Bandcamp’s recent decision to ban music with heavy AI intervention is striking hot debate within the industry. Upon initial glance, it may simply read as a noble pursuit to defend artists and human creativity, but that framing overlooks the economic reality of producing as an indie artist. For many artists, AI tools lower the cost of high-quality production and removes a major barrier getting in the way of their success.
Matthew "Mattske" Berman, Owner of media company Liberty Rose Studios and a media professional with a diverse background as a creative director, writer, and media producer, is one of those musicians seeing clear benefits from AI. For Berman, as an independent artist who has felt the frustration of the industry's walled gardens firsthand, the technology offers opportunity.
"I’m the artist whose job is being threatened right now," he says. "I’ve never had a million-dollar studio or a huge label budget, so these tools are how I can finally make professional-quality music on my own." Berman argues the central flaw in Bandcamp’s policy is a fundamental misunderstanding of how artists use the technology. Modern production actively blurs the line between human and machine, making any attempt at detection nearly impossible. While some companies are developing detection tools that are now commercially available, Berman remains skeptical.
- AI already in the mix: "Bandcamp says they're going to ban AI music, but I don't know what spectral analysis could ever prove it was machine-made. So much of what you hear in a modern pop song has been run through so many plug-ins and compressors that it no longer sounds like a person singing into an old ribbon mic."
- Show your work: Berman posits that in a complicated technological landscape, an outright ban creates a slippery slope. "If you're going to do that, then are we going to ask other producers to submit their entire process to Spotify? Will they have to report all the plug-ins they used, what settings they were at, and exactly which notes this guitarist played versus that guitarist? You would have to expose the entire creative process."
Much of the technical debate around AI, Berman suggests, is driven less by concerns about creativity than by fear. Innovative tools that drastically lower the cost of music production threaten industry gatekeepers, turning AI into a convenient target for a legacy industry already under financial pressure. Meanwhile, many musicians are embracing the technology. For underfunded musicians, platforms like Suno and Udio represent a leveling of the playing field that poses a direct threat to legacy labels.
- A dollar and a dream: "There's an elitism in punishing independent, underfunded artists for using a tool that takes the cost of making a song from $5,000 to a dollar," he says. "That's incredibly threatening to a record label whose major artists spend millions of dollars."
- The fear of the new: He also sees the industry as fearful of AI's potential radical originality. "The record labels are masking this whole thing with the threat of impersonation, but they're really afraid of originality. They're afraid that someone could make 15 different viable country-pop singers, and Taylor Swift will only be reserved two Billboard Top 10 spots a month. The real problem is that many people can now create great stuff that sounds nothing like anything we've heard, and audiences will flock to that."
- A convenient villain: Berman also highlights that concerns of AI flooding platforms with "slop" misdiagnose the problem. He believes it's more about economics than creativity. "The industry has a streaming fraud problem that predates the AI slop phenomenon. There are already practices where fans of major artists act as a botnet, streaming songs on old devices concurrently to inflate an artist's streaming numbers. When it comes to AI, it's a whole picture scenario, not just a music problem."
While the industry struggles to define a hard line on the topic, Berman sheds a light that plenty of independent artists are using AI in radical ways, and building work they normally couldn't without financial backing. For him, AI in music isn't about whether or not it should be used, but how artists wield it. "Music is supposed to make people feel something," he says. "If you’re able to do that, it shouldn’t really matter what tool you use to get there."