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/

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Tie it to in-person concerts and it might actually work as a business, as well as logistically

Don't give ticketmaster any ideas.

Baudelaire and many others said the same thing about photography.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.