Zircon in the Mine: AI Music on Bandcamp
In creating this blog, one of my goals was to, weekly, go sifting through the "Discover" function on Bandcamp and find some hidden gems, report back here, and shine a little light (even if it's just illuminating for myself) on some fresh indie tunes. There'll be one tomorrow as the first Bandcamp Friday feature.
What I did not expect to find was a proliferation of clearly AI generated music posing as the real deal—especially in the folk and acoustic category.
I came across a record called "Lanternfolk" by a band called Kosava in the freshly release section. Their bio said that they "kick up dust where Slavic tales and fierce riffs collide" and that I would find "wild, raw storytelling backed by balalaika fury and guitar thunder". OK, there's words in there like Slavic, storytelling, and balalaika that are like catnip for me, so I'll bite.
I start streaming the first song, and something feels off. The band claims to be from Batumi, Georgia, but they sound like an amalgam of every American stomp-folk band you've heard. There's also only a distant acoustic guitar on the track, and definitely no balalaika. The production is thin and tinny and undistinguished. Not charmingly inept, like any number of bedroom folk songs I've heard and made, but just like someone hit the "produce" button on a cheap plugin and didn't check the results.
The illusion of there being a real band here quickly fell apart. A different singer starts the second track, and on examination, the lyrics parallel the first song's in odd ways. Both first verses reference coins, both second verses start with reference to boots. Now into listening to the second song, the music starts to fall apart in the middle, with odd time signature changes and mistakes that aren't quite interesting enough to be jazz. I don't think these are real people.
A quick internet search for the band discovers nothing except a review of their record on a German music site with what appears to be an AI generated, or at least heavily doctored image. The review is positive, but honestly, may also be AI penned. There is no member list, production credits, song credits, or anything else on the Bandcamp page. They are a band with no internet presence of any kind, or any record of their existence.
I'm 99% certain this is an AI band. 99.9%, even. On the .1% chance I'm wrong, I apologize to Kosava and the Georgian music community.
My suspicions are confirmed by going back to a filtered list of recent releases in the acoustic genre on Bandcamp. A band called Lithael, also from Batumi, Georgia, promises "moonlit whispers between old willows" on their album "Mossbringer", but it looks like madlibs of the Kosava album and sounds about as weird and middle of the road as the former. Here's "Swampmouth Jubilee" by Spuddle, another variant of the same formula. "Inkspun", by Quillforge. "Grafton's Circle" by Meadwise. My personal favorite, "Guilded Grooves" by Minstreliq, which promises "lutes and hurdy-gurdys danc[ing] with MPC rhythms—monastery echoes under candlelight for thy headphone quest".
These were all easy to identify by their similar album art, similar lyrical construction, and the fact that all the "bands" hail from Batumi, Georgia—which, if any of these bands were real, would have the most eclectic and weird folk scene in the known world, but sadly, I don't think there's really monastery-core folk or Slavic folk-stomp going on in large quantities there.
If these were the easy ones to find, how many other ones are better hidden, better produced, and better edited hiding among records by humans? I developed a pretty quick radar for it while scanning the new releases, but the records themselves are not flagged as AI creations on the site, and some of these have been live since early June at least, so I don't think Bandcamp is flagging them either.
It's hard enough being an indie musician trying to stake a virtual homestead in a crowded digital space without having to share it with badly rendered polydactyl nonhumans and music made by no-one for no-one.
Simply stated: Bandcamp needs to better detect and remove AI generated music and protect the hard working musicians who strive every day to perfect their craft, release their music, and actually exist as real human beings.
In a recent Forbes interview, Bandcamp editorial director J Edward Keyes said that he had "not noticed any significant uptick on records that are like created with the help of AI". But it's there. Some of it is extremely evident, like the linked records above. The rest is hiding waiting to be discovered.
You might ask "so what?". In a free market, the best music will rise to the top, and if that's human beings, then so be it, and if it's AI, then I guess that's what the market wants, right? Except that music isn't a free market. Money gets you exposure. The manipulation of algorithms—which is exactly the kind of thing AI excels at—gets you exposure. Curation is difficult. Discovery is next to impossible. The deck is already stacked against smaller and independent artists. They don't need it any harder.