I suspect the problem is scale. AI slop can be churned out at an unprecedented rate, and Bandcamp is not a big company, but they'd have to host and serve all of that stuff nonetheless.
Fellow user of en dashes here. I also try to use proper grammar to the best of my abilities, and I feel your frustration.
So far I've resisted giving in. Something about "those AI bros can grab my ellipses from my cold, dead typing fingers." But I have already caught myself deliberately leaving in a typo when checking over an e-mail before sending it, thinking it makes it less likely to set off AIdars, which is very strange for a perfectionist like me.
I don't have the solution ready either, but if I had to guess, it would be a return to more heavily moderated, closed communities where people have a reasonable expectation to be interacting with real people. It's not foolproof but maybe more manageable. We had trolls and stupid bots on Usenet and IRC as well, after all, and it kind of worked.
This may also be a financial decision. Bandcamp is not a huge player compared to Spotify, Google, or Apple. Deezer said more than a third of new music uploads are GenAI now. If AI slop starts outnumbering real musicians' uploads 10 to 1, 100 to 1, or 1000 to one, which doesn't seem so far out there given the complete lack of talent, effort, or experience required to generate it, how would a site like Bandcamp pay for storing and processing all that data? They may have no choice but more rigorous curation.
Also, it's kind of antithetical to the purpose of Bandcamp. As you say, a place where anyone can publish music - but that's true for Spotify et al. these days, too. Bandcamp was always about a more direct connection to the artists, so it makes sense that they want their site to be about actual flesh-and-blood artists who have put sweat into their work.
I will always check Bandcamp before buying digital music anywhere else, under the assumption that more goes to the artists. I'm glad to hear that that's not just wishful thinking!
Making music involves writing and arranging the score, playing the instruments, writing lyrics, singing, recording, mastering... each of these steps is hard work, takes practice, and by that fact alone will be unique to every person because, in some way, their whole life experience flows into it.
GenAI music is writing a few words about how you'd like the result to sound. That's it. That's the entire original contribution. There is no individuality to it beyond that, because it's not someone making music, it's someone deciding about the weights in averaging together existing music that other people have actually worked for.
That's not nonsense to me (and judging from the reaction to this news, neither is it to a large number of music fans). It's an absolutely massive, huge, decisive, qualitative difference.
do you now see how reductive you are of the technology behind genAI? by reading your own comment does it not drive the point home that reducing music appreciation to the quoted comment is also hilariously reductive?
As a non-musician, but being into music to an unreasonable degree, I always thought that the best artists are those where I feel that, even if no one bought their records and there were just five people at their concert, they'd still be doing the exact same thing and with the same passion. Audiences notice.
The only reason this sort of tracks is that a lot of people today don't listen to music, they just put it on as background noise to drown out the silence. It seems to pay off for some producers, but I don't think there's big money there, or a real threat of replacing artists.
By and large, the general public has shown that they notice the vapidness, blandness, and incongruity of GenAI music, and don't much care for it apart from seeing it as an interesting curiosity.
That's another one for concluding that there's nothing new under the sun. This is the exact dynamic that happened during the offshoring hype.
Now, it's expecting senior engineers to "orchestrate" 10 coding agents, then it was expecting them to orchestrate 10 cheap developers on the other side of the world. Then, the reckoning came when those offshore developers realised that if they produced code as good as that of a "1st world" engineer, they can ask a similar salary, too, and those offshoring clients who didn't want to pay up were left with those contractors who weren't good enough to do that. This time, it will be agent pricing approaching the true costs. Both times, the breaking point is when managers realise that writing code was never the bottleneck in the first place.
> be an immediately useful engineer who learns quickly
Then also nothing has really changed. This was, verbatim, the advice everybody was giving when I was a grad student almost 20 years ago.
Back then, the conclusion was to learn the frameworks du jour, even if it was unfulfilling plumbing and the knowledge had a half-life of a few weeks. You needed it to get hired, but you made your career because of all the solid theory you learned and the adaptability that knowing it gave you.
Now, the conclusion is to learn how to tickle the models du jour in the right way, even though it's intellectually braindead, unaspiring work and knowledge with a half-life of a few days. It's still the theoretical foundation that will actually make the junior become a valuable engineer.
The more I read between the lines of AI evangelists' posts like this, the more I'm convinced that expectations will return to grounded reality soon. They are new tools to help the engineer. They enable new workflows and maybe can even allow a two-digit percentage increase in speed while upholding quality. But they're in no way a revolution that will make possible "10× engineers" or considerably replace engineering positions beyond the "it doesn't really matter" area of PoCs, prototypes, one-offs, cookie-cutter solutions, etc.
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