Keep it up bandcamp. We are all waiting for when you enshittify like everyone else but you've held it at bay so far.
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I'm glad they did this. Confident in my choice to remain with Bandcamp.
What's a good way to discover artists on Bandcamp? Most artists I listen to at the moment are with the usual big labels and don't sell on Bandcamp.
- read Bandcamp's writeups. Sometimes they do a deep dive into a genre, city, or band. https://daily.bandcamp.com/
- if you find something you like, scroll down and there's other users who bought it. Peek into their collections
- if you scroll down further on an album, there will be more recommendations
- you can search by genre or tag, too
This is the best answer! Thank you for sharing your methods. I was going to reply about the daily editorial, but yours is more complete.
I would also like to add that I type the name of things I like and often find them on bandcamp. Including big artists.
Peter Gabriel, Evanescence, Run the Jewels, Flight of Conchords, Ghost...
What I don't find there, I get from a thrift store (easy to find famous artists there) or quobuz.
I'll often find something interesting and look through the collections of other people who also have the album. Another way is to just start in the genre sections and browse.
Here are a few varied suggestions, no specific genre since I don't know your tastes:
https://boyharsher.bandcamp.com/album/country-girl-uncut https://idlesband.bandcamp.com/album/tangk https://williethrasher.bandcamp.com/album/spirit-child
Thanks, I didn't know about music map. I have used Everynoise, which is similar, but doesn't get updates anymore since Spotify closed that particular API access.
Try searching by tags within genres that you like.
N-th the suggestion to creep on people who buy the same stuff as you. There's a lil grid of their pfps, I click on a cool one and check out the stuff they listen to that I haven't
This, I think, is the best way. You start to recognise people that are buying all the same stuff you like so follow them and periodically have a look at what they are buying.
All other avenues on bandcamp are a bit shit IMO. Tags are dog shit because artists never tag their work correctly and my feed will constantly be old shit I listened to a long time ago. You can't even rely on it to let you know when artists you follow release new work.
I love bandcamp but I also fucking hate bandcamp xD
Not answering your question exactly, but finding community (non-commercial) radio shows in your local area that you like is a good way to find new music. Find a few shows/presenters that play music/genres you like and they should play local artists that you might not have heard. They'll also mention upcoming gigs etc.
c. Find a few shows/presenters that play music/genres you like and they should play local artists that you might not have heard.
I love option c. I've been going to the music shop and buying stickers, then looking up the bands whose stickers i've bought and going to their shows. most of the bands are, uh, well the bands i was in at that age sucked and they're a little better than we were. but like $5 concerts, you can't be mad even if the music sucks
maybe someone [who is not me because i am done being a mod] could make a "hey i found this neat song/album/artist/genre/existence on bandcamp" community because i would for sure sign up and comment and share songs
I'm a fan of the new and notable feed on the main page myself. KEXP is also a great source of new acts which are typically not on major labels.
Just watch, we’re two weeks away from some tech bro trying to start a Clankercamp website. The best part is that no one except other tech bros will care.
Bandcamp consistently throws Ws
Surprising considers that it's parent company Epic (yes, of Fortnite Unreal Tournament and GoW fame) has a pro-AI stance.
Your info is a bit out of date. Epic already sold off Bandcamp back in 2023 during layoffs. Its owned by Songtradr now, who I personally know nothing about.
Bandcamp is where you want to be if you want to support artists. they get money when you buy things from them on there
I was buying some LPs recently and saw one that caught my attention. I looked them up and almost all their content included some form of AI.
it's bullshit.
fuck AI.
Are Bandcamp still the good guys? I thought they were bought by the big capital and now went down the drain. Artists' opinions especially welcome
on average, i'm earning 3x as much from bandcamp FLAC sales compared to what i earn off streaming. Hasn't been ruined so far.
People expected them to get fucked after the acquisition, though the new owners are just going "you keep doing what you're doing, not gonna change a thing, just give us a cut of your profits"
Touch wood, it's gonna stay that way.
They fucked the union, though.
The massive layoff that gutted Oakland-based music service Bandcamp hit one group at the company particularly hard: leaders of its nascent union.
As of Monday, Bandcamp has been sold by video game juggernaut Epic Games to Songtradr, a music licensing firm. The acquisition closed with just half of Bandcamp’s employees offered jobs at the Santa Monica-based company.
The job cuts, which SFGATE reported Monday amounted to about 60 of 118 employees, disproportionately hit union leaders, Bandcamp United told SFGATE in a Tuesday press release. Every member of the union’s eight-person bargaining team was laid off, it said, and in sum, 40 of the bargaining unit’s 67 people lost their jobs.
Were sold by epicc to some other company.
Still doing their regular job and not went to shit.
- A user
I don't bought a lot of music, but all the independent musicians I follow have a bandcamp store. They also sell merch there.
I haven't noticed any change since they've been bought up. The new owners did bust up an attempt at unionizing, though, so there's that.
Neat, my current setup is :
- stream from FIP.fr via cvlc
- when I absolutely love a tune, buy on Bandcamp
- if it's not available or I bought it elsewhere, e.g. old CD, then get from Soulseek
- scp my ~/Music directory on my mobile phone
I tried LMS for few weeks but honestly just plain VLC is enough for me.
Anyway, point is, this decision makes me want to buy from Bandcamp even more.
Good.
And sure... People will obviously try to break this rule, and I'm sure some will succeed. But that's true of any rule. Rules don't prevent bad behavior, only deter it.
Bandcamp W. One of the platforms I buy music from and surf other than soundcloud. You can find some banger albums by genre on there.
Oh, I need to get back into Bandcamp
That's nice. But I wonder how they detect them.
There are usually some tells. For AI generated music (AIGM for short) the cover “art” is also AI generated. The vocals/style are different between tracks. Another method that I think was recently made obsolete was that if you opened the track in audacity it looked weird compared to regular music when you looked at the spectrograms because AIGM added some weird unnecessary noise to the music. AIGM “artists” usually don’t have any social media presence, they don’t really exist outside of the internet. No shows/interviews etc. Is it a lot of effort to find out whether something is AIGM? Maybe. Is it worth it? Yes, I don’t want to give money to people who desecrate the art or music.
So you're saying a milli vanilli would be basically impossible to detect.
Besides, who cares? Isn't the purpose to enjoy the music? Whether some uses a capella, instruments, electric instruments, autotune, vocaloid or AI... if you like the music, listen to the music. It's ultimately created by a human using tools.
not the same thing. AIGM is by definition not created by a human.
if i tell you to create a song about a recent breakup i got through, gave you some notes about rhythm and maybe what kind of feel i would like it to have, and then you went ahead and composed the whole song, played all the instruments, provided the vocals, did the mixing and editing and gave me the result, do you think it's fair to say i made the song?
Same as vocaloid. Or autotune. How far do we go?
Besides, again, who cares. If you like the music, enjoy it, if not, pass.
how is it like auto tune? auto tune corrects your singing, it doesn't sing for you.
also, humans care? that's kind of the entire point of art? we care where art comes from. find the best painter in the world, have them make mona lisa's exact copy, and see if it sells for even remotely similar price as Mona Lisa's estimated value which is probably around a billion dollars. anyone can "enjoy" an exact copy, no?
no. we care about art because art tells stories. human stories. computers don't have stories to tell. they can imitate, but the best it can ever be will be as valuable as an imitation: not much.
What does monetary worth have to do with anything? A photo of the Mona Lisa is an exact replica, you could even make it bigger to appreciate the details better. If what you like is the picture, you can have it. If what you want is speculation and tax write offs, then you need the scarcity.
Besides, again, who cares. If you like the music, enjoy it, if not, pass.
I care. Clearly so do the people in support of this decision on here as well as bandcamp themselves.
I disagree on all counts.
It's not exploitative, it doesn't exploit anyone.
It's not trash, and if it were you wouldn't need to regulate it because people would reject it on the merits.
The space belongs to whoever wants to create art, with whatever tools they want to do it. Gatekeeping and true Scotsman arguments are really grasping.
I don't know what "social value" is created. A nurse or a fireman create social value. You won't see them worrying about AI. If AI could put out fires they would definitely be interested.
It's not exploitative, it doesn't exploit anyone.
It had to be trained on music created by human artists. Those artists were not compensated.
It's not trash, and if it were you wouldn't need to regulate it because people would reject it on the merits.
I would reject if I knew it was AI. I can't always tell, though.
The space belongs to whoever wants to create art, with whatever tools they want to do it.
The owners of Bandcamp get to set the rules, because they own it.
If AIGM was like VSTs or vocaloids that'd be one thing. But it's more like imitation of sounds, synthesizing song chunks instead of instruments and voices themselves.
The best way to think of it is something creating an audio file solely by using the Photoshop clone stamp tool across millions of source files.
That's not how transformer neural networks work...
Sure, but we're talking generative here, as is the article, and to pretend it's referring to a tool that's been standard in libraries and even VSTs for over a decade is either misunderstanding the article or being disingenuous on purpose.
No, I get it. It's generative. GPT: Generative Pretrained Transformer. Music generators add a diffusion layer, but it's fundamentally new music being generated, not copies of existing songs.
My point is that it's just another tool, that automates it even more. It's not the same, it's the next step.
A text prompt -> audio is not a transformer in the sense of what people are talking about, and you know it or just don't care, or don't wholly understand how these systems work under the hood as well.
What I'm referring to are neural models that take an input audio and are effectively a filter that operates as a neural network. Voice mods, instrument adapters, virtual pedals, amp models... These are all actually transformative. There is actual music and effort going into these. And that is not what Bandcamp is after; those were already in heavy use like 15 years ago.
The things that generate based on text are a transformer in the most technically correct sense but not in the sense of what is meant when people talk about transformative.
They're fundamentally different purposes and usages. It's not generated vocals from nothing but the lyrics; it's someone else actually singing it and then a model transforming the sound to match an intended pre-set trained target, not generalization.
They are a transformer in the same sense ChatGPT is a transformer. And hence they do generate new content that share characteristics and patterns with existing one. It's no clone tool. Lyrics are new. They probably follow the grammar rules of certain language, but it's not copy paste. Chords will probably be shared, but melody is new. Etc.
I think you might misunderstood what Bandcamp is aiming for here. They're explicitly trying to still allow it when humans are using it (responsibly) as tools. This is essentially a ban on AI where no human is involved (or not involved enough), where the music produced is focused on quantity over quality (slop). That's a fine and nuanced distinction for a music distribution platform in my opinion.
Benn Jordan made an AI model to detect generated music but I thought he wanted to build his own platform...?
Exactly my thoughts. Tho I think that purely AI generated music would be somewhat easy to detect? As in compared to original chord progressions with AI lyrics or vice versa
As they should.
On the other hand, if AI music was any good why would I go to bandcamp for it?
An important feature is that you can basically download (and thus, own) the music you pay for (in many formats too).
Bit of both. More on the indi/hobby side of things though.
It’s more like old iTunes and the like. No subscription, just buy albums. Artists define the price, and keep the majority of their revenue with some Fridays being Bandcamp Fridays where they get to keep all the revenue. You can download everything you own or you can stream it from the website or app on your phone also.
Only real downside with Bandcamp is that you won’t find some artists there but it all depends on what you listen to and want to find.
Bandcamp is where you go to download/buy stuff for a band you already know and like. I rarely if ever have listened to music through the website itself, nor have I found new bands through it.
good decision, also good decision to not ban all music with ai in it. like, we got so many pedals nowadays. live pitch correction? like wtf. how is that not ai. as long as there is some human pouring their blood, sweat, tears and soul into the music, that is what i want to hear.
How would you even screen for AI music?
If anyone needs to bypass this ban, for $3 I will record 1 minute of yodelling so your content isn’t pure AI.
Good on them on recognizing that slop is undesirable and shouldn't be encouraged, but that a full ban also kills the nuance of creative freedom and creates painful situations where a single AI tool anywhere in the process (even indirectly) gets hard work rejected, which could hamper aspiring creatives in their ability to (start to) get their work out there and (start to) make a living when they are not what (most) people have issue with.
Not quite sure what you're trying to say. The article literally says:
Bandcamp’s policy targets the latter end of that spectrum while leaving room for human artists who incorporate AI tools into a larger creative process.
Which is what I'm applauding and affirming, so I'm not sure what you're saying I'm saying is opposite to what the article says.
Love the idea of bandcamp, but sucks that there are no artists there I am interested in. I just download M4A (MP4 audio) files off of YouTube lol
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