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)
