8Sided Blog

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Bells and Mechanical Tune-Teasers

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Spotify Shuts Out SongShift → SongShift is a popular iOS app that allows the transferring of playlists across platforms. That is, if you use Apple Music (like me) and want to grab one of Joe Muggs’ Spotify-only Soft Music For Hard Times playlists, SongShift makes it happen. Now it seems Spotify is pouring the jerk sauce on this recipe, as the SongShift team recently made this announcement: “The Spotify Developer Platform Team reached out and let us know we’d need to remove transferring from their service to a competing music service or have our API access revoked due to TOS violation … as of SongShift v5.1.2, you will no longer be able to create transfers from Spotify to another music service.”

I guess one can understand the rationale. Spotify’s strength and differentiator, as far as music listening goes, is its playlists. If you’re into Spotify-only playlists, transferring them to your streaming place of choice might keep you from committing to their platform. Transferability makes it easier to leave the Spotify ecosystem, too. But it still comes off as a weaselly power move, especially as all other services allow these transfers (for now — this decision could set the tone). 

Spotify is a public critic of Apple’s walled garden, and Jason Snell points out this hypocrisy on his Six Colors blog: 

Spotify hates how Apple tends its own ecosystem, but it has zero interest in allowing its customers to migrate metadata in any way that might make it more convenient to leave Spotify behind. That’s their decision to make, of course, but for a company that claims to support consumer freedom, it has just made a hypocritical decision designed to reduce the freedom of its own customers.

One can argue about ownership of playlists, but the music is not the property of Spotify or anyone else besides the rights-holders. And I’m sure rights-holders would prefer the containers for their music remain fungible across applicable services. 

But what are you gonna do? I suppose if you use SongShift, maybe don’t update to the latest version (though I don’t know for sure if that will make a difference). And transfer those Spotify playlists as soon as you can, even if you use something other than SongShift. I’m sure Spotify will quickly put the kibosh on those other services, too.

Update: Spotify has done an about-face. Adds SongShift: “The only caveat is, you have to have created the playlist yourself, or the playlist must be collaborative and followed by you.”

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The Company That Has a Monopoly on Ice Cream Truck Music → The origins of the music boxes playing from ice cream trucks are fascinating. Today’s familiar sound was once in a heated competition with sleigh-bells (“ringing a bell all day long soon proved to be too manually taxing for drivers”) and resistance from older generations complaining about the noise (little did they know).

Nichols Electronics persevered and still delivers 300-400 music boxes a year. That seems low, but the company — which has provided these boxes for several decades — is comfortable with its niche’ monopoly.’ Nichols Electronics is a lesson for labels and artists — find your audience, serve only them, and prosper with consistency despite limited opportunities for growth. 

I also like the strategic rules that Nichols Electronics sets for songs included in their music boxes: 

• They’re short and easy to remember … the perfect length at between 15 and 45 seconds.
• They’re structurally simple: “You don’t want the music to be very full,” music historian Daniel T. Neely tells us. “If it’s too complicated, the message becomes kind of muddled.”
• They’re typically rooted in nostalgia.

As the article explains, “That last point is perhaps the most crucial element of a good ice cream truck song: We’re drawn to these melodies because we’ve heard them before.” It also helps when the ‘nostalgic’ song is in the public domain and doesn’t require licensing fees. That aspect might be a problem for the heavy metal ice cream truck. 

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Yoshiaki Ochi – Natural Sonic → Today, I randomly happened across a lovely percussive ambient album from composer Yoshiaki Ochi. Light On The Attic’s Kankyō Ongaku compilation featured this Japanese artist, as did Music For Dreams’ Japanese music collection Oto No Wa. Natural Sonic calms with tropical sounding wooden percussion, floating between the tribal, the distant, and the contemporary. In my interview with Elijah Knutsen, an enthusiast of Japanese ambient music, he describes how the Kankyō Ongaku genre often features the “natural sound of life, with bits of melody blended between the long stretches of environmental sounds.” Natural Sonic includes these elements on a few of the songs — beach surf on “Woods from the Sea,” or bird sounds on “Anywhere.” But the lack of synthesizers draws Ochi’s album closer to the likes of Martin Denny (except the bird sounds here are real) than the pioneers of Asian ambient music. And, interestingly, the organic materials that populate the album result in a timelessness. Natural Sonic was recorded in 1990, a fact I had to look up as listening gave no easy clues to its year of origin. 

Reclaiming the Intention of Fandom

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Warren Ellis has been reclaiming his physical media, sorting through collected DVDs and CDs — and sending off for new additions — in defiance of this century’s model of ephemeral, digital distribution of art. Ellis’s re-transition is occurring in public, through his fantastic newsletter — Orbital Operations — and photos appearing on his blog. There’s a touch of paranoia about treasured music becoming unavailable, whether through hard drive failures, platform redundancy, the whims of corporate interests, or technological apocalypse. It’s a calculated “withdrawal from feeds and streams,” he says, meaning the download option is considered a form of ownership. Here’s a section from today’s issue of Orbital Operations:

This is, of course, all part and parcel of my withdrawal from the feeds and streams … also, a continuing personal rejection of Music As A Service. I purchase all my downloads. And if something for sale is offered for free on a streaming site, I try to track the thing down and buy it if I love it. Sampling is fine. That’s what radio was/is for. I use YouTube and other services to sample things, and I think – I hope – it can help artists. But renting a music collection is bullshit and bad for everybody. (As is, of course, acting as if music is free like air. That only works if you don’t let all the trees die.)

(But, I reiterate, personal. Not trying to make you feel bad for streaming here. This is just what works for me, and I am well aware of my personal privilege of having an amount of disposable income for music.)

These thoughts intersect with Darren Hemmings’ piece I mentioned in a previous post, and how many of us are re-evaluating our relationships with the transitory delivery of digital art. Hemmings’ reservations mainly come from wanting to give an artist his or her due — some coin directly in the pocket — and a reasonable suspicion into the goals of a company like Spotify. These feelings also motivate Ellis, but he adds the wild card of wanting to own his music and movies and to enjoy them in a way that’s not dependent on a corporate subscription platform. In other words, something other than a platform that encourages ephemerality and distraction through endless options.

And this dovetails into my preoccupation with the societal effects of music streaming and our perception of ‘music’s place in the 21st century.’ I was a late adopter of music streaming — a casual free-tier Spotify user, the launch of Apple Music is what got me fully on board.1 Know that my late-adopter status wasn’t a Luddite-like resistance — I wasn’t listening to a lot of music in the first half of the 2010s, something I may get into at a later date. I went through multiple stages of the streaming listener: excitement at all my favorite albums at hand; discovering new albums and artists based on reviews in niche blogs; getting seduced by the fun of playlists2I temporarily switched from Apple Music to Spotify as my platform of choice during this stage.; and the realization that an obsession with playlists was turning me into a passive listener rather than an intentional one.

Passive vs. intentional is a recurring theme on this blog and it’s something I think about a lot. One effect of ‘newsfeed culture’ is it creates passivity in our consumption — what we see and hear is determined by an algorithm or a curation, a diet of someone else’s choices. This passivity isn’t always bad. When we listen to the radio, we are listening passively, and there have been times when a random radio experience changed my life. But the erosion of intentionality is a disassembling of personality. This condition can deprive us of the agency of our thoughts.

Fandom requires intention, as we decide the artists worthy of our obsession and adulation. Of course, the fan can discover a new artist through radio or a playlist, but there needs to be a push – an inner encouragement, even — to explore further. Whether by design or not, I find that playlists encourage the opposite. There’s always that new niche playlist — updated regularly! — front-and-center on the platform’s launch page, drawing attention with delightful sonic promise.

Like Hemmings and Ellis, my struggles with this brought me to Bandcamp and my personal library.3Unlike Ellis, I won’t go as far as embracing physical media. I’ve flirted closely with hoarder tendencies when I was ‘collecting,’ and I don’t want to go back there. My practice was independent of their individual screeds. Several months ago, I started building a Bandcamp collection of music for sleeping. I noticed that familiar satisfaction of purchasing a release and knowing the majority of my payment will go to the creator — a much different psychological experience than a monthly subscription payment to a DSP. And I was picky about what I was purchasing, thus committing the music to multiple listens and an attachment to memory. At first, I left these releases to play via Bandcamp but soon downloaded the lossless files, adding them to my iTunes library. More satisfaction; I was creating a walled-garden library of music that I intentionally discovered and considered top notch. Sort of like I did when I was a teenager buying record albums and arranging them in a milk crate.

And now I’m visiting Bandcamp more often than Apple Music or Spotify, and I’m purchasing more than ‘sleep music.’ Admittedly, I’m still experimenting — this whole era of digital music has been a constant experiment — and I’ll continue to document all this on the blog. But behind this post is a fascination that as all things internet have lost their luster other listeners and music fans are arriving at a similar place. There’s a questioning of music’s role among fandom and the artists that wish to cultivate fans. I feel like we’re all at a critical crossroads and I couldn’t be more excited.

Music Biz Recap: Non-Stop Shop Talk Recovery

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Vintage Nashville Postcard

After a miserable travel day (storms over Charlotte) I made it to Nashville and participated in what is perhaps my favorite music industry conference, Music Biz. I like Music Biz because all the attendees are laser-focused on making the music industry better — though like in politics, our definitions of ‘better’ might wildly diverge. There aren’t people hanging out wanting to see their favorite bands, and there isn’t a film, tech, and gaming festival running in tandem. It’s just music industry folks meeting music industry folks and talking about the music industry,

Music Biz is a barometer for how people are thinking about the industry. In retrospect, only a week later, the conference seems like a snapshot of the state of the business of music in 2019. And this year, more than any other year I attended, that state seems pretty good. Attendance was supposedly at a record level, and buzz about the future overshadowed complaints about the present.

Last year the Music Modernization Act was a ‘fingers crossed’ topic, and this year there were multiple panels on how to prepare and utilize it for increased royalty. There was much talk about how smart speakers will influence and aid discovery, something I was bearish on before but now I’m sufficiently intrigued. New technologies I sampled involved enhanced streaming fidelity and improving a fan’s immersion through interactive ‘liner notes’ functions, both fan-centric efforts. The IFPI gave an optimistic presentation showing dramatically rising music revenues across the globe. And, though there was still talk of playlists, the conversation was mostly about how a band’s overall presentation across channels — digital and IRL — is key, rather than tips on gaming an algorithm.

Sunday was the first day of Music Biz, which is new as all the years I’ve gone things started on Monday. This change threw things off a little, starting with my first breakfast meeting turning out to be a brunch meeting. Sunday also included presentations from almost all of the significant DSPs — Spotify, Amazon, Apple, SoundCloud, and YouTube. There wasn’t much new in the actual presentations, but I did find the Q&A portions informative in the recurring themes of the questions (though not all the DSPs included Q&A). Spotify’s Q&A theme reflected frustration with playlists, showing how an emphasis on this aspect makes it the primary concern of Spotify’s music creators. And then Apple Music’s Q&A embodied a different frustration: artists wanting access to more data and customization of their profiles. Paraphrasing one artist’s comment to the Apple team, “I’d love to push my Apple Music profile but, as an independent artist, Spotify allows me to add so much more of my information.” This complaint is understandable as Apple Music is positioning themselves as the artist-friendly DSP but don’t seem to be walking the talk. I hope the team picked up on this and quickly implements helpful new tools for the artists using the platform.

And with that, another Music Biz sealed and delivered. I’ll be returning next year, no doubt. In the meantime, some things I learned:

• Get in early the day before. My Airbnb check-in was 3 PM so I should have taken advantage of that and gotten in at that time and just chilled out. Or I could’ve done fun non-business Nashville stuff (like the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which I still haven’t visited). Instead, I opted to fly in the early evening and, because of flight delays, I didn’t get into bed until nearly 1 AM, and I couldn’t sleep from all the leftover travel stress. It took me almost 48 hours to feel normal again.
• Writing on business cards is a pro move. At SXSW, as I chatted with a new contact, he pulled out a pen and started writing about our conversation on my business card. That stuck with me, and I copied this tactic at Music Biz. Now I have a stack of business cards with scrawled notes about how I met each person, what we talked about, and if there’s anything, in particular,-requiring follow-up. A game-changer.
• Another pro move: getting back to the hotel/Airbnb by 10 PM. Conferences are exhausting, especially for introverts (raises hand) who require precious time alone after a day of networking and non-stop chat. There are VIP parties and drinks with friends and pop-up industry hangs at seedy bars to create temptation. Don’t give in. I only made it back to my accommodations by 10 AM on the Monday night — and Tuesday at the conference was my most clear-headed and productive day. That wasn’t a coincidence.

Apple Gains as Songwriters Come Out Against Spotify

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Billboard:

In 2017, Spotify launched its Secret Genius Awards annual event to honor songwriters and producers behind some of the streaming platform’s most-played songs. But now some of those same honorees are speaking out about something much less celebrated — Spotify’s plan to appeal Copyright Royalty Board rates, along with Google, Pandora and Amazon.

“We’re hurt and disappointed,” the dozens of songwriters wrote in an an open letter to Spotify on Tuesday (April 9) addressed to Spotify chief Daniel Ek and shared with Billboard. “You created a songwriter relations team and ingratiated Spotify into our community. We know that you are not the only DSP appealing the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) rate determination. You are, however, the only provider that made us feel we were working to build a modern music industry together.”

It seems silly, from a PR standpoint, that Spotify would pick this battle (along with another two at the same time). But how could the company know that songwriters — and a good segment of the industry — would come together with such force? Historically musicians and their industry don’t exactly agree, delivering a fragmented and unfocused protest at best. Perhaps songwriters have been emboldened by the Music Modernization Act, or the pervasive atmosphere of protest we live in now, or the vilification of the tech industry by its own actions, led by Facebook. A combination of the three is most likely.

Spotify will probably be the loser in this PR war. And the winner might be the tech giant that’s sitting this one out, according to Variety:

Ultimately, Apple, which for years was the company the music industry most loved to hate, is now in an enviable position. If Spotify wins its appeal against the CRB — which is considered a long shot — Apple benefits by paying reduced royalty rates. If Spotify loses the appeal, Apple, by not joining the other streamers, looks like the hero. And if, at the urging of songwriters, artists start jumping on a #CancelSpotify bandwagon, Apple Music stands to gain subscribers.

“Unlike Spotify, music is not Apple’s core business, thus allowing [it] to sit this one out, with Spotify taking the heat and the legal bills that follow,” says Jeff Rabhan, chair of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU Tisch. “By choosing to watch this war from the sidelines, Apple has made a brilliant move by making no move at all.”

🔗→ Spotify’s Secret Genius Songwriters Pen Letter to Daniel Ek Over CRB Rate Appeal: ‘You Have Used Us’
🔗→ Apple Is the Real Winner in Spotify’s Battle Against Songwriters’ Rate Hike

Robots vs. Curators: The Battle Begins

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Techcrunch:

Spotify … announced a major change to how its playlists will operate, with the news that some of its previously human-curated [editorial] playlists will now be personalized based on listeners’ tastes. […] “Some playlists will now be personalized for each listener based on their particular taste. This means that for those specific playlists, no two will be the same,” the company shared in a blog post.

Spotify says it decided to make this change after finding that users listened longer to the personalized playlists, during a trial of the new system. It also notes that the new system will increase the number of artists featured on playlists by 30 percent and the number of songs listened to by 35 percent — metrics that artists will surely like.

I’m a huge fan of increasing discovery opportunities, so I welcome and am intrigued by this news. Though I wonder if Spotify’s creating a musical version of the ‘Facebook bubble,’ where listeners with narrow tastes don’t get introduced to artists outside of their established spectrum. The algorithmic playlist change could be beneficial for new artists among listeners with an already broad predilection and great for classic, already well-known catalog artists with everyone else.

Matty Karas isn’t having it. He wrote this rebuttal in the 3/28/19 edition of the Music:REDEF newsletter:

But sometimes I really, really don’t want personalization. Like when I decide to click on my preferred ANTI. I don’t want to hear the re-sequenced version of the album that Spotify thinks would be best for me, and I don’t want to start on track 2, no matter how great track 2 is. If I wanted that, I would’ve clicked directly on it. I want to hear the album Rihanna actually made, sequenced and mastered. That was the intention of my click. Likewise any of the playlists that I follow. I follow them because I like the music and the flow and/or I like and trust the curator. The unspoken agreement between me and them is they’ll put thought and effort into the playlist and I’ll listen. Period. […]

Labels love this, I’m told, because it’s a way to get more tracks and therefore more labels on any given playlist. But who wants that kind of democracy? I want the four most interesting, pertinent, appropriate tracks you’ve got, not one from each of the three major labels and one from a token indie. Does anybody not want that? […] I want my curators to lead. If they’re just passively following me, why exactly am I following them?

Luckily there are many curated third-party playlists out there, but those are for the ‘broad’ listeners mentioned above. Maybe we’re selfishly expecting the majority of listeners — the ones who, in the past, mainly listened to music via commercial radio on car commutes — to explore and embrace new artists. Spotify’s giving the majority of its users what they want (and I won’t lie —algorithmic playlists are fascinating and fun) while the rest of us can dig into curated niche selections like this. Or this.

Elephant, get into that room. Let’s talk about Apple Music. The industry is expecting the company to copy Spotify and start introducing their own sophisticated algorithmic playlists. However, I’d like to see them lean into curation. Apple Music has flirted with playlists compiled by influencers and other notables, but they are hardly visible — the ones that exist are sort of difficult to find. If Apple can get Oprah and Spielberg on stage to promote its TV offering, then why not enlist playlists from heavy hitters? And I’m not talking lazy extensions of Beats 1 shows. Perhaps Frank Ocean’s ‘Songs I Listened To Growing Up.’ Mitski’s ‘Songs I’m Playing on the Bus While On Tour.’ Convince Four Tet to move this over to Apple Music. Put some fun and personalization into it — what makes that Four Tet playlist so cool is that there’s no doubt he’s adding the songs to it himself.

Let Spotify have the algorithms. Apple probably won’t be able to catch up anyway. Apple Music already subtly differentiates itself by being friendlier to the album format — they should go all in on the taste-making curator as well.

🔗→ Spotify expands personalization to its programmed playlists
🔗→ Music:REDEF – March 28, 2019

Spotify is “Effectively Suing Songwriters”

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Music Business Worldwide:

Yesterday (March 7), it emerged that four major owners of digital music services – Spotify, Amazon, Google and Pandora – had lodged legal appeals against the US Copyright Royalty Board’s recent decision to raise streaming royalties for songwriters (and music publishers) by 44%. That royalty rise, which previously looked locked in, is now in serious jeopardy.

Apple Music, in contrast, has accepted the new rates, and declined to challenge what’s viewed as an important pay hike for songwriters.

Remember when Kendrick Lamar and (reportedly) other artists threatened to pull music from Spotify over the arbitrary ‘hate conduct’ ban policy? Spotify quickly backtracked. This might be another opportunity for artists to show Spotify and the streaming industry who really needs who more.

And, as with privacy, Apple continues to brand themselves as the company that does the right thing. I’ll contain my cynicism (which I have for any corporate organization) and say ‘good on them.’

🔗→ Wait… Spotify is ‘suing songwriters’? What the heck is going on?

Two Things That Don’t Go Together

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Chris Rizik of Soul Tracks is understandably frustrated:

… in the modern world of streaming, with literally thousands of new songs being uploaded onto platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal every week, confusion is the norm. So a young rapper who calls himself Babyface can put his music up on the site, and the automated systems don’t realize that this is definitely not the Grammy winning Tender Lover. Consequently, not only does “Y2K” show up in my Release Radar, it shows up on Babyface’s Spotify artist page, leaving his fans scratching their heads, or maybe even complaining that ‘Face’s new music is awful. Putting aside any trademark issues (and I’m sure there are some), this is a mess for both the original artist and for the streaming service.

I run across this all of the time. Recently I was looking for an album to listen to by jazz legend Sam Rivers on his Spotify profile. Nestled among his sizable catalog were a few ‘new releases’ of thinly produced R&B/pop, placed at the top of Sam’s artist page. Of course, these releases were from a pop artist also named Sam Rivers.

I don’t have a problem with more than one artist with the reasonably not-rare name Sam Rivers. But having Spotify (and other services) combine them is wacky stuff. Jazz Sam is sadly deceased, so he doesn’t care, but doesn’t Pop Sam check himself out on Spotify? Does he think it’s okay for his smooth R&B-ness to sit alongside late 20th-century free jazz?

It’s possible Pop Sam doesn’t know what to do about it. I decided to tell Spotify about the mix-up, using Twitter, and they were immediately responsive. They referred me to a page where I could submit the error for review. But these are a lot of steps for Pop Sam.

There is a ‘report’ option hidden on the artist profile, but this goes to a page for infringement issues. There’s no link or redirect to report mistakes. And this report option doesn’t exist for songs or albums, making it more difficult to flag individual releases that are in the wrong place (or infringe, for that matter).

But that’s far better than what Apple Music offers. Spotify acted on my request and separated Pop Sam and Jazz Sam, but Apple Music has them combined thanks to one stray Pop Sam EP. I looked for a way to report this through iTunes on MacOS. The only option I could find is a menu item under ‘Song’ (in the top menu, not in the player). The option is titled ‘Report a Concern.’ I can’t tell you what this does as it’s grayed out and inactive. I tried highlighting the song, playing the song, adding it to my library — nothing would activate this option. And it’s completely missing on the iOS app.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about how streaming doesn’t feel like a personal, fan-friendly experience along with conjecture about how to make it more so. I don’t think there’s one magic answer. Instead, I feel many smaller actions could make the platforms feel more welcoming. Keeping the artists and their releases straight — and giving fans a clear way to interject when they’re not — is a good start.

🔗→ “Wait a minute, that’s not Babyface” – Artist confusion abounds online

Make Way for the Virtual Dance Floor

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On our blog about “music’s place in the 21st century” we rarely get to write about anything as futuristic (in a ‘shape of things to come’ way) as this, via Music Business Weekly:

Yesterday (February 2), DJ star Marshmello played an exclusive in-game concert in Fornite at 2pm ET. Fortnite players could watch the virtual show for free, so long as they made sure their avatar was available at the concert’s location (Pleasant Park).

The numbers are now coming in on the event’s audience, and they’re mighty impressive: according to reliable sources, over 10 million concurrent users witnessed Marshmello’s virtual concert. These people’s in-game avatars were all able to hit the virtual dancefloor in front of Marshmello’s own avatar and show off their moves.

Mark Mulligan in Music Industry Blog:

For my son and his friends this was every bit a shared live experience, each of them talking to each other via Xbox Live and dancing with each other on screen. In-game live experiences like this are nothing new, but it may just be that we are beginning to get to a tipping point in shared gaming experiences for Gen Z that will shape their entertainment expectations for years to come.

and Darren Hemmings in the Motive Unknown newsletter:

I tweeted over the weekend that this brought to mind when US rock bands of a certain age talk about the influence KISS had on them. Often it wasn’t about the music so much as the spectacle of it all, and how much that impacted them as a child or teen. I think there’s parallels here; these are the kind of great experiences that really get fans hooked in, and strikes me as a colossal win for Marshmello as an artist.

At a point where I often grumble that innovation is drying up in music, this proved to be a fine example of how great things can come together to make a massively successful event for all involved.

Marshmello’s DJ set is also now exclusively available on Apple Music, no doubt a high-profile pay-off of the streamer’s association with Dubset.

Video games took some of the blame when music industry profits declined in the late-90s/early-00s. We reasoned that kids who once spent their allowance on music were instead using it on games. There was probably some truth in that, setting up tension between the game and music industries. But we’re now starting to see cooperation in marketing games and music that’s going leaps beyond background songs and Guitar Hero. And as journalist Cherie Hu talks about on a recent episode of the Music Tectonics podcast, the integration of music and non-music media and interactive entertainment may be the big music business story of 2019.

Regardless, we’ve come a long way since this:

🔗→ Marshmello just played a live set to 10m people in video game Fortnite
🔗→ Marshmello Just Live Streamed on Fortnite…So Just What is a Concert?
🔗→ Marshmello’s Fortnite concert shows it should be done

Dubset’s Major Move

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TechCrunch:

Spotify and Apple Music could soon get the legal grey area of music like remixes and DJ sets that today live unofficially on SoundCloud. Sony Music Entertainment today became the first major record label to allow its music to be monetized through unofficial mixes thanks to a deal with rights clearance startup Dubset. That means Sony’s master recordings will be indexed by Dubset, and rights holders will be compensated even if just a tiny one-second snippet of their song is used in a DJ set or remix.

A source tells TechCrunch that Dubset is getting closer to securing deals with the other two major labels Warner and Universal.

If it can lock down all three, remixes and DJ sets featuring almost any music could be legally hosted on the top streaming services instead of being barred or removed for copyright infringement. That might eliminate the differentiation that’s kept struggling SoundCloud afloat. Illegal music uploaded there has sometimes flown under the radar since SoundCloud is protected by Safe Harbor law regarding user generated content. But if it’s legally available on Spotify, Apple Music, and elsewhere, listeners wouldn’t have to go to SoundCloud.


Could we be stepping closer to a mainstream acceptance of remix culture? A future where derivative works are not only allowed but encouraged is a divergent music future, indeed. As previously stated on this blog, if you can clear unauthorized remixes using Dubset, then why not clear samples eventually? We might be entering an era where most music is fair game for creative mutation, and the original artists get paid. How will that work with songs already released, especially the ones that sneakily didn’t clear drum loops or other samples? Should clearance lawyers start looking at new career options?

As far as Apple Music and Spotify go, I really can’t see them opening up their services to user-uploaded content a la SoundCloud. I’m ready to be surprised, but I do think those predictions are off the mark. The Verge gives a clue to where this might be headed for the two big streamers:

DJ mixes have historically proved to be especially difficult for monetized distribution. “The average mix is 62 minutes long and has 22 different songs in it, and those 22 different songs are represented by over 100 different rights holders,” {Dubset CEO Stephen} White tells The Verge. Using Dubset’s technology, a 60-minute mix can be processed in just 15 minutes.

During that 60-minute mix, White says, MixSCAN will fingerprint every three seconds of audio. “We’re using a combination of audio fingerprinting technologies and fairly advanced algorithmic approaches to identify the underlying masters that are being used in a mix or a remix,” he says. Although MixBANK asks DJs themselves to identify the masters, White says this is just to help validate MixSCAN’s results.


Apple’s Beats 1 Radio regularly broadcasts sets by newsworthy artists and celebrities, but the Beats 1 platform still fails to make the news. These DJ events need exposure outside of the ephemeral original broadcast. Wouldn’t it be nice if the sets were recorded and archived, and then available to play on demand via Apple Music? I think that’s what’s happening here. A different sort of license is required to make these DJ sets available on demand, and every song (and, yes, unofficial remix) must be cleared for this type of usage. Theoretically, Dubset’s technology would not only clear the songs in the mix, but it would be able to do so in 15 minutes. A Beats 1 set could be available to stream on Apple Music within thirty minutes of its broadcast. Voilà. And I’d wager Spotify has similar ambitions.


Previously and Previously and Previously

That Music Rights Shell Game

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Routenote:

With the release of iOS 10, song lyrics are now displayed within Apple Music. Apple have received incredibly positive feedback from members, who can now follow along during playback of their favourite songs. To ensure songwriters are paid Apple is obtaining the licenses required to display lyrics in Apple Music. Apple rely on accurate songwriter and composer data to efficiently obtain these licenses.



O RLY?

Music•Technology•Policy:

Apple says to “make sure the ownership of your song is registered with a publisher, and that they have registered ownership with relevant publishing agencies such as ASCAP, BMI, PRS, Harry Fox and Music Reports.” That obviously is misleading.



First of all, we can’t be that surprised that Apple has this impression because as we all know, it is frequently lost on HFA and MRI that neither of them is in fact the government. However, given that Amazon, Google, Pandora and others are sending millions upon millions of NOIs to the Copyright Office claiming to have no idea who owns songs by very well known artists, it should make it obvious that the one place you need to “register” your song copyright ownership is with the U.S. Copyright Office.



It’s also misleading to state that you have to have “the ownership of your songs…register[ed] with a publisher” which may happen frequently, but is not required to enjoy ownership rights.



That unified music metadata database (Blockchain, etc) that keeps getting bandied about can’t come soon enough.