Im posting this as ive found out this week that one of my DJ mixes on my massive 15 subscriber Youtube channel has been taken down due to copywrite issues. The edit that contains the core music from Primal Scream - Loaded is apparently so seriously breaking the law that ive had to have my non-monetised video removed.
Ironically in the same week ive just cancelled my yearly £90 payment to Soundcloud for their ‘pro’ package that is anything but, to be informed by them that not only is my limit now restricted to 2hrs, they are completely deleting all the mixes i have posted on there that exceed it.
Based on this id like to open a discussion on the state of trying to share your DJ work online, my hatred of record companies and their generally fascist behaviour, and how the industry can save itself from this nonsense.
How do they think people hear this music they are trying to make extortionate amounts of money from? Its the DJs who are actively promoting the music these people are selling, so its seems ridiculous to then punish them or try to extort money from them.
I completely recognize your frustration and feel it. While i’m nowhere near the yuge numbers as some YouTubers whose gimmicks garner 1M views (seriously - they are “winning” youtube compared to my tiny channel!), I have posted mixes there for a few years now without major issues.
I have some problematic publishers in my library - one song in particular “I feel for you” by Bob Sinclar is incredibly frustrating. A 24 year old, lovely song, an absolute anthem that transcends space and time is clutched onto as if it’s the essence of humanity. Any video i post will have to be trimmed to be released. 99.9% of my library is just “you can’t monetize this video” type of warnings.
Sound cloud is an absolute shᴉt show of a haven for spam. I really considered writing a crawler to discover and document the spam situation there, but the owners really couldn’t give two sh!ts about the property. They are milking it for whatever money they can get from hit.
Mixcloud is poorly funded (developed), so much so that I stopped paying for it months after starting. The other service i use is hearthis.at, which is half baked.
All that said, my strategy is to do a ‘shot gun’ approach and post long-form mixes on the following properties:
Sound Cloud
HearThis.at
YouTube
I’ve never had a takedown on SoundCloud, and have been a member for over a decade now.
You’re right – it’s a sad state and the only alternative is to build your own at this point.
The music that we play as DJs is copyrighted. We don’t own it. Even when buying music (rather than streaming/renting) we do not have the right to do what we want with it.
We purchase the right to play it/listen to it. That’s it. There’s no automatic right to record it, broadcast it, modify it, share it etc.
Unfortunately there do seem to be many people who either don’t understand this, or choose to ignore it.
In days of old, the copyright info was clearly printed on covers and labels. With digital downloads, we don’t see it - but it still applies. Maybe that’s why people don’t “get it”?
YouTube was set up for people to share their personal videos, yet people started uploading copyrighted music, ignoring the YouTube T&Cs - which is why YouTube ended up having to foot the bill (hence adverts etc).
The people who upload the stuff say things like “oh I’m allowed to do it because YouTube pay”. No, they are having to pay because you’re uploading something which doesn’t belong to you.
The response of “we’re promoting the music” is often trundled out. In the same way I suppose that people who sell dodgy DVDs at car boot sales are “promoting the movies”…
The BBC “promote the music” too, but they still have to pay TPTB when they play a track.
Yeah i considered my own web domain as an option. Ive got copywrite strikes on all 3 of my videos and i think off the top of my head they are all Sony… i dont think i could hate a company more than i do Sony lol, hate their naff laptops, hate their TVs, hate their stupid spec sheet war cameras, hate their games consoles and now just plain hate them because of their record label and its gung ho approach to silencing DJs.
This is the first time ive ever had one taken off the site full stop though, all because it recognised Loaded.
I used to use Hearthis but the adverts and popups completely put me off, its like one of those tabloid newspaper websites you cant even scroll up and down without 5 ad blockers running.
But all my videos are non-monetised, and its literally 3 minutes of a 35yr old tracks that nobody under the age of 25 has even heard of.
They want to have their cake and eat it PK, and i cant actually believe you’re trying to take some moral high ground with this, read the room. They don’t complain when some guy plays their track at some festival and suddenly 200000 people pay to download it, but then they want to block anyone else from being able to mix with it.
In fact lets hear your great solution to the problem? should all content creators just stop posting things on the internet then? is that your power play here?
Lets here your solution to the problem, instead of just the problem for once.
You can roll your own, sure. You’d have to pay a lot more for a distribution mechanism (CDN) for folks to get a good experience and you’d need to bake in metrics etc if you want to see how popular your stuff is, etc…
I used to do my own website stuff back in the early '00s and i would hate to do it again.
Or pay Squarespace and be no better off than SoundCloud lol.
I think im going to rejoin Mixcloud as at least you can export track lists and post them with timestamps. got some hours of uploading to do. Will have a think about it though.
There’s always a “but…” isn’t there? It doesn’t matter that you’re not earning money from the upload. If you did (like DVD car boot guy) that would be worse.
It also doesn’t matter what length or age the track is.
What matters is, you shouldn’t be doing it. The tracks don’t belong to you. You don’t have the right to upload them.
Look at DMC or Mastermix for example. They release remixes, megamixes etc. and they also profit from it - but they’re licensed to do so, and they pay the artists/labels.
That’s the “solution” (not that it’s my job to offer one).
I aren’t making money from it, i specifically ticked the box to state that i aren’t making money from it.
What’s the solution? all you’ve done there is your usual pedantry then wormed your way out of offering anything of worth outside of scoring petty points on correction.
What is the solution to a DJ who wants to mix music together for people to enjoy then post it on a video sharing site?
No uploads (of copyrighted music) are “allowed”. See previous post.
YouTube have deals with some copyright holders, but not ALL copyright holders. If you upload copyrighted material from artists/labels that are not receiving anything from YouTube then it’ll get taken down or muted.
Yes Twitch is definitely an alternative, although i believe reading between the lines, its about to get hit by the same restrictions.
What i find funny is the enforcers of this policy are generally the 2 worlds biggest music conglomerates (Warner and Sony) and yet the smaller independent record labels are more than happy for people to use their music in this environment.
So the ones who leech the most coin from it, want to leech even more, yet the ones who get the least seem to care more about the actual music itself.
The one ive been done on is an edit of Loaded with a Jungle Bros acapella over the top… the tag its been given isnt even that, and there’s nothing i can do about it outside of completely muting that section of the video.
Even Jazzy Jeff who pioneered most of this stuff cant leave his mixes on there, he probably accounts for literally millions of dollars in the bank of Sony and Warner, yet he is treat like the same piece of dirt as the rest of us.
Any video i post will have to be trimmed to be released. 99.9% of my library is just “you can’t monetize this video” type of warnings.
=) 
