Bandcamp vs. AI | Matt Connarton Unleashed

0:00 Speaker 1: I did as promised. I wanted to talk about some news. You know, we mentioned band Camp on the show earlier.

0:05 Speaker 2: Band Camp.

0:05 Speaker 1: Two things that come up a lot on the show band Camp the website of course, bandcamp dot com, and AI and how AI is affecting how music is made, generated, consumed in the music industry. And band Camp has now banned AI generated music. They have made it official saying that they want musicians to keep making music. And you know, we've got kind of a point counterpoint on this to look at. But first, this is from Music Businessworldwide dot com. And this just happened, by the way. They just announced this ban a couple days ago.

0:38 Speaker 1: According to this website direct tofan platform, band Camp said it will ban artificial intelligence generated music and audio from its platform, including any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles. The company made the announcement in a post on Wednesday, January fourteen.

0:56 Speaker 2: So this just happened. Like I said a few days ago.

1:00 Speaker 1: Quote, something that always strikes us as we put together a round up like this is the sheer quantity of human creativity and passion that artists express on band Camp every single day. The fact that band Camp is home to such a vibrant community of real people making incredible music is something we want to protect and maintain unquote. And by the way, and this came up during our conversation with Adam steglitic have ever felt in the second hour,

1:29 Speaker 1: I think what we talked about with Adam, it was either with Adam or with Grimrock.

1:33 Speaker 2: No, I think it was with Adam. We were talking about how band Camp.

1:36 Speaker 1: One of the reasons that I'm such a proponent of it is if you get your music files from band Camp, You're getting a high quality music file, much higher quality than say if you're just streaming it on YouTube or something like that. So just something to be aware of too. Band Camp is really good that way, it says here again. According to this article, band Camp said music and audio that has created quote holly or in substantial part by AI unquote will no longer be allowed on the platform. The company will also enforce existing policies against any use of AI tools to copy other artists or styles.

2:09 Speaker 1: The company said, quote, we want musicians to keep making music and for fans have confidence that the music they find on band Camp was created by humans unquote. This has come up several times. Like I said, over the past couple of years. You know, Jenny and I talk about this all the time on the show, the effect of AI in the music industry and in the creation of music.

2:29 Speaker 2: And there are some tools like.

2:31 Speaker 1: Pseudo dot com, which we've experimented with live on the show, that they can make some really realistic sounding, you know, music that sounds like it was made by humans, entirely by humans. One thing that look, it's any platform has the right, whether it's band Camp, whether it's YouTube, whomever. As frustrating as it can be at times, any platform has a right to police and control what the content is, in this case music, when we talk about band Camp, what the content is it is being uploaded to their platform.

3:07 Speaker 1: However, I really worry with policies like this that because it's going to happen, it's inevitable. I guess it's an extent it's impossible to prevent this. So it comes down to an extent to which it ends up happening. Artists are going to get caught in the net. And I don't mean net as an internet, I mean net as in like a fishing net. Artists are going to get caught in the net where whatever software band Camp is using to detect AI generated music, there are going to be artists who are flagged by band Camp as being AI generated, who in fact are not AI generated.

3:53 Speaker 2: It's going to happen. It's unavoidable. Okay.

3:57 Speaker 1: So I'm not saying that because that's going to happen, that band Camp should not do this. I'm not saying that. But what I am expressing is a concern that what if it happens a lot. Because anybody who's ever created anything that you've then put on the Internet for mass consumption, whether it's music, whether it's a podcast, doing a radio show that you know, in addition to being live on FM radio also streams online. Anybody who's ever created anything knows that sometimes you can get flagged, you can get tagged, you can get dinged for something by these platforms that is in fact, uh not correct, and you're getting blamed for something that you didn't necessarily do you know.

4:49 Speaker 1: Look, I've been on YouTube for a very long time. You know, it hasn't happened in a long time, but I have in the past. More so when I was doing a lot more political content, I would get I would get dinged by YouTube for things. So you can't say this, you can't talk about that. You've got to strike on your account now because you said this, you repeated this, and this is not accurate. You can't do that, you know. And most of the time, not to sound like I'm shirking responsibility, but most of the time it's like, wait a minute, that's not what I said.

5:29 Speaker 1: They're flagging me for I was quoting something somebody else said that wasn't my opinion. Why are they Why am I being penalized for repeating what somebody else said and making it clear? But see, you know what happens is right there is these the bots. They it's all it's AI. See, that's the thing. They use AI to detect AI. That's what band camp is going to be doing here. They're going to use AI to detect when there's AI and AI.

6:00 Speaker 2: The AI that.

6:01 Speaker 1: They're using to detect whether or not they there's AI is not going to get it right every time, especially when because this is a little broad when they say

6:16 Speaker 1: band camp, okay, band Camp said music and audio that is created holly or in substantial part by AI. Listen any any recording studio you know that that is modern is probably you know, probably has software in their computers in that recording.

6:38 Speaker 2: Studio that use AI to fix things, to tweak things.

6:42 Speaker 1: I mean, it's so ingrained in everything, and it really has been with us for you know, some people act like, oh, AI it's this new thing.

6:51 Speaker 2: It's not.

6:52 Speaker 1: It's just becoming a lot more prevalent with access to tools like chat ebt and things like this. But AI, there's always been an element of AI, not always literally, but for a very long time in everything we do. I mean, look, even twenty years ago, you could go online, for example, and you could interact with chatbots. Maybe there's a particular service that you are having a problem with. Maybe you made a purchase through a website, for example, and your item never arrived. There's something wrong with it.

7:29 Speaker 1: So you go to the website and you try to contact someone to get some help with your purchase, and you end up talking to someone through a chat box. Right, You're talking to someone, but the person you're talking to doesn't seem to be able to help you very much, or they seem to be really easily confused by what you're trying to communicate to them. Why, Because it's not an actual person. It's a chatbot, it's a bot. It's AI that's been with us for a very long so it's not new. It's much more prevalent, especially over the last couple of years.

8:10 Speaker 1: It's much more prevalent than it was and will continue to be. It seems to be accelerating and unavoidable, but it's not perfect, and it makes mistakes.

8:25 Speaker 1: It's almost makes it kind of human in that sense. Right now, as it becomes more sophisticated, I presume it will make fewer and fewer mistakes, but it still makes mistakes. So in other words, again, I say all that to say, people are going to get caught up in this net. When I see these platforms saying well, we're going to ban any use of AI in anything that is uploaded to our platform, It's like, but how are you going to accurately detect it? And I know some will say, no, there's nothing to worry about here.

8:52 Speaker 1: You'd be surprised. I've had people tell me that, Matt, you'd be very surprised at how accurate AI can detect when there's AI being used. I'm a little bit skeptical because again I'm someone who has seen what happens when AI tells me, for example, that I've done something wrong on YouTube, when I didn't even do the thing that I'm being accused of by this bot, and good luck trying to talk to a real person, you know.

9:21 Speaker 2: Don't get me wrong.

9:22 Speaker 1: There's been a couple of instances where I've appealed strikes on my channel and one. But I've also lost some too that I shouldn't have lost. But again, it's it is AI. It's not a human being I'm talking to. So so that's my concern about this.

9:40 Speaker 2: Again.

9:40 Speaker 1: Ultimately, they can do whatever they want, it's their platform, but I worry about people getting caught up in the net who shouldn't be. It also says here again continuing with this article, This is from Music Businessworldwide dot com. It says band Camp said the new policy was driven by quote the sheer quantity of human creativity and passion that artists express on band Camp every single day. Users will be able to report suspected AI generated content through band Camp's reporting tools. The company says it reserves the right to remove music based on suspicion of AI generation.

10:11 Speaker 1: The company said it will update the policy as AI technology continues to develop. The announcement comes over four months since band camp launched a new thirteen dollars a month subscription service that is human curated. The service gives users access to monthly recorded selections, listening parties, recommendations, and exclusive artists content. Band Camp general manager Dan Melnick at the time said, quote, instead of algorithms, fans get human curated picks from some of the best DJs and journalists in their respective areas, exclusive interviews with artists, and community listening parties.

10:49 Speaker 1: Vibrant music scenes are made up of dja's journalists, fans, and artists, and band camp clubs reflect that as always, artists are paid fairly and at the heart of the experience.

11:01 Speaker 2: Unquote all right, well, I like that. I like that.

11:05 Speaker 1: Founded in two thousand and eight, band camp launched as a direct to consumer alternative to record labels for artists. It has since expanded its services to include features such as ticket live streaming, and vinyl pressing. Artists like Peter Gabriel and b York have placed their catalogs on the platform. All Right, I don't want to get into the whole history of band camp, but uh okay, and then it gets into some more details about band Camp. Oh, I'm skipping down though, because Spotify is mentioned here and I remember we talked about this on the show too, and I expressed the same concern when talking about Spotify removing AI generated music.

11:41 Speaker 1: Some artists are going to get caught in the net, it says here. Spotify in September said it removed more than seventy five million spammy tracks from its platform over the past year. Amid the explosion of generative AI tools, the streaming giant rolled out new policies for managing AIG generated content on its service to address that. In November, French streaming platform Deezer said it receives over fifty thousand fully AI generated tracks daily, or thirty four percent of all tracks uploaded to its platform each day.

12:16 Speaker 2: Oh my god, that's nuts. That is wild. Now. So that's band Camp's position. Now someone has.

12:27 Speaker 1: Offered a I don't know if rebuke is quite the right word, but there's an artist because you would think you would think recording artists would be in favor of what band camp is doing, and probably most are. But Holly Herndon says band Camp's AI ban is misguided. This comes from stereogum dot com. This went up just yesterday. Earlier this week, band Camp issued a blanket ban on generative AI and deep fake impersonations. The new measure makes band Camp an exception on the streaming landscape where AI music is becoming more and more inescapable.

13:05 Speaker 1: Most of the reactions to this bandcam announcement were positive, but one artist who's not applauding it is Holly Herndon, an experimental artist who has long messed around with what she sees as the artistic possibilities of AI technology. Holly Herndon has a PhD from Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, and she has made her most recent album, twenty nineteen's Proto with Spawn and AI Baby, curated by Herndon and her partner Matt Dryhurst. A few years ago, Herndon and Dryhurst launched Spawning, a tool that allows artists to choose whether or not their work will be used to train AI, and that work earned them Austria's first Digital Human Rights Award.

13:57 Speaker 1: Interesting, I didn't know that was the thing. On Wednesday, in response to Bandcamp's new policy, Herndon tweeted this, putting the ban in band Camp. It is a wicked problem, so I understand what they are trying to do. I'm sure the human moderators won't be banning artists exploring AI. Rather, I hope, will just be looking to filter out sound spam. The gray area will only get larger m HM. After a negative response to that tweet, Herndon elaborated with a thread. She said this, I understand why band camp is taking this measure, but it's a tourniquet.

14:39 Speaker 1: The human AI binary is not going to hold and will become a matter of superficial optics. I already have more authorship in my models than most pop stars do in their songs. People will already be using models to generate songs they then put a human filter on. Artists will integrate generated passages into they orchestrate, and will soon train their own models. Another protection might be to flag accounts it posts on an inhuman amount of content, but that too may seem retrograde. We live with infinite media now.

15:15 Speaker 1: I encourage platforms to be more curated, but enforcing a hard human AI binary is not the right way to address this long term. If an expert uses AI to help them write an article, they otherwise would not have the time to complete it will not be of less substance than a non expert with time on their hands writing something by hand. A practice or reputation of thought and work developed over time is the best filter. The contemporary demand for twenty four to seven content from people is the problem.

15:53 Speaker 1: So that's that's basically her argument. So she's concerned. She has some of the same concerns you, I mean from a little bit of a you know, from a different perspective.

16:02 Speaker 2: But but.

16:06 Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I think the tooth based is probably pretty far out of the tube at this point. As I like to say, Now, there's another element to this though, and this is this is the part that people don't talk about very much. But this came up on the show not long ago. These streaming platforms because of the rise of AI generated music and and how easy it is to make it, and and it is a form of spam. I think Holly Herndon referred to it as sound spam when you just if you just make a whole bunch of AI tracks and just upload them all at once to Spotify and bandcamp, YouTube and wherever else, it does cause a problem.

16:47 Speaker 1: Uh, in terms of storage because you know, we like to think of you know, it's just data. It's not it's not something, uh you know that you can touch or feel or it's or hold it. It's data is Therefore, there's just a It doesn't take up any actual room anywhere. You just have this infinite amount of storage space to put data. But that's not true.

17:10 Speaker 2: You have to.

17:12 Speaker 1: You do have to create the physical mechanisms with which to store that data, and you do have to make more of those if you more and more data you have to store. So if you think about this, I don't know the numbers offhand how many different song files are on band Camp and Spotify, and obviously it's in the millions, perhaps in the billions, I don't know. But if if that's all been ratcheted up exponentially because of the rise and the ease with which you can create AI generated music, then that's a problem.

17:45 Speaker 1: So of course they have to find ways to filter this stuff out. And then I found this. This is on Music Businessworldwide dot com And this just went up a couple of days ago.

17:57 Speaker 2: Music streaming.

17:58 Speaker 1: Music streaming platform now host a quarter of a billion tracks.

18:04 Speaker 2: Where does it end?

18:07 Speaker 1: And uh, this is Uh, this is short, but it just kind of gives us an idea of the scope of the concern here, So it says here there were two hundred and fifty three million music tracks sitting on audio streaming services at the close of twenty twenty five yep over a quarter of a million. According to new data from Lumini's new annual report, that was that was up only thirty seven point nine million tracks, an average of one hundred and six thousand uploads per day. Most of this music was far from popular.

18:51 Speaker 1: Almost half of the two hundred and fifty three million files hosted by audio platforms received fewer than ten streams last year, Almost three quarters of it received fewer than one hundred annual streams, and nearly nine tenths of it received fewer than one thousand annual streams. We're obviously a long long way from Apple's promise to deliver one thousand songs.

19:14 Speaker 2: In your pocket with the iPod.

19:16 Speaker 1: Yes, as AI generated music proliferates, are we now just a few short years from the likes of Spotify hosting quote one billion songs in your pocket. And wouldn't such a tidal wave of content inevitably swamp digital services while hurting artists, songwriters and the perceived value of music amongst consumers.

19:38 Speaker 2: This is all.

19:39 Speaker 1: These are all legitimate concerns. In my opinion, I don't know what the answer is. By the way, off, I'm not here to offer solutions because I have no idea what the answer is to this. But these are legitimate concerns. Universal Music Group CEO and chairman Sir Lucian Grange certainly thinks so, and he's keen to stop it from happening. Last week, Grange delivered a stark warning about AI generated content overwhelming streaming platforms. In his twenty twenty six New Year's Address. He wrote, quote, validating business models that failed to respect artists' work and creativity and promote the exponential growth of AI slop on streaming platforms is a grave disservice to artists', songwriters and all of us who work in music unquote, this warning was not theoretical.

20:27 Speaker 1: Last year Spotify removed think think about these numbers. Last year, Spotify removed over seventy five million spammy tracks from its platform, while rival Deezer reported receiving fifty thousand fully AI generated tracks per day, accounting for thirty four percent.

20:49 Speaker 2: Of all daily uploads.

20:54 Speaker 1: So think about that. So on any given day, deezer, what's being uploaded? A third of it a third is AI generated tracks. Yet despite this aggressive purging of content, the total amount of music and the global audio streaming ecosystem continued to soar. In twenty twenty five. Discussion around tracks that attract fewer than one thousand streams per year is, of course particularly relevant. Here illuminates new numbers help illustrate why, with UMG's encouragement, audio streaming services moved toward artist centric style payment models a couple of years ago, and why these models are now increasingly being stress tested by AI.

21:38 Speaker 2: In early twenty twenty.

21:39 Speaker 1: Four, Spotify introduced a threshold requiring tracks to attract at least one thousand plays in a twelve month period to qualify for royalty payouts, which a lot of people were mad about.

21:48 Speaker 2: They were critical of I get it though at.

21:50 Speaker 1: The time Spotify said ninety nine point five percent of streams on its platform went to tracks exceeding the one thousand annual streams threshold.

21:58 Speaker 2: Under its new.

21:59 Speaker 1: Policy, it's said each of those tracks would earn more with payouts previously going to sub one thousand stream tracks redirected back into the royalty pool. Deezer's artist centric model, launched in partnership with you Universal and Warner, achieved a similar aim, providing a double boost in royalties to artists with a minimum of one thousand streams per month and five hundred unique listeners.

22:21 Speaker 2: This goes on.

22:23 Speaker 1: There's a lot of numbers here, and we don't have time to get into all of it, but the article isn't that long, so if you want to check it out, Music Businessworldwide dot com, which is a great website for music news if you're interested in the industry and so forth. But we are rapidly running out of time, so I think we will close with that