SoundCloud's take-down algorithms are only targeting musicians who rely on sampling copyrighted works. This, clearly, is a large chunk of SoundCloud's current user base but I honestly think this will result in a net increase in quality.
I made a completely sample free demo song for a friend to jam to and got stopped by the algorithm. I was referred to a song that was from a musical number with lots of chord and time changes. My sound was a single verse that was straight-ahead 4 chord rock. So while I wasn't hit with a takedown notice, I was prevented from posting until someone could listen to both songs (also it was really hard to listen to the song they quoted due to it's rarity).
This is a great example of how badly configured these systems are and how ultimately, they do more harm than good. It also brings up an interesting question. After a couple hundred years of recorded music, eventually everything will have some historical basis. If copyright law is to be enforced this harshly, then how do new works get created without hitting some automated censor firewall?
The elephant in the room, of course, is how strong copyright laws are. Unfortunately, Congress has shown little interest in reforming them.
> Paradoxically, the takedowns are often hurting the artists that they’re meant to be protecting. On August 12, London DJ Plastician had a track he produced, owned and released on his own label blocked by SoundCloud’s copyright detection algorithm.
As a plastician fan, I'm not surprised if this ends up happening to even more producers of in his scope of genre. Theirs is a completely different culture than the DMCA/Mainstream Commercial American Pop Music - their community is very tightly-knit, and they freely pass around unreleased tracks, samples, and song stems for each other to remix. They will often hold onto a track for years before putting it on an independent label release. More underground UK artists will sadly stray away from the app altogether.
But they want to make deals with the majors, and they already have one with Warner. Which is fine, of course, but it no longer interests me personally. Instead of being a platform for indie musicians, it seems they are more interested in becoming a streaming platform for music from major labels, and that no longer interests me at all. Besides, I don't think their funding will be enough to compete in that area...
Fair point about the focus on majors. I would argue, though, that they're not completely abandoning indies, just raising the bar for entry. Like going from hypem.com to pitchfork.com
What sort of bar are you referring to? The fact that one could just use additional processing plugins on their samples to make them unrecognizable by algorithm doesn't correlate well to the quality of the track in question.
To ChrisArgyle:
Oh yes, I understand that. Even worse are the wannabe rap artists who will use the entire artist name and title of a track to "trojan horse" their own rap rendition and trick people into playing their music to drive up play counts. They're still getting away with this somehow.
But the commercial trance songs themselves are sampling other tracks (although doing it much better), and also licensing issues down to the one-shot drum samples they're using.
One of my tracks takes a Beyonce vocal stab and it processes it so much you won't recognize who the singer was - unless you knew the steps to reverse engineer it - and, you'd be surprised to find many talented audio engineers who are much better than I can do this easily. When I hear songs on the radio which use a similar technique, I can pick this up instantly. AFAIK, my track hasn't been pulled off SC yet.
Did you also know that many companies (Verizon and TMobile have been known to do this) have audio engineers who will "reverse engineer" a song their marketing team likes from an indie artist to recreate it so they don't have to pay royalties? Its not hard to trick these algorithms, and in many cases they come up with false positives anyways.
Most of the (commercial) "Industry" itself is running off uncredited samples, many of which have been cut from 1960-1980s Jazz/Blues tracks. These tracks still are technically copyrighted[0], but the artists are often not knowledgable over who is sampling their tracks, or in many cases they don't care / want people to sample their stuff. Most of their record labels have also long since died off which would have tried to protect their works as well. You would be shocked to find how wide the range of genres are of producers that are doing this.
In sum, it stinks of a moneygrab. Soundcloud became big enough to get into DMCA's non-artistic crosshairs.
There are large swaths of the SoundCloud user base that rely so heavily on sampling that they contribute very little creatively. A great example is "nightcore". Though the result is quite enjoyable it really doesn't take a lot of skill to create (wholesale copy a trance song, pitch up the vocals, speed up the track a bit, done)
What is it about sample-based music that makes it so inferior to acoustic music (on average) that culling it en masse "will result in a net increase in quality"?
Derivative work can be great, sadly lazy derivative work comes off more as theft but in the art world it's a blurry line. [1] [2] [3]
Lazy (creative) work seems of no higher quality than lazy work utilizing premade bits. Bad code made from scratch, a bad song written from scratch, or a bad sample based song...
