I’m glad they did this. Confident in my choice to remain with Bandcamp.
Bandcamp consistently throws Ws
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.
Keep it up bandcamp. We are all waiting for when you enshittify like everyone else but you’ve held it at bay so far.
They gave us a scare over the years, being sold around to companies that are famous for enshittifying platforms.
Epic sold the company when people unionized, and the next did a trick to not recognized the union and “hire” half of the staff (contrary to fire half of them).
The platform is not what has been 5 years ago, but it is still my favourite place to get music around.
It was being OVERRUN with AI stuff, hopefully this cleans it up
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.
They do already, and most of the comments on the noise are “please share promp”.
I’m generally supportive of removing AI from artistic endeavors, but also wildly unfamiliar with bandcamp. I’m looking at it for the first time right now. Does it work like Deezer / Tidal or one of the streaming services where I can listen to things from my phone, or is it more of a website that you use to discover unsigned / smaller acts by clicking through a bunch of things and listening?
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.
Major labels have a presence on there too 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 W. One of the platforms I buy music from and surf other than soundcloud. You can find some banger albums by genre on there.
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.
First I’ve heard of FIP, I’ll have to give it a go
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
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.
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.
Shit, that I didn’t know about 😭
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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?
With AI, duh
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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.
If anyone needs to bypass this ban, for $3 I will record 1 minute of yodelling so your content isn’t pure AI.
uh, i may want to collaborate. can i offer $20 for a 3-5 minute blues yodel (song pending, probably about a shower running out of hot water or a wife being too proud to borrow deodorant, album title A Complaint Letter to the Sea)
Paying monthly subscriptions for music that for most people is essentially the same mix with some deviations will become very costly for listeners over time. Relying on paid streaming services is the ultimate expression of laziness.
