8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

An Update: What The Hell Is Going On With Soundcloud?

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I really don’t mean to be posting about SoundCloud every single day, but this new article from FACT, nicely summing up the service’s recent headaches and the cause for these issues, is too good to pass up.

FACT:

Moves like this and the suspension of Dummy’s account aren’t great PR for SoundCloud. In both cases there’s no evidence to suggest they’ve done anything to warrant having their accounts shut down, and it affects the livelihood of both. Dummy, like many music sites, relies on its account to host track premieres from small artists, who in turn get the boost from Dummy’s following. If a music magazine were to lose its SoundCloud account, it could suffer a loss of traffic from a lack of premieres, and smaller artists lose a platform for exposure. But anecdotal evidence suggests this isn’t necessarily the fault of SoundCloud, but of heavy-handed requests from major labels over a licensing impasse that’s been going on for over a year.



SoundCloud has an official line on copyrighted material, but much of what goes on behind the scenes is still unknown to most people. In Dummy’s case, the trigger for its problems was material it claims had been sitting there for years. The goalposts seem to be moved on a daily basis, and nobody really has any idea why, or to what extent.



FACT asked Sony Music for comment on both their policy regarding SoundCloud account takedowns and Dummy’s allegations that it was given the tracks to host by the company itself, but Sony has yet to respond. Sony has every right to ask SoundCloud to remove illegally uploaded or remixed material, but its treatment of Dummy seems especially heavy-handed given the situation, and its silence on the matter makes it seem as if it’s happy to let SoundCloud take the blame.



The potential loss of the platform would have fairly serious implications, not just for small artists but the music industry as a whole. If the service goes the way of Grooveshark, it won’t just be underground artists like Plastician that lose their access to a wealth of undiscovered talent – it’ll be the majors losing their access to the next generation of hitmakers too.

“We Don’t Need Other Worlds. We Need A Mirror.”

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Here’s an excellent – and somewhat poetic – video essay by Kogonada exploring the themes of one of my favorite films, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris:

Slate:

Solaris was adapted from the novel of the same name by Stanisław Lem, but ignores most of Lem’s astrobiological theories to focus on the relationships between characters—deliberately, as Kogonaga clearly outlines. Kogonaga smartly points out that Tarkovsky’s film, unlike Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is about humanity, not technology.

Personalized Spaces, DJ Curators, And The Speedy Evolution Of General Licensing

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This article on SoulCycle’s DJ-fueled fitness phenomenon explains how the growth in performance royalty may not just be attributed to ‘new media’, but also to general licensing in physical spaces (clubs, restaurants, fitness clubs, etc) thanks to increased personalization and the mainstream integration of DJs as curators. Thus the Performing Rights Organizations (PROs) need to update how they calculate distribution of these royalties as it’s based on an outdated system of presumption.

With respect to distribution, the procedures used by the PROs today are perhaps as inadequate as the licensing fees themselves. While technology makes it possible to track every song actually performed in any given (fitness club) spin class, general licensing revenues are not distributed with this data. Rather, the money received is put into a larger pool, and mostly distributed using a number of inaccurate proxies such as a sample of television and radio performances that overwhelmingly favors “Top 40” hits.



The genesis of this allocation makes sense if you consider that, at the time this licensing category was originally created, there was no cheap, reliable method to track general licensing. Today, several companies, such as the tech start-up Music Play Analytics, are producing inexpensive, unobtrusive and simple song identification technology on a B2B basis. Requiring chain-wide music usage reports, in an easily digestible format, is hardly a burden to either party.



Apart from fitness clubs, many retailers, restaurants, hotels and other general licensees are increasingly personalizing their music offerings. This results in more songs from niche genres getting more exposure than ever before. And nowhere is this truer than at SoulCycle where they have whole classes devoted to a specific artist, DJ or theme (like 90s hip-hop or 70’s funk). Continuing to distribute these license fees by following a homogenized pop radio chart defies logic and underserves the vast majority of PRO affiliate songwriters and publishers.


This has been a problem since the rise of non-top 40 DJ music over four decades ago. That underground nightclub that only books the most cutting edge DJs, and dutifully pays their required ASCAP and BMI fees? Chances are those fees have been going to mainstream songwriters, not the ones actually being played in the club. The time for incorporating song identification technology is now … device installation should come with a venue’s PRO membership.

As an aside, some other countries with stricter performance royalty laws have attempted to solve the problem in unwieldy ways that make one understand why our current system was adopted. I know many clubs in Italy and Mexico will make a DJ write down information for every song played in a set – or, alternately, any song that could potentially be played, if the DJ doesn’t plan sets – so these details can be reported to that country’s PRO. Not only is this a big headache for the DJ, but there’s no guarantee for accuracy; one DJ friend told me that he once listed a large number of my songs (even though he didn’t actually play them) to give me a ‘boost.’ I didn’t end up seeing an influx of royalty from Mexico because of that, but it’s the thought that counts.

SoundCloud’s ‘Three Strikes’ Policy Claims Another High Profile Victim

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Dummy:

Soundcloud have frozen Dummy’s account which we have grown to over 21,000 followers having used and supported the service since it first launched. Although the page is still visible, we can no longer access to repost or upload tracks.



The reason Soundcloud has given is that we have received three strikes for content that we have uploaded which is in breach of major record company Sony’s copyright, although Soundcloud have so far not told us which tracks are in question.



Soundcloud have stated if we can persuade Sony to remove the objections then they will remove the strikes to restore and unlock our account. However, under instruction from Sony, Soundcloud are not allowed to tell us who to contact within the organisation. We have only ever uploaded music that Sony have sent us to promote, so it seems ridiculous that they would want to shut down our account and prevent us from supporting new music signed to their label in the future.


This is an update to yesterday’s post, and more evidence that the pressure on SoundCloud is getting to deep sea levels. Not that I’m advocating favored exceptions to SC’s policy, but it hardly seems like a good idea to target a respected and somewhat influential music site like Dummy. And obviously Sony isn’t the one getting tarnished in the eyes of the public. Perhaps SoundCloud should be more transparent in their take-down notices as to why certain content is not permitted, spinning it as more of a case of boycotting content from those who won’t play nice at the bargaining table. All of this backwards-bending and high stakes negotiating won’t mean anything if SoundCloud emerges with a MySpace-like public indifference.

Matthew Herbert’s Next Album Takes The Form Of A Book

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FACT:

Matthew Herbert has announced that his next album will take the form of a book called ‘The Music’. Herbert is crowdfunding the book, from which he intends readers to be able to construct the end result.



“For my next record, I will write a description of the record rather than make the music itself,” Herbert says. “It will be divided into chapters in the same way that an album is separated in to tracks. This is that book.”



“Each chapter will describe in precise detail what sounds to use, how they should be organised and occasionally an approximation of what the net result should sound like. Crucially it must be able to be recorded for real given enough time, access and resources. However, I will never make the record. It will always just be a description of the music itself.”


Brilliant. There are so many directions this could go upon release of the ‘album.’ If fans and other artists choose to participate with their own interpretations of the described songs then this project might keep evolving for some time. Herbert once again tickles my fancy for creative games and I’ll certainly be following this latest endeavor closely.

Data To Date: The Rapid Rise Of Social And Streaming

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Next Big Sound has released a fascinating industry report on the current state of social media and streaming:

Streaming is fast becoming the primary way we consume music, whether that be through the more interactive on-demand services, algorithmically-driven lean-back experiences, the increasingly popular format of human curation and playlists (think Beats One radio or Spotify’s discovery feature), or some combination of the above.



What really blew our minds when tallying these totals was that the number of online plays in just the first six months of the year far exceeds what we tracked in all of 2014, even before the addition of Pandora’s data. Let’s take a moment to consider what impact this could have on the music industry at large. For musicians, their piece of the streaming pie will only continue to grow.


It would seem streaming is here to stay. Is this the final step in the format wars? I mean, what could possibly come after streaming as a music delivery format? Honestly, I’m sort of open to the idea of a combination of streaming, downloads (if you gotta have it), and vinyl or deluxe physical packages as our musical diet from here on out.

The Next Big Sound report also has some news about SoundCloud that would normally be encouraging for them. Instead, it will probably just add to the pressure they are receiving from the majors:

SoundCloud’s play counts continue to climb at a steady rate year over year. Next Big Sound tracked close to 5 billion plays on the service in May 2015, which is twice that of the same month a year before, and five-fold the year prior. At the same time, unless you’re living under said rock, you know that the social streaming service has long been in ongoing negotiations with labels for direct licensing deals, reportedly with the intention of launching a subscription service.



If slow and steady wins the race, SoundCloud could plausibly compete with more mainstream platforms such as Spotify or Rdio. However, SoundCloud provides a valuable niche service in that it is optimized for content such as mix tapes and DJ sets. If striking direct deals with rights holders – integral to legitimizing the service and monetizing content – means they are essentially strong-armed into charging users for a service they were once offered at no cost, they’ll want to see that growth rate remain as stable as it has been.


I sincerely wish them the best of luck with that.


There’s some further dissection of Next Big Sound’s report from Forbes:

You read that right: one trillion streams. That’s the number tracked by Next Big Sound in the first half of 2015 across YouTube, Vevo, Spotify, Rdio, SoundCloud, Vimeo and Pandora. In other words, the average Earthling has streamed more than 140 songs over the past six months. There should be no doubt not only that streaming is here to stay, but that it offers the music industry a level of reach never previously seen in human history.

Living In Fear Of Soundcloud’s Take-Down Robot

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FACT:

In April, we reported that SoundCloud’s new copyright infringement software was removing DJ mixes from various websites, including FACT’s.



Things appear to have got worse. London internet station Radar Radio has today had its entire account taken down, despite clocking up over 900,000 plays.



We spoke to Radar Radio, who told us that they were originally told that they had seven days to sort out any copyright infringements on their page, but the account was closed the next day.



Mystifyingly, on top of that DJ Plastician has had his account suspended over a track that he produced, released and owns the publishing rights to.


Behold, once again, the perils of automatic copyright-detection software combined with intense legal pressure from outside forces. There’s no real mystery why Radar Radio was penalized — I’m sure they were posting shows with content that triggered the detection software — but the DJ who claims to have ownership of every facet of the removed track seems to have been a victim of electronic misidentification. (Update: Another possibility I just considered is that his distributor may have claimed the copyright which triggered the take-down. It wouldn’t seem that a distributor would hold the necessary rights to be able to do this, but I do know — from experience — that INgrooves was causing some take-downs for a while. If that’s still happening or how common a practice this is among digital distribution entities is unknown to me.)

I was told that SoundCloud had a ‘three strikes’ rule, where an account would be terminated if this threshold of copyright infringement had been reached. This was worrisome for me as I have a lot of Q-Burns Abstract Message content on my SoundCloud account that have master rights ownership by various entities, though I am the songwriter and publisher. Legally the master holders do have the right to flag my content, but I am always able to work it out with them to keep these tracks live on my account. But every time SoundCloud updates this detection software (or new audio fingerprints are added en masse) then I’m confronted with a number of new take-downs to dispute. It’s annoying, but even more annoying is the fear of suddenly acquiring three take-downs at once for my own compositions, and then I’m going through the hassle of reinstating my terminated account.

One should not have to use a service — and pay for it, as I am — while being fearful that it could be taken from you for reasons outside of your control. Surely this can’t be the way forward.

I am pretty certain SoundCloud are sick about all this and wish it weren’t the case. Indeed, our friends at Universal, Sony, et al are to blame. And credit where credit is due — when I do have to deal with a take-down, SoundCloud are always reasonably swift to consider my dispute and have the track reinstated. As always, I remain interested, though not necessarily optimistic, in how the company works to resolve their own dispute with the major label bullies.

Musicians Sue Universal, Sony And Warner Over Streaming Payments

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Music Business Worldwide:

The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) claims that the majors signed a collective bargaining agreement in 1994, and further amendments over the next decade, in which it committed to paying AFM members 0.5% of all receipts from digital statutory and non-statutory music licenses – including audio streams, ‘non-permanent downloads’ and ringback tones – both in North America and abroad.



The AFM’s Pension Fund has now filed a lawsuit in New York claiming its independent auditors recently discovered that the majors have failed to make promised contributions in three areas: (i) from streaming receipts outside the US; (ii) from non-permanent downloads outside the US; and (iii) from sales of ringback tones in the US and abroad.



“The record companies should stop playing games about their streaming revenue and pay musicians and their pension fund every dime that is owed,” said Ray Hair, AFM International President. “Fairness and transparency are severely lacking in this business. We are changing that.”


We’ll probably see a lot more of this over the next several years as we continue to navigate our covered wagons through the wild west of the streaming economy. It’s common knowledge — almost to the point of being grudgingly accepted — that the majors (and many independents) practice fuzzy mathematics when it comes to bookkeeping. But this will get tougher to obscure as the exact science of calculating ones and zeroes connecting to a user’s device replaces hand-counting the number of CD units leaving on a truck from the distributor’s warehouse. Keeping the gatekeepers honest (Spotify, Pandora, etc) will be the key. They aren’t angels, but they don’t have as much of an incentive for smoke-and-mirrors as a record label does.

8D Projects: Kartech – Larrisa (Wind Horse Records)

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We’ve been working with the New Delhi-based deep house label Wind Horse Records since the early days of 8DPromo and are excited to be involved in the continuing growth of this ambitious imprint. As Wind Horse moves into its twenty-fifth release, there is more of a global feel, with the Indian talent that label-founder Hamza works hard to expose rubbing shoulders with renowned producers outside of South Asia.

This latest single from Thakur Kartik AKA Kartech exhibits the exotic musicality and expressive range of dynamics that set Wind Horse apart from other house music labels. Indian producers Llewellyn Hilt and Aaryan are on hand to remix, as are Alvaro Hylander, a prolific DJ and label owner (DeepWit Recordings) from Denmark-via-Spain, and UK duo City Soul Project. It’s our latest promotions project here at 8DPromo … here’s a preview of the “Larrisa” single: