DJ Dominance of SoundCloud May Be Ending
Early this year SoundCloud embedded content ID technology into its site. Due to the predominance of DJs and remix artists on SoundCloud, Hypebot feared this move might have negative and unintended consequences. According to a new report, it has. Staff writer Miles Raymer at the Chicago Reader says SoundCloud may be raining on its own parade.
Once the content ID technology went live, Raymer reports that many DJs grew upset because it "zaps entire hour-long mixes, even if they contain just a small segment of a single copyrighted track." Many thought such mixes were protected under fair use and now "feel betrayed" by the site, "given that DJs were the early adopters that helped the site reach critical mass," Raymer writes. Due to such content policing and the increased use of SoundCloud by artists in other genres, he believes the era of DJ dominance of SoundCloud "may be coming to an end."
Lastly, Raymer argues that SoundCloud is at a crossroads:
"Right now its practices appear to defer to rights holders, allowing labels and publishing companies to determine almost unilaterally what counts as infringement—a stance that puts an undue burden on uploaders whose employment of copyrighted material might meet the criteria for fair use.
Were SoundCloud to take the nobler and more difficult path, it would devise a policy that could differentiate between DJs and remixers on one hand and pirates on the other. Of course, it's easier and cheaper for SoundCloud to just keep serving DMCA notices to its most passionate users—though taking that route could drive off enough of them to make it very expensive indeed."
What's your opinion?
You can only break the rules for so long until someone gets pissed. Just another case of labels and publishers viewing technology as a threat instead of an opportunity to do something different and innovative.
The talented DJ Ripley posted this concern back in December: http://djripley.blogspot.com/2010/12/walling-off-another-garden-is.html
(via SinkDeep). They have pulled a couple of mixes from the artists of my label http://www.staticdiscos.com/staticwp with their own music.
Only the most naive would not have seen this coming.
What is sad is that with their powerful technology and market share that no one on either side could talk about ways of making this work for everyone. To my knowledge no such discussions have occurred.
This is a simple thing and requires solid biz affairs and the willingness to talk in advance of the storm clouds.
Yeah its a bummer but they ain’t got much choice.
Anyway the cool kids hang around for 1-3 yrs before they find something else. Thats when you have to cross that divide to commercialism, be shit boring but make the masses happy.
There are those artists both signed and unsigned who work hard to produce original content and some spend good money to clear any samples 100%.
If as people love to point out, the labels have been stealing and profiting off the backs of the creators for years, what makes unauthorized use by DJs, especially those deriving income any different?
Welcome to the future. Zap away.
indeed. in this case, the ‘music should be liberated’ idea is a bit of a straw man.
we’re not talking about people who want to enjoy music DRM free, or even people who want to pirate stuff for their own use because they don’t want to pay.
we’re actually talking about DJs who want to promote their skills to get gigs and make money. I’ve got a certain ambivalence about this because as an electronic artist, back in about 2006 something like 20% of my income came through compilation licences/royalties/sales. The internet mixtape era has rendered the paid-for mix almost obsolete, and now that slice has dropped to 0%. Some argue that the mixes offer valuable promotion for artists – this is true, but the promotion is massively less valuable than the money!
I’m not saying we should be trying to turn back time on this one, but equally I don’t think this one is a simple case of the evil industry versus the wide-eyed music-lover. Especially in dance music, where sales of a single will typically hover in the low hundreds; and live performance is very different to the acoustic field.
Ed,
You bring up some interesting points, this definitely isn’t a simple thing.
But I think your ambivalence may be misdirected in this case. Should you not be angry at the labels instead of the DJs? The labels that you give a large cut of your potential profit to, who have failed you in what TEHY are supposed to be doing, what you are paying them for, to sell your music to an audience?
Technology moves on. Instead of the labels, who you pay to sell your music, taking advantage of this technology to give you more money-making opportunities with your music, they instead prefer to cling onto their old business methods, ignoring and crippling new technology which has the potential to not only get your music out to far more people than it normally would have, but to make it more profitable. It’s the labels fault it isn’t as profitable anymore – not the listeners or the DJs.
Why couldn’t SoundCloud and the labels use this fingerprinting technology as some kind of automatic user-pays system, for example? Soundcloud IDs your track and charges the user a small fee for download. That fee then goes to you, the musician.
We need to be creative about this. Not just shut off new tech. There are opportunities for everyone to be had.
TEHY = THEY 🙂
MixSCAN (currently offered on DUBSET.COM — embedded player launching this month) is the only legal alternative to hiding behind the DMCA and hoping content doesn’t get taken down. View infographic video on MixSCAN here – MixSCAN.com.