First user-created music remixes about to launch on Apple Music and Spotify

Redesigned Apple Music iOS 10

Unofficial remixes of songs are launching on both Apple Music and Spotify thanks to a partnership with a company called Dubset Media Holdings. Apple signed a deal with Dubset in March 2016, while Spotify cut a similar deal of its own in May.

Remixes and DJ mix sets, typically distributed through services like YouTube and SoundCloud, should start appearing on Apple Music and Spotify.

Dubset’s proprietary scan-and-match technology will ensure that artists get paid fairly for musical remixes, TechCrunch said Friday.

Licensing remixes and DJ mixes based on original recordings is incredibly difficult. A typical remix might have upward of 600 different rights holders. For example, a DJ mix created from 25 to 30 different songs would require royalty payments to the same number of record labels and anywhere from two to ten publishers for each track.

This poses a major problem for services like Apple Music that don’t own the rights to distribute user-created music remixes.

Using a custom platform called Mixbank, Dubset scans an entire mix to find the likely source of each sample used in a mix by matching it against official song snippets from Gracenote’s audio fingerprinting database.

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

Dubset has deals with over 14,000 labels, publishers and music holders. Royalty revenue from the Mixbank platform is shared with rights holders while Dubset gets a cut.

According to Dubset CEO Stephen White:

Content owners have been very supportive. The publishing and label deals we have under license provides a large catalog to work with This allows some of the content that until now has only been on YouTube and SoundCloud to come to these great paid services where content owners will get paid.

In the future, Apple’s partnership with Dubset could expand to include multi-song mixes, longer DJ sets and other perks. White claims that 700 million people a month listen to mixed content, making it a big opportunity.

The article does not make it very clear when first user-uploaded remixes might be going live on Apple Music so be sure to watch this space because we’ll be reporting more information as soon as it becomes available.

The Financial Times has learned that Spotify is in advanced talks to acquire SoundCloud, which has upwards of 200 million registered users.

Source: TechCrunch