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.
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/
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.
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.
There are a couple different solutions, depending on where you have your music.
For organizing, as another user suggested, Picard is your friend. You point it to your collection and can have it move and correct file tags all in one go. It even has default naming scripts for folders so it will go [Album Artist]->[Album], and if that doesn't suit your fancy you can edit the script however you'd like.
If where you store the music is all local (on your machine), then there are hundreds of great local players depending on platform that you can just point towards your music collection and shuffle. I have a massive collection myself that I will usually browse through randomly ordered albums until something catches my eye.
If you're looking to stream it to your own devices, then you're looking at something like a subsonic compatible server will offer a wide variety of options and platforms for playback. I go through some of this in more detail in a blog post as well, with some specifics https://illegal.solutions/posts/streaming_sucks.
If you keep each album in its own folder, basically any app will be able to use the MP3 tags to keep things organized for you. Really even the folders aren't needed, you could just have a huge directory full of every MP3, but that would be annoying to deal with for other reasons.
Something like https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ can be used if you want to get more complicated. For instance I like to keep albums in folders per release year.
> 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.
You open the music you download with something like IINA or Doppler, and you're off to the races. What exactly is the hurdle?
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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.
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.
> Independently-released music is a huge red flag.
You've never listened to anything on Soundcloud and found it good?
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
> 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.
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.
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.
I went to see an orchestra performance. They literally just only made sound by dragging their bows across the strings on their "instruments". I can confidently say that is not music.
> I can confidently say that house is not music.
Hey, this is really fucking stupid.
I would respect it if he followed up with “the only real music is dubstep”.
People engage with music in different ways. Some people focus on lyrics and the connection they make. Other people largely ignore lyrics and focus on the rhythms and patterns. Both are valid and both are very human. We do not need gatekeepers coming in and judging what is music and what is not music.
House music can bring me as much joy as listening to Bach performed by a skilled ensemble. It depends on where I am at mentally. Both are valid forms of human expression.
It's pretty clear you didn't get beyond the very basics of music production or house music if you think this. I'd love to hear your masterfully produced house track to prove me wrong, though.
And yet there are well respected composers who intentionally copy/paste. Repetition is key to minimalism, for instance.
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.
-> Downrank( 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.
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.
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.
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.
junk food is a common misconception about electronic music with ppl who have only listened to trash versions of it on social media.
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.
There's a human behind AI-generated music too. A human writes the prompts. Your distinction seems rather arbitrary.
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.
I think a lot of songs about bad break-ups were written by talented musicians without actual experience of a bad break-up, riffing on the corpus of songs they'd heard about bad break-ups.
Like, a lot of times you're just engaging with someone's desire to have made a song, and what they felt about some songs that someone else made.
You are describing empathy, a human experience.
Even if you generate the soundtrack, if you set the lyrics it can be great music. At least for one person, who chose the lyrics. I set some poems on music and I absolutely love the results.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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
I'd love to see AI take a stab at a Meshuggah or Dillinger Escape Plan clone.
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.
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.
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.
> Tie it to in-person concerts and it might actually work as a business, as well as logistically
Don't give ticketmaster any ideas.
this is called the pub
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).
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.
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.
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.
Baudelaire and many others said the same thing about photography.
You’re gonna have to be more specific. They said what same thing?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There was an interesting study recently which showed that if you put a human-written short story up against an AI-written short story, the AI wins. But if you put an anthology of AI-written short stories up against an anthology of human-written stories, the human-written anthology wins.
I see the same thing in music. I accidentally clicked on a couple of AI albums in YouTube. On a minute-by-minute basis they aren't necessarily bad. But if you keep listening, even though the stream is nominally an hour long, it's the same couple of minutes over and over again, more or less.
In the case of music I could see a coder preferring that for their background noise, but for direct listening for its own sake, once the initial impression wears off there isn't anything left.
I'm not necessarily saying this from an anti-AI position, either. This is just the current reality of the situation. At the moment, AI art has a very flattening effect.
What's more, I spent some time at Suno and tried to get it off the beaten track. I was able to get it to create broken music with chopped up words and instruments that were confused about what they were by trying to make an excessively-interesting combination of genres. It broke before I could get anything really interesting going on musically. Possibly if someone spent a lot of time with the higher-touch music tracking tools they could get something interesting happening but I had enough of the same problems there that I bailed. Even if you try to inject your own inspiration, the AI has a very strong flattening effect.
Text I think you could probably do better with. I have not tried to write fiction but I've done a lot of non-fiction writing with it at work. But no matter how I prompt it, it is always flabby. I can style-shift it away from Default LLM Voice, and it's at least somewhat more concise than that, but I can't get it to be truly concise.
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.
> 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.
Yes, and AI music generation (like auto-tune before it) enables people to choose their celebrities from a wider pool than "the type of dork who practices guitar for 10000 hours".
Frankly, this is also how I mostly listen to music - I set a song or two I like, then I let auto-discovery keep adding to the list.
If I happen to like it, I hit thumbs up/like. Otherwise I ignore it.
I sometimes go through and browse musicians, mainly to see if they have other songs I might like, but generally speaking... it's not high on my list of priorities. Then again, I don't give a shit about the "pop" aspect of music at all. It's mainly background noise I put on while doing something else.
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As an aside:
> 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.
I think this is where it gets weird, and I think you're pretty solidly incorrect here. Samplers and grooveboxes absolutely play music by themselves. I think there's also a weird world where things like "Girl Talk" are somewhat spiritual successors to AI music...
Ex - I definitely love girl talk, and I'm not in any way implying that those albums don't take skill and taste, but he's literally just playing samples of other artists. If that's real music (and I'd argue strongly that it IS real music) then I think I struggle to rule out AI generated songs that are edited by someone (and if you've used this tooling, it still requires lots of editing).
> Samplers and grooveboxes absolutely play music by themselves.
I disagree. You cannot take your Akai MPC out of the box and ask it to play music. You have to load samples, you have to arrange them and you have to instruct it to play. That seems like a far cry to me from "playing themselves." You still have to... write the music.
> Very different things – an electric guitar doesn’t play music by itself.
And a model does not play good music by itself. Only slop if your contribution is nil. Models are more like pianos than parrots.
You're correct that AI will probably end up producing the majority of music no one cares about. Like the muzak you hear on elevators. Or for people that just put on a playlist at work and don't really care much beyond having some background noise.
When you're paying attention, and if you actually care about art and music as human expression, then it will matter. And maybe AI music will still "fool" someone then. Maybe we'll discover the next Michael Jackson was just prompting their way to the top of the charts. But that won't really be the point, just like it wasn't the point when everyone discovered that Milli Vanilli were faking it.
People don't like liars. And using AI to generate art is lying. You didn't make it, the AI that did make it was only possible because it collectively stole from every human musician and artist before it. You can wrap it up however you like, but at the end of the day its just a lie.
And yeah there's some nuance here. Lets take Milli Vanilli for example. They were considered frauds because they weren't actually singing on their tracks. What if they had been singing, but using autotune? I don't know where you draw the line but for me its somewhere around people who have no appreciation of the amount of effort that goes into producing art that think they can create it whole cloth from a couple of prompts.
> 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.
Consumption vs. Appreciation in a single pair of comments, what a beautiful dichotomy of the human experience of art.
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.