d have no way of knowing if a song was written by human or by AI. If it’s good, it’s good.
  - someguyiguess 4mo ago
    I learned music production by first learning how to produce house. Because of this, I can confidently say that house is not music. You literally just copy/paste over and over. Just because a human makes something, doesn't make it good or "music" necessarily.
    - rvnx 4mo ago
      Their approach of "manually tagging songs that are good 'non-AI' and not good 'AI'" is a questionable approach from an engineering and product perspective. They would benefit much more from a have a better recommendation and ranking algorithm that carefully monitors all metrics, recommends high-performers, and excludes unpopular content from the feed. You can use the fact it was AI-generated as a signal, but it is just a signal among other criterias, not an outright ban. Essentially, explore songs and artists, exploit winners. Lot of people abort a song/artist/creator/etc. Lot of fake listens. People don't like the song of an album Creator is historically with a low score etc... -> Downrank ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit ) Then you judge the popularity of a song, an album, a creator, a playlist, etc not its creation method. Exactly like a genre type. It's not because you don't like country music that everybody should be forbidden to listen to country music. It's good for them too, the more streams they do, the more money they get, and the more their audience is engaged. If the person doesn’t like “AI-generated genre” then just downrank it heavily on its recommandation feed, like YouTube or TikTok does.
- otabdeveloper4 4mo ago
  AI music != electronic music. Most AI music is actually country-pop ballads and indie folk. Making electronic music with AI is hard and it isn't very good at it.
  - blehn 4mo ago
    YouTube is already recommending tons of AI-generated electronic music. It's pretty easy to spot: It will have millions of views and the "artist's" discography will only go back to 2025 or 2026. It's usually just singles. The cover art is vague atmospheric AI-generated. The "artist" will have no presence online save for a couple instagram account with a couple posts that are also AI-generated.
    - otabdeveloper4 4mo ago
      I'm not saying it doesn't exist at all, I'm saying electronic music is significantly harder for AI to do than a conventional love ballad or a rock song. AI can't do "robotic" math music, it's best at sappy generic emotive stuff. (I guess this isn't at all a surprise for those that know how the musical sausage is made.)
      - platevoltage 4mo ago
        I'd love to see AI take a stab at a Meshuggah or Dillinger Escape Plan clone.
        ozzmotik 4mo ago
        not exactly what you're aiming at with your comment but, sort of adjacent, maybe relevant: https://suno.com/s/o0CtwRfvFXxxTDE7 https://suno.com/s/o0CtwRfvFXxxTDE7
      - blehn 4mo ago
        > electronic music is significantly harder for AI to do than a conventional love ballad or a rock song Why do you say that? I'd argue the opposite
- y-c-o-m-b 4mo ago
  I believe we've already crossed the quality threshold for being equal to or "better" (subjective) than human. For EDM, check out the AI artist "Vibfy". Especially the song "I Hear You" as it has the best mastering so far. The melody and vocals of all the songs are fire, but in some of the earlier songs the mastering is sub-par with strange volume changes and muddy beats. There is an AI folk band called "We're all f*cked" that is incredibly good and indistinguishable from actual humans.
ryukoposting 4mo ago
> Tie it to in-person concerts and it might actually work as a business, as well as logistically Don't give ticketmaster any ideas.
jamiequint 4mo ago
Baudelaire and many others said the same thing about photography.
- keiferski 4mo ago
  You’re gonna have to be more specific. They said what same thing?
  - jamiequint 4mo ago
    Called photography poor facsimiles of painting, not real art, etc.
observationist 4mo ago
As of now, you can tell the difference for most AI generated music. There's some where you cannot. There is no Turing Test for taste, and the specific constellation of features that represent your particular interpretation of what things like human, best, goodness, excellence, beauty, and any other label you might apply to abstract qualities will be reproduced at a sufficiently high resolution that you will no longer be able to meaningfully discern between human and AI creations. In a blind test, you will prefer the AI product, and your own perceptions and biases will convince you that the AI generation is actually human, because whatever ineffable abstractions you attribute to "human" quality will be replicated, refined, and exploited. The very act of recognizing some difference is the tool with which the next generation of outputs is refined, until it's so "good" for any and all particular instances of "good" that human perception is insufficient to differentiate the source. At some point we're going to have to admit that the distinction based on source is a problem, and perhaps there's a lot of nuance in the context of any particular piece of media such that an arbitrary dismissal of a song, or image, or piece of writing, for the mere reason that AI was used to produce it in whole or in part is missing the point. If you enjoy a song, your enjoyment is real. If you appreciate beauty, your perception of beauty is real. If you feel deeply about a written text, your feelings are real. How you perceive things, while not entirely conscious, does involve elements of choice. Make the choice to judge things on meaningful merit, and if the next generation of musicians and artists use AI tools to explore new territory, don't dismiss their art and passion and creations out of hand. An electric guitar is artificial. People used to make the same sorts of "that's not music" statements people are making now about music and art. Imagine being so twisted up over some arbitrary distinction that you miss out on Jimi Hendrix or BB King, or Joe Satriani, or any of the brilliant musicians that have wrung beauty and soul from "artificial" electronic signals.
- keiferski 4mo ago
  I think most of what you’ve written here only really applies if you listen to music without knowing anything about the musician. That seems pretty uncommon to me, for most people. The most popular musicians in the world are basically celebrity characters, with the music as a key ingredient, not the only one. Do Taylor Swift fans or Kanye fans or [musician] fans just listen to the music and not follow the person? Pretty unlikely IMO. I also think it’s an entirely false equivalence to say using electronic instruments are like AI music tools. Very different things – an electric guitar doesn’t play music by itself. It’s still a tool at the end of the day.
jmuguy 4mo ago
Bandcamp is well on their way already. If you want to support actual musicians, you can just buy their music directly. https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/ https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
- MisterTea 4mo ago
  Just broke 1000 albums this past weekend. It's delightful to be able to just listen to something then hand the artist money and download the flac files. I also really like the quasi social aspect where users have simple profiles. No messages between users, no likes, no ratings, no BS. About the most you can do is leave a text review. Your profile is an image and text field so you can write a simple bio and provide links to whatever. My entire Bandcamp collection is discovered by crawling profiles and randomly listening to things. I also found some fun personal sites and so on. The site design is also simple and not a JS laden mess like "MoDeRn" ampwall.
  - rurp 4mo ago
    Do you have any recommendations for casual listening of downloaded music files? I'm pretty done with Spotify and would rather spend money on Bandcamp. The main hurdle is that I'm not enough of a music person to want to spend much time organizing a collection, I just want an easy way to put some music on while I'm working.
    - sbaildon 4mo ago
      You open the music you download with something like IINA or Doppler, and you're off to the races. What exactly is the hurdle?
    - MisterTea 4mo ago
      > Do you have any recommendations for casual listening of downloaded music files? Other than the simple approach of playlists and/or shuffle, unfortunately no. > I just want an easy way to put some music on while I'm working. Think of Bandcamp as a record store, not a radio station.
neutronicus 4mo ago
That seems like a hard line to draw for EDM, which I suppose, plenty of people have indeed refused to class as "human-made" over the years. You'd probably need to be more generally back-to-basics (instruments-only, no EDM).
- tshaddox 4mo ago
  To me it’s less about the technologies used to produce the audio. If a human has put some creative effort into it, even if it’s mostly curating AI-generated audio, I’m in principle fine with that. But if little to no effort was put into it, it’s slop by definition.
mathgeek 4mo ago
Let me preface this by agreeing that we should have platforms for only human-generated music. > Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it. Like most things, this is an overgeneralization. In general, I agree, but not always. While most AI-generated content is not going to appeal to most people, it's wrong to say that all AI-generated music is not about what music is about. Personally I find _some_ AI generated music to be amazingly fun to listen to, but mostly it's parodies or works that are essentially built on top of existing media. A creative person using AI well can produce art that people enjoy and which adds to our culture (I selectively choose not to say "create" here to avoid that very overloaded connotation w.r.t. AI creations). That is not to say that most of the work that comes out of AI needs to exist or does any of those things.
doug_durham 4mo ago
Your statement is so imprecise as to be meaningless. Is EDM made on an Abelton DAW human made? Even though the human didn't touch an instrument and used a robot drummer? What about a human who uses AI to generate snippets of music and then pastes them together in an emotionally compelling way, much like HipHop artists do for traditionally sampled music? AI is a tool. Low/no-effort work on the part of humans is the problem.
- keiferski 4mo ago
  Do you really think the vast majority of AI music is going to be akin to old school hip hop sampling culture? I certainly don’t, and I think it’s pretty likely that the vast majority will be the generic derivative slop. Which is why I’d like a separate platform, so I don’t have to waste my time wading through all the garbage.
brookst 4mo ago
Perhaps. But just how human made? We already had the “Depeche Mode isn’t real music because they just push play on a sequencer” debate 40 years ago. And lots of composers can’t play the stuff they write. But the composition is human. Then there’s emerging AI-supported music, since AI can come up with and test harmonic ideas far more sophisticated than most people. If a human’s saying “no, not that, try using an augmented sixth to get us from F#maj to Cmin”, is that human generated? Not trying to be contrary, just saying the definition needs to be really clear, and that’s going to be difficult.
- keiferski 4mo ago
  What I had in mind was, "perform it on your instruments in our studio and we'll record the performance, record the music, and add it to our platform." Probably too expensive to scale, but... it's an idea.
  - brookst 4mo ago
    So, only physical musicians need apply? No composers, no guitarists who can program drum tracks but not play drums? I honestly like your intent. But we need to find a way to include people who can write sheet music for a symphony without being able to play most of the instruments.
- mapontosevenths 4mo ago
  Art is the expression of a person's unique perspective. The tool you use to do that isn't the important part, the communication of the perspective is. When AI makes that communication better it is good, when it produces perspective free noise, or steals someone elses perspective and paraphrases it then its' bad.
datsci_est_2015 4mo ago
As I stated elsewhere in the thread, the streaming platforms do not have the correct incentives to do this. It’s the labels that do releases that are correctly incentivized, as they need to build an audience that trusts them and enjoys the music that they release. Independently-released music is a huge red flag. If you can’t find a single label A&R to support you, you may have to work on the quality of your output… music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are tens of thousands of labels across nearly every imaginable genre. Their role as gatekeeper is a valuable one.
- keiferski 4mo ago
  > Independently-released music is a huge red flag. You've never listened to anything on Soundcloud and found it good?
  - datsci_est_2015 4mo ago
    The vast majority of music I listen to on SoundCloud is released on small labels (<10, <100, or <1000 artists). It is not that hard to release on those labels. There are tens of thousands artists releasing on thousands of labels every Friday. That being said, I guess I may have some genre bias. Maybe it’s exceedingly difficult to get signed to a small label as e.g. a Midwest Emo Band (bad example because I have friends who released on a small label as a Midwest Emo Band). But you need to put in the effort if you expect me to give you my precious listening time. Edit: redundancy
Sandbag5802 4mo ago
A platform like that exists. It's called Subvert. It's a cooperative that was created as a response whenever Bandcamp has changed ownership several times. The idea of Subvert is to focus on the artists instead of the interests of the founders and investors.
echelon 4mo ago
> Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it. Music is about making my brain feel good. I don't care what/who makes it. If I like it, I like it.
- devmor 4mo ago
  Consumption vs. Appreciation in a single pair of comments, what a beautiful dichotomy of the human experience of art.
  - echelon 4mo ago
    It's not a dichotomy anymore. With AI tools I can make for myself. I was already a creative before AI, but now I have a lot more control in more domains than I could express myself in before.
    - devmor 4mo ago
      You clearly stated in your post that nothing matters except how it makes your brain feel. That wasn’t vague, don’t try to walk it back - own it.
janalsncm 4mo ago
What is your response to Tidal’s statement > Artificial intelligence and machine learning are not new to music creation, they have just become more commonplace and advanced In other words, there is no bright line. AI techniques have been a part of music creation from the start. What makes bad AI music hard to detect and remove is the fact that it is a much closer approximation of regular music.
- delis-thumbs-7e 4mo ago
  As always, what is AI? I have used algorithmic machine learning tools to help in mixing and mastering tracks years ago. Generative music has existed in some sense as long as electronically amplified music has. These all at heart have some human sensibility directing them to wards communication with other people ac part of rhe socio-cultural language of humanity music and art are. However, startups providing at massive loss wep applications with which you can prompt with few words some inane crap is completely a new phenomenon and it has as much to do with music as spam emails have with literature. It is pretty clear what the difference is.
  - janalsncm 4mo ago
    Strongly agree that AI is underspecified. Better name is probably “automation” which at least makes it clear that it depends on what is being automated.
techterrier 4mo ago
this is called the pub

1123581321 4mo ago

That would be interesting and could start simply. CDBaby was what, $20 per record and self-serve. Maybe each record on this new platform costs $200 and is accompanied by an employee-uploaded video of the artist uploading the record.

wiremine 4mo ago

> Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it "art is in the eye of the beholder." I listen to a lot of EDM, which can be very mechanical, but I personally have strong emotional connection to. I personally would welcome AI-generated music as an alternative to human-made. To be clear: I do agree a "human-verified" system would be great, but I don't think it would be black and white. And I would guess that eventually AI music will be better than a lot of human made music.

keiferski 4mo ago
You will probably be able to listen to machine-generated music on most major platforms. I just hope there’s one which excludes all of that. Personally I think it’s a bit like cultural junk food: it has the appearance of real food, but leaves one hungry afterward. Which really isn’t all that surprising – music isn’t just some random collection of patterns, it’s intimately tied to real culture. Current AI software is only ever going to copy and regurgitate human culture, not make meaningful creations from scratch.
- dominotw 4mo ago
  junk food is a common misconception about electronic music with ppl who have only listened to trash versions of it on social media.
  - keiferski 4mo ago
    I don’t mean electronic music writ large, I mean AI generated music. Electronic music is probably my favorite genre, broadly. But there’s a human behind the machine, not a random collection of patterns. To use a concrete example: NIN is about 1000% more interesting because of who Trent Reznor is, and not because it’s merely good music. This disconnect is much more of an issue with say, country or bluegrass or jazz. To divorce those from the musician and their cultural context is to miss the whole point.
    - someguyiguess 4mo ago
      There's a human behind AI-generated music too. A human writes the prompts. Your distinction seems rather arbitrary.
      - keiferski 4mo ago
        Typing “make me an electronic guitar song about a bad breakup” is a whole lot different than learning to play the instrument yourself and conveying your own emotions from your real experience into a song that you write and perform. If you can’t see how these are fundamentally different things, I don’t know what to tell you.
        esikich 4mo ago
        Do you really think that's the only way to do it? I spend hours refining the output, slicing things up, redoing certain parts, tossing it into the DAW and compressing, adding effects, etc. I mean, if you think one shot prompts are the only way to use AI to make music fine, but you're being intentionally obtuse.
        neutronicus 4mo ago
- neutronicus 4mo ago
  I agree with the other poster. I think it's very difficult to guide this missile so that it blows up AI-generated music and doesn't blow up EDM. My own taste in music is pretty junk-food-y I guess. Electronic music and not the pretentious kind. Dubstep, electro. Give me something that goes wub-wub. Incidentally, I think this experience mostly isn't one about human connection? Like, there is some circuit in my brain that likes that sound and wants to be tickled. I can play classical piano to a mediocre standard. I listen to it and enjoy it occasionally. But, honestly, what I feel like my spirit needs is something that goes wub-wub and I think that space is densely seeded enough that maybe we can scale back human involvement in producing it.
  - keiferski 4mo ago
    Sure that’s fair, and maybe my ideal platform doesn’t really work for electronic music and works better for singer-songwriters that perform live. Which is fine - I just like the idea of a platform that guarantees that a real person made this music.
kstrauser 4mo ago
I made (what would eventually get called) EDM in high school and a lot of what I enjoyed was dismissed as “not real music”. It’s not a musician playing it, but a computer! Unless a guitarist was plucking strings or a pianist hitting the keys, it wasn’t “real”. Doesn’t matter how carefully crafted it was: it’s only real if you couldn’t hit “play”. Sorry, Mike Oldfield. Hate to break it to you that you’re a fake musician. I agree with you. I do enjoy some live musicians jamming on a stage, but for a lot of the genres I frequently listen to, I’d have no way of knowing if a song was written by human or by AI. If it’s good, it’s good.
- someguyiguess 4mo ago
  I learned music production by first learning how to produce house. Because of this, I can confidently say that house is not music. You literally just copy/paste over and over. Just because a human makes something, doesn't make it good or "music" necessarily.
  - rvnx 4mo ago
    Their approach of "manually tagging songs that are good 'non-AI' and not good 'AI'" is a questionable approach from an engineering and product perspective. They would benefit much more from a have a better recommendation and ranking algorithm that carefully monitors all metrics, recommends high-performers, and excludes unpopular content from the feed. You can use the fact it was AI-generated as a signal, but it is just a signal among other criterias, not an outright ban. Essentially, explore songs and artists, exploit winners. Lot of people abort a song/artist/creator/etc. Lot of fake listens. People don't like the song of an album Creator is historically with a low score etc... -> Downrank ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit ) Then you judge the popularity of a song, an album, a creator, a playlist, etc not its creation method. Exactly like a genre type. It's not because you don't like country music that everybody should be forbidden to listen to country music. It's good for them too, the more streams they do, the more money they get, and the more their audience is engaged. If the person doesn’t like “AI-generated genre” then just downrank it heavily on its recommandation feed, like YouTube or TikTok does.
otabdeveloper4 4mo ago
AI music != electronic music. Most AI music is actually country-pop ballads and indie folk. Making electronic music with AI is hard and it isn't very good at it.
- blehn 4mo ago
  YouTube is already recommending tons of AI-generated electronic music. It's pretty easy to spot: It will have millions of views and the "artist's" discography will only go back to 2025 or 2026. It's usually just singles. The cover art is vague atmospheric AI-generated. The "artist" will have no presence online save for a couple instagram account with a couple posts that are also AI-generated.
  - otabdeveloper4 4mo ago
    I'm not saying it doesn't exist at all, I'm saying electronic music is significantly harder for AI to do than a conventional love ballad or a rock song. AI can't do "robotic" math music, it's best at sappy generic emotive stuff. (I guess this isn't at all a surprise for those that know how the musical sausage is made.)
    - platevoltage 4mo ago
      I'd love to see AI take a stab at a Meshuggah or Dillinger Escape Plan clone.
      - ozzmotik 4mo ago
        not exactly what you're aiming at with your comment but, sort of adjacent, maybe relevant: https://suno.com/s/o0CtwRfvFXxxTDE7 https://suno.com/s/o0CtwRfvFXxxTDE7
    - blehn 4mo ago
      > electronic music is significantly harder for AI to do than a conventional love ballad or a rock song Why do you say that? I'd argue the opposite
y-c-o-m-b 4mo ago
I believe we've already crossed the quality threshold for being equal to or "better" (subjective) than human. For EDM, check out the AI artist "Vibfy". Especially the song "I Hear You" as it has the best mastering so far. The melody and vocals of all the songs are fire, but in some of the earlier songs the mastering is sub-par with strange volume changes and muddy beats. There is an AI folk band called "We're all f*cked" that is incredibly good and indistinguishable from actual humans.

ryukoposting 4mo ago

> Tie it to in-person concerts and it might actually work as a business, as well as logistically Don't give ticketmaster any ideas.

jamiequint 4mo ago

Baudelaire and many others said the same thing about photography.

keiferski 4mo ago
You’re gonna have to be more specific. They said what same thing?
- jamiequint 4mo ago
  Called photography poor facsimiles of painting, not real art, etc.

observationist 4mo ago

As of now, you can tell the difference for most AI generated music. There's some where you cannot. There is no Turing Test for taste, and the specific constellation of features that represent your particular interpretation of what things like human, best, goodness, excellence, beauty, and any other label you might apply to abstract qualities will be reproduced at a sufficiently high resolution that you will no longer be able to meaningfully discern between human and AI creations. In a blind test, you will prefer the AI product, and your own perceptions and biases will convince you that the AI generation is actually human, because whatever ineffable abstractions you attribute to "human" quality will be replicated, refined, and exploited. The very act of recognizing some difference is the tool with which the next generation of outputs is refined, until it's so "good" for any and all particular instances of "good" that human perception is insufficient to differentiate the source. At some point we're going to have to admit that the distinction based on source is a problem, and perhaps there's a lot of nuance in the context of any particular piece of media such that an arbitrary dismissal of a song, or image, or piece of writing, for the mere reason that AI was used to produce it in whole or in part is missing the point. If you enjoy a song, your enjoyment is real. If you appreciate beauty, your perception of beauty is real. If you feel deeply about a written text, your feelings are real. How you perceive things, while not entirely conscious, does involve elements of choice. Make the choice to judge things on meaningful merit, and if the next generation of musicians and artists use AI tools to explore new territory, don't dismiss their art and passion and creations out of hand. An electric guitar is artificial. People used to make the same sorts of "that's not music" statements people are making now about music and art. Imagine being so twisted up over some arbitrary distinction that you miss out on Jimi Hendrix or BB King, or Joe Satriani, or any of the brilliant musicians that have wrung beauty and soul from "artificial" electronic signals.

keiferski 4mo ago
I think most of what you’ve written here only really applies if you listen to music without knowing anything about the musician. That seems pretty uncommon to me, for most people. The most popular musicians in the world are basically celebrity characters, with the music as a key ingredient, not the only one. Do Taylor Swift fans or Kanye fans or [musician] fans just listen to the music and not follow the person? Pretty unlikely IMO. I also think it’s an entirely false equivalence to say using electronic instruments are like AI music tools. Very different things – an electric guitar doesn’t play music by itself. It’s still a tool at the end of the day.

jmuguy 4mo ago

Bandcamp is well on their way already. If you want to support actual musicians, you can just buy their music directly. https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/ https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/

MisterTea 4mo ago
Just broke 1000 albums this past weekend. It's delightful to be able to just listen to something then hand the artist money and download the flac files. I also really like the quasi social aspect where users have simple profiles. No messages between users, no likes, no ratings, no BS. About the most you can do is leave a text review. Your profile is an image and text field so you can write a simple bio and provide links to whatever. My entire Bandcamp collection is discovered by crawling profiles and randomly listening to things. I also found some fun personal sites and so on. The site design is also simple and not a JS laden mess like "MoDeRn" ampwall.
- rurp 4mo ago
  Do you have any recommendations for casual listening of downloaded music files? I'm pretty done with Spotify and would rather spend money on Bandcamp. The main hurdle is that I'm not enough of a music person to want to spend much time organizing a collection, I just want an easy way to put some music on while I'm working.
  - sbaildon 4mo ago
    You open the music you download with something like IINA or Doppler, and you're off to the races. What exactly is the hurdle?
  - MisterTea 4mo ago
    > Do you have any recommendations for casual listening of downloaded music files? Other than the simple approach of playlists and/or shuffle, unfortunately no. > I just want an easy way to put some music on while I'm working. Think of Bandcamp as a record store, not a radio station.

neutronicus 4mo ago

That seems like a hard line to draw for EDM, which I suppose, plenty of people have indeed refused to class as "human-made" over the years. You'd probably need to be more generally back-to-basics (instruments-only, no EDM).

tshaddox 4mo ago
To me it’s less about the technologies used to produce the audio. If a human has put some creative effort into it, even if it’s mostly curating AI-generated audio, I’m in principle fine with that. But if little to no effort was put into it, it’s slop by definition.

mathgeek 4mo ago

Let me preface this by agreeing that we should have platforms for only human-generated music. > Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it. Like most things, this is an overgeneralization. In general, I agree, but not always. While most AI-generated content is not going to appeal to most people, it's wrong to say that all AI-generated music is not about what music is about. Personally I find _some_ AI generated music to be amazingly fun to listen to, but mostly it's parodies or works that are essentially built on top of existing media. A creative person using AI well can produce art that people enjoy and which adds to our culture (I selectively choose not to say "create" here to avoid that very overloaded connotation w.r.t. AI creations). That is not to say that most of the work that comes out of AI needs to exist or does any of those things.

doug_durham 4mo ago

Your statement is so imprecise as to be meaningless. Is EDM made on an Abelton DAW human made? Even though the human didn't touch an instrument and used a robot drummer? What about a human who uses AI to generate snippets of music and then pastes them together in an emotionally compelling way, much like HipHop artists do for traditionally sampled music? AI is a tool. Low/no-effort work on the part of humans is the problem.

keiferski 4mo ago
Do you really think the vast majority of AI music is going to be akin to old school hip hop sampling culture? I certainly don’t, and I think it’s pretty likely that the vast majority will be the generic derivative slop. Which is why I’d like a separate platform, so I don’t have to waste my time wading through all the garbage.

brookst 4mo ago

Perhaps. But just how human made? We already had the “Depeche Mode isn’t real music because they just push play on a sequencer” debate 40 years ago. And lots of composers can’t play the stuff they write. But the composition is human. Then there’s emerging AI-supported music, since AI can come up with and test harmonic ideas far more sophisticated than most people. If a human’s saying “no, not that, try using an augmented sixth to get us from F#maj to Cmin”, is that human generated? Not trying to be contrary, just saying the definition needs to be really clear, and that’s going to be difficult.

keiferski 4mo ago
What I had in mind was, "perform it on your instruments in our studio and we'll record the performance, record the music, and add it to our platform." Probably too expensive to scale, but... it's an idea.
- brookst 4mo ago
  So, only physical musicians need apply? No composers, no guitarists who can program drum tracks but not play drums? I honestly like your intent. But we need to find a way to include people who can write sheet music for a symphony without being able to play most of the instruments.
mapontosevenths 4mo ago
Art is the expression of a person's unique perspective. The tool you use to do that isn't the important part, the communication of the perspective is. When AI makes that communication better it is good, when it produces perspective free noise, or steals someone elses perspective and paraphrases it then its' bad.

datsci_est_2015 4mo ago

As I stated elsewhere in the thread, the streaming platforms do not have the correct incentives to do this. It’s the labels that do releases that are correctly incentivized, as they need to build an audience that trusts them and enjoys the music that they release. Independently-released music is a huge red flag. If you can’t find a single label A&R to support you, you may have to work on the quality of your output… music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are tens of thousands of labels across nearly every imaginable genre. Their role as gatekeeper is a valuable one.

keiferski 4mo ago
> Independently-released music is a huge red flag. You've never listened to anything on Soundcloud and found it good?
- datsci_est_2015 4mo ago
  The vast majority of music I listen to on SoundCloud is released on small labels (<10, <100, or <1000 artists). It is not that hard to release on those labels. There are tens of thousands artists releasing on thousands of labels every Friday. That being said, I guess I may have some genre bias. Maybe it’s exceedingly difficult to get signed to a small label as e.g. a Midwest Emo Band (bad example because I have friends who released on a small label as a Midwest Emo Band). But you need to put in the effort if you expect me to give you my precious listening time. Edit: redundancy

Sandbag5802 4mo ago

A platform like that exists. It's called Subvert. It's a cooperative that was created as a response whenever Bandcamp has changed ownership several times. The idea of Subvert is to focus on the artists instead of the interests of the founders and investors.

echelon 4mo ago

> Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it. Music is about making my brain feel good. I don't care what/who makes it. If I like it, I like it.

devmor 4mo ago
Consumption vs. Appreciation in a single pair of comments, what a beautiful dichotomy of the human experience of art.
- echelon 4mo ago
  It's not a dichotomy anymore. With AI tools I can make for myself. I was already a creative before AI, but now I have a lot more control in more domains than I could express myself in before.
  - devmor 4mo ago
    You clearly stated in your post that nothing matters except how it makes your brain feel. That wasn’t vague, don’t try to walk it back - own it.

janalsncm 4mo ago

What is your response to Tidal’s statement > Artificial intelligence and machine learning are not new to music creation, they have just become more commonplace and advanced In other words, there is no bright line. AI techniques have been a part of music creation from the start. What makes bad AI music hard to detect and remove is the fact that it is a much closer approximation of regular music.

delis-thumbs-7e 4mo ago
As always, what is AI? I have used algorithmic machine learning tools to help in mixing and mastering tracks years ago. Generative music has existed in some sense as long as electronically amplified music has. These all at heart have some human sensibility directing them to wards communication with other people ac part of rhe socio-cultural language of humanity music and art are. However, startups providing at massive loss wep applications with which you can prompt with few words some inane crap is completely a new phenomenon and it has as much to do with music as spam emails have with literature. It is pretty clear what the difference is.
- janalsncm 4mo ago
  Strongly agree that AI is underspecified. Better name is probably “automation” which at least makes it clear that it depends on what is being automated.

techterrier 4mo ago

this is called the pub