Apple Music to stream previously unlicensed remixes and DJ mixes

Apple Music all devices teaser 001

Billboard reported Tuesday that Apple Music has become the first streaming music service to include DJ remixes and mashups that had previously been absent from licensed services due to copyright issues.

“Thousands upon thousands cool mash-ups and hour-long mixes have effectively been pulled out of the underground and placed onto the world’s second-largest music subscription service,” reads the report.

Working in partnership with a company called Dubset Media Holdings, which delivers content to digital music services, Apple will leverage their proprietary MixBank technology to automate the process.

The software will identify existing music within DJ mixes and remixes by matching it against a database of audio snippets from Gracenote in order to determine the amount of copyright fees that must be paid to rights holders before these mixes can be distribute on Apple Music and other streaming services.

By finding the stop and start point in each mix, the software basically finds the corresponding rights holders in a dataset together through multiple partnerships and direct feeds.

“Licensing remixes and DJ mixes, both based on original recordings, is incredibly complex,” explains the article. “A single mix could have upward of 600 different rights holders.”

As an example, said Dubset CEO Stephen White, a typical DJ mix has 25 to 30 songs that require payments to 25 to 30 record labels and anywhere from two to ten publishers for each track.

The partnership will have Dubset keep a certain percentage of revenue to pay DJs and cover license fees. The company has deals with over 14,000 labels, publishers and music holders.

IFPI estimates that 20 percent of Internet users worldwide regularly listen to some kind of unlicensed music services.

Source: Billboard