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DJ Set Monetization Platform Dubset Gets Monetized

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We haven’t heard much from Dubset in a while. Like all good start-ups, they’ve been biding their time collecting cash. Via Hypebot:

Dubset Media has scored a $4 million Series A funding round, led by Cue Ball Capital. Founded in 20o8, the company had previously closed two funding rounds for undisclosed rounds from investors including Rhapsody and Three Six Zero.



Dubset’s MixBANK technology identifies musical recordings used in mixes and remixes, determining the appropriate rights holders (a DJ mix could have as many as 100 different rights holders), and simultaneously clearing the mix or remix across all rights holders. That enables record labels and music publishers to set permissions for access via a simple rules-based system which enables catalogs to be efficiently monetized and precludes the need to conduct time consuming searches and initiate claims.



Music Business Worldwide:

Dubset enables record labels and music publishers to set permissions for access via a rules-based system which aims to prevent the need for time-consuming searches and initiate claims.



Last year, the company signed agreements with Spotify and Apple Music for its system to be used on their platforms – potentially allowing user-generated/amateur remix content to be uploaded onto the services for the first time.



We’re still waiting for this technology (or something like it) to make serious waves in the monetization game.

Previously and Previously.

The Endurance of Hype Machine

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Technical.ly Brooklyn:

The Greenpoint-based Hype Machine is a website that conglomerates music blogs and forms music charts out of what the blogs are covering. The more blogs are writing about a particular song, the higher it is on the Hype Machine’s Popular chart. As music blogs tend to be on the early adopter side of the industry, the songs you hear on the Hype Machine’s popular playlist are unlikely to be those you hear on the radio, or Spotify for that matter.



The site grew to become a place where tastemakers would go to hear new music, and, thus, a critical part of the music industry. In 2008, Billboard described the Hype Machine as “One of today’s most groundbreaking online music services … emerging as a juggernaut of growing influence.”



But the world moves on. Where Hype Machine was well-positioned in the new universe of music blogs, the industry has continued changing. People still write and follow music blogs, to be sure, but not as they once did, when Vampire Weekend went from unknown to indie kings off the strength of blog buzz.



“It definitely changed the type of blogs that are out there, it’s way more professional [now],” said Volodkin. “And that’s another thing I’m thinking about, too. If we don’t have blogs in the same way we did what are some other ways we can accommodate?”



It may surprise you how popular the aged (in internet years) Hype Machine is among young starting-out independent artists. Getting massive blog notice and thus moving up the Hype Machine chart is a strategic priority among the SoundCloud set, even more so than Spotify plays and Pitchfork reviews. As the article alludes, it’s one of the last outlets for breaking emerging / unsigned artists. However, the purity of the process has been tainted by pay-for-play blogs and repost channels, and many young artists have no problem ponying up for a blog placement.

Facebook’s inevitable foray into music streaming could harness some of Hype Machine’s approach by utilizing social media shares, posts, and mentions to build its own automated music charts (much like Hype Machine presently does with its Twitter chart). Integrating a streaming service with an already vibrant social media community has innovative potential and, somehow, is uncharted territory.

Fun Fun Fun at the Weddingbahn

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Last Wednesday I was honored to attend the wedding of my longtime close friends David and Jennifer, who opted to transform their ceremony into the most delightful homage to influential electronic music heroes Kraftwerk. I’ve known David since my somewhat misanthropic college years in northern Louisiana, and I remember our shared love of Kraftwerk as present even then. Of course, David reportedly went on to fully exemplify the Kraftwerk lifestyle, and the ‘Weddingbahn’ is only the latest episode in this couple’s meisterplan.

I was thrilled to be on hand to not only DJ at Weddingbahn, but I also recorded some very special wedding music. Check out several photos (mostly taken by the intrepid Jon Wolding), read a couple online accounts from the local press, and have a listen to two tracks I specifically recorded for Weddingbahn (featuring vocoder contributions by @pimpdaddynash), all below:


→ Tampa Bay Times: German ’80s Band Inspires ‘Kraftwerk’ Wedding

→ Creative Loafing: This Tampa Couple had Full-On Kraftwerk Nuptials

Update: Jennifer just posted a wonderful ‘behind the scenes’ recap on her blog.

DJ Shadow Dissects “Mutual Slump”

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The often excellent Song Exploder podcast has dropped an episode featuring DJ Shadow pulling apart his seminal 1996 track “Mutual Slump”:

It’s difficult to overstate just how much of a creative gut-punch DJ Shadow’s early recordings were to those of us producing electronic music at the time. I remember how the pre-Entroducing singles on Mo’Wax – such as “Lost & Found (S.F.L.)” – totally blew my mind and forced me to raise my studio game. I know I wasn’t alone.

I met Josh Davis / DJ Shadow at a record show in Austin in the early 2000s before one of my gigs. After introducing myself he laughed and said, “ohhh, now I know what my friend meant when he told me DJ Q-Bert was in town.”

On Exclusives and Windowing

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Jonathan Galkin, Co-Founder of DFA Records, in PIAS Blog:

“All of these ‘streaming exclusives’ are for the 1%. This is not my fight. It sort of feels awful all around, regardless of the scale of the artist. It’s like having to join a gym in order to buy a pair of sneakers.

“This is the least democratic way to hear discuss and enjoy new music. It shouldn’t be a scavenger hunt to find an album, and albums shouldn’t be used as bait to build tech companies.

“But, you know, good for Kanye and Drake and Beyonce. But it leaves little room to focus on the discovery of new music, which is what DFA is all about.”

Music Business Worldwide:

Per Sundin (Universal): “It’s exactly what happened in the US with physical product. Best Buy said, we’re going to buy 2m AC/DC albums, and it was: ‘Wow, 2m albums.’ But eventually when you looked at the real record stores, the Towers that closed and others, you’re killing the people who feed you.”

Mark Dennis (Sony): “It’s the wrong thing, without a doubt. People who believe that exclusives are going to bring the market forward are the most naive people in the world. We have to learn from what’s happened in the past: when people haven’t been able to consume music in the way they want, they turn to piracy. We’re just not learning! We’ve got to be realistic. What will move the market forward is having content across all platforms, giving the consumer the ability to make their decision and use great products.”

So, not much love for streaming exclusives. However, windowing may soon have a new champion. Via Music Ally:

With no free tier, Apple Music has been able to pitch itself as a premium-only option for album releases, as has Tidal. SoundCloud, meanwhile, made premium-windowing part of the industry pitch for its recently-launched SoundCloud Go subscription tier.

Sources have told Music Ally that Spotify was in advanced discussions with Radiohead’s management company Courtyard and label XL Recordings about a deal to make A Moon Shaped Pool the first album to be windowed to premium subscribers on the service.

“We are always looking for new ways to create a better experience for our free and paying listeners, and to maximise the value of both tiers for artists and their labels. We explored a variety of ways to do that in conjunction with the release of Radiohead’s latest album,” said {Jonathan} Prince {of Spotify}.

“Some of the approaches we explored with Radiohead were new, and we ultimately decided that we couldn’t deliver on those approaches technologically in time for the album’s release schedule.”

Reading between the lines of Prince’s statement, it seems that this is less a case of getting cold feet about premium windowing, and more a case of Spotify wanting to make sure the technology to make it work was robust.

A Boost for DJ Mixes and the New Streaming ‘Sub-Economy’

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Billboard:

The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and Dubset have reached a deal that will allow the NMPA’s independent members, both publishing companies and songwriters, to take part in a new streaming “sub-economy” that only recently became technologically feasible. This new revenue source is through derivative works, or pieces of music that are wholly or partially based on others’ creations, like DJ mixes and remixes. Through its MixBANK, Dubset cross-sections these creations and identifies their constituent parts (a vocal line here, one-half of an entire song there), determines the appropriate royalty splits, then services them to its clients, like Apple Music.

Dubset isn’t the only company making advances in this highly technical space. SoundCloud’s new subscription service, Go, uses an undisclosed process to identify derivative works, which its platform has plenty of. (This, despite a recent report to the contrary.)

Hypebot:

Through the Rights Agreement, NMPA members who opt-in will have access to Dubset’s MixBANK platform where they can set terms and rules around how and where their catalog may be used in mix content. Each time a new mix or remix is delivered to MixBANK the clearance rules set by rights holders to determine whether the content is cleared for distribution are applied. Cleared mix and remix content is then made available to legal music services under an approved royalty structure.

Pay no mind to Digital Music News’s shadowy anonymous sources … DJ mixes and remix culture are on the rise in the social sphere.

(Previously)

Update (May 25, 2016); via Hypebot:

Dubset Media announced today that it has reached an agreement with Spotify to use its MixBANK distribution platform. The deal makes it possible for DJs to upload and legally stream their mixes and single track remixes. In addition, the new agreement is expected to enable Spotify listeners to stream radio shows and other user generated mixes that have not been previously legally available to music fans.

Music Can’t Last Forever, Not Even on the Internet

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Wired:

As music has become more durable, it has—paradoxically—also become more ephemeral. Your physical records don’t evaporate if the store you bought it from closes shop or the record label that published them goes out of business. If a streaming music company goes under, a stockpile of important cultural artifacts could go with it.



Fears that exactly this could happen erupted this week when a financial statements from popular audio hosting site SoundCloud surfaced online. The company, which has become a vital resource for independent musicians and podcasters, lost $44.19 million dollars in 2014 even as it increased revenue to $15.37 million, according to the regulatory document filed with the UK government. The revelation led to immediate speculation that SoundCloud could go offline, taking with it the 110 million audio tracks it hosts.



Fortunately there are alternatives to SoundCloud, such as Bandcamp, which a spokesperson told us has been profitable since 2012, and YouTube, which has become an increasingly important part of Google’s overall strategy. But SoundCloud users would have to re-upload all of their work—if they even still have copies of it. Much of what lives on SoundCloud today would likely vanish forever.



The article does point out that fears of SoundCloud capsizing are likely overblown, though it is generally agreed that 2016 is the service’s make-or-break year. But the warning is good to heed, as it should be assumed that any of these services you may be relying on could suddenly be offline – or at least altered overnight in a way that doesn’t align with your goals or ‘brand.’ My repeated advice is to future-proof yourself by focusing primarily on your own site and promotional ecosystem, treating these third party services only as complimentary outlets. The fan-outreach gateways that you fully control should always be the primary sources of attention.

Moving Past The Jukebox Model

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Wired:

Spotify announced today that it’s acquiring two companies: Soundwave and Cord Project. Both are small-ish startups, founded in the last couple of years, that have won accolades for their design chops. Soundwave in particular makes perfect sense for Spotify. It’s a social tool for finding, sharing, and talking about music, which are all things Spotify would like to be as well. Cord Project is a more curious fit: it’s an audio-first messaging app, a sort of walkie-talkie for the smartphone age.



What Cord really did—what founders Thomas Gayno and Jeff Baxter do best—is design audio experiences. “For years,” Gayno says, “we’ve been listening to music on phones and on laptops kind of the way we listen to music on our hifi stereo, by just looking for a song and hitting play.” We find and listen to music like we’re at the world’s biggest jukebox. Spotify has recently started experimenting with variations on that form, with features like Running and Party and the brand-new Behind the Lyrics feature it created with the folks at Genius. They’re trying to do more than just find you music you’ll like—they want to change the way you experience it altogether. That’s a hard problem to solve.



Through The Echo Nest’s incredibly detailed tech and its years of usage data, Spotify has a ridiculous trove of data about much more than just music. The Cord crew is the start of a new team at Spotify dedicated to turning that data into entirely new kinds of auditory experiences, “leveraging all the amazing technology that is available on my MacBook Pro, on my iPhone, all these things,” Gayno says. “The accelerometer, the geo-localization, all the social network data I have provided, is available for Spotify to create a compelling music experience.”



“The place to innovate is on the consumption side,” Baxter says. “So we’re still working on that. It’s still, what are unique ways that you can serve up audio to people, on phones, but also on devices of the future?” It’s not enough to have 30 million tracks in your library anymore. The streaming wars will be won by the company with the best experience, the best discovery, the best tools for listening to the right thing at the right time in the right way.



As SoundCloud seems to be moving towards Spotify’s model, Spotify in turn appears to be implementing tools for more SoundCloud-like interaction among users. And the idea of playlists and suggestions based on one’s activity, location, and such is intriguing. The streaming wars are apparently moving on from who’s the best at ‘discovery’ and into the social, user-experience terrain. Apple has had a history with social integration in their music services but, with the failure of Ping and the underwhelmed reaction to Connect, it’s an area that’s still up for grabs.

Soundwave presents some interesting concepts that Spotify could easily adopt. Here’s an interview with Soundwave co-founder Craig Watson on an episode of the Music Biz Podcast from a few months back:

2015: This Is A Recap

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I admit, I do like end-of-year ‘best of’ lists.

I’ve used my work – and being immersed in client music – as an excuse not to listen to much new music. I’d bashfully tell people “I’m actually a bit out of touch” when a new release or band was mentioned. These past few months I’ve aimed to change this, in part by training myself to listen to music while working (for me, it’s a practiced skill to not get distracted by music). Then, armed with a handful of ‘Best of 2015’ album lists and an Apple Music subscription I made a truncated journey through the year in album releases. And I’ve been loving it. Here are some of the lists I’ve been consulting:

FACT’s 50 Best Albums of 2015
The Quietus Albums Of 2015
Bleep’s Best of 2015 (good re-issues + compilations sections here, too)
NPR Music’s 10 Favorite Electronic Albums Of 2015

There are other lists bookmarked that I’ll be hitting, but this is what I have covered so far. What have I found? That I really like these albums:

Colleen – Captain of None (Thrill Jockey)
– My most exciting discovery. This album is fantastic and otherworldly.
Floating Points – Elaenia (Luaka Bop)
– I think I’m a little late on Floating Points but this album was an impressive introduction. The 10+ minute “Silhouettes (I, II & III)” is a stunner.
Four Tet – Morning/Evening (Text Records)
– Fout Tet has obviously been on my radar, but not much of his output has grabbed me quite like this two song album.
Cliff Martinez – The Knick, Season 2 (Original Series Soundtrack) (Milan Entertainment)
– I actually haven’t seen this on any ‘best of’ lists yet, but Martinez’s work on The Knick (also recommended) is among his most compelling. My current favorite ‘gotta focus on this tedious computer task’ soundtrack.
Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood, and the Rajasthan Express – Junun (Nonesuch Records)
– There’s not a whole lot on this to differentiate it from purely an Indian / world music album, but it’s still a great one. Greenwood’s input isn’t always obvious, but when his influence is apparent – like on the rapturous “Roked” – it’s the kind of fusion that really piques my attention.

As you may have noticed, spacey and somewhat laid-back electronic music is what’s turning me on at the time of making this list. Though, on the grungy shoegaze tip, “Firehead” by Infinity Girl rocked my boat repeatedly since its release a few months back. Their album’s not bad, either, though I’m not sold on the band name.

I’m continuing this adventure of listening to new music and going through ‘best of’ lists so mine above is hardly complete. I’ll continue to practice my ‘listen while working’ skill in 2016 so next year’s list should be more of a corker.

When it comes to movies, it is interesting that my two favorite films of 2015 were not movies per se, but are in fact BBC produced documentaries. Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake blew my mind in January and continues to do so … I watched it for the fourth or fifth time last week. Its content is eye-opening and incendiary, but Curtis’s use of visuals (the bulk being found footage, mostly discarded, from BBC News’s Afghanistan coverage) and music is revolutionary. And then there’s Atomic – Living In Dread And Promise, commissioned as part of BBC’s Storyville series. With help from a moody soundtrack by Mogwai, Mark Cousins (known for his expansive and essential The Story of Film: An Odyssey) has crafted a sort of meditation on life in the nuclear age. Like Bitter Lake, this film is made up of found footage juxtaposed to give additional meaning and emotion, and is narration-free, at least verbally.

Of the handful of ‘real’ movies I saw in 2015, I loved Paul Thomas Anderson’s divisive Inherent Vice most of all, and I discovered profound meaning where I know many others found complete nonsense. I can dig it. Mad Max: Fury Road is the only other movie I saw multiple times, which puts it in odd company with Bitter Lake. If I’m feeling down I just imagine I’m the guy whose job it was to mash up all those automobiles. Ex Machina was fine stuff, though I wasn’t as nuts about it as others were. Fantastic score by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and composer Ben Salisbury, too. The End Of The Tour gave me a lot to think about and used Eno’s “The Big Ship” in a wonderful way. And I believe Mommy is technically a 2014 film, but it opened in the US in January and it’s a definite favorite. 26 year old director Xavier Dolan is responsible for one of the most moving and heartbreaking sequences I’ve ever seen in a narrative film … that one towards the end, and you definitely know what I’m talking about if you’ve seen Mommy.

Unlike music, which I listened to more of this year (though mainly in the past couple months), I usually watch a whole lot of movies. But this year I consumed a lot less – as I worked a whole lot more – so I’m sure there’s a bunch left out, and a bunch of 2015 winners I’ll see later on that would’ve made it up there. But I know that’s everyone’s story.

As for me, 2015 brought on a lot of professional changes that don’t feel confined to this year as they are ongoing. I’m in the middle of planning a new creative project that I’m quite excited about, but it probably won’t see a launch until the middle of 2016. I’m also opening up 8D Industries a bit more to provide ‘virtual assistant for the music industry’ services, helping with things like contract management, music publishing organization, royalty calculation, web site administration, and so on. More news on this soon. 8DPromo continues to develop into an increasingly efficient promotions machine with a fine group of labels on board. 8DSync looks to expand with new catalog and site features added early in the new year. It seems my plate is full.

So, indeed, here’s to 2016. {glass clink} I’m anti-resolution, but making new friends and connections is paramount in this coming year. If there’s a way you think we might be able to work together, or if you just want to reach out with a ‘hello’, question, and/or comment then please do so. Let’s make things happen.