Friday, May 24, 2019 • 55min
Digital Attribution For Musicians
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Episode #156 : Thousands of hours of content are uploaded to sites like YouTube, SoundCloud, TikTok, Facebook, etc. every minute, and a fair amount of it contains unlicensed music. Technologies like YouTube’s “Content ID” system can help rights holders find offending usages once they’re uploaded, but not all sites have that kind of functionality, and certain uses are so short that the current tech can’t find them. Thankfully, there are several third party services stepping into the market to fill this critical gap in digital attribution and rights management, and we talk to three of them on this episode. In this hour, we hear from Stephen White of LyricFind, Amadea Choplin of PEX, and Stephen White of Dubset.
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Talking about
Speakers
(2)
Darryl Ballantine
Amadeu Chaplain
Transcript
Verified
Darryl Ballantine
00:00
For years now the internet has allowed an artist's music to be used all over the world in a matter of seconds. But tracking those usages and properly accounting for them has been a longer process. However, we're finally starting to see technology come into the marketplace that is specifically designed to find and identify usages and help artists get paid in a significant way.
Share
00:22
Welcome to the future of what I'm your host Porsche, Sabban, president of the independent record label,
Kill Rock Stars
, Support for the future of what comes from merch.Share
00:31
Table with over 15 years of experience in merchandizing, screen printing, tour support and online fulfillment Merch Table partners with artists and labels looking to jump start their business, visit Merch Table dot com to learn more and open a store today on today's episode. We talked to several companies whose roles in digital attribution are making a difference to creators one micro transaction at a time.
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00:54
It's all coming up on the future of what no support for the future of what comes from Soundexchange.
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01:18
You're listening to the future of what I'm talking to Darryl Ballantyne of Lyricfind, Darryl, Welcome to the future of what
Share
01:25
Great to be here.
Share
01:26
Thanks for having me.
Share
01:26
So my first question of course is what is Lyricfind and what do you guys do? And I know I know you do a lot so we can just take this in pieces but go ahead and and start
Share
Darryl Ballantine
01:38
We'll start with the biggest piece and at its core Lyricfind is an aggregator of all the rights and content for the use of lyrics in the digital world.
Share
01:48
So we're the back end for websites, streaming services and mobile applications and other things that you see out there using lyrics like
Amazon
and Spotify and Google
and Pandora and I Heart Radio and a whole bunch of others.Share
02:06
That's the biggest part of our business.
Share
02:09
So we can we can start with that one.
Share
Speaker 3
02:11
Yeah, definitely. And that's perfect because that's really what this episode is about this week is sort of digital attribution. Right?
Share
02:19
I mean you and I met at music biz just a couple of weeks ago and I would say that that was probably the biggest topic in all of music biz was was basically credits and how people get properly credited because credits are the foundation of how people are getting paid.
Share
02:35
And you know, we've certainly been through in the last few years in the music industry that we realized that there's so many places that are now producing cash for artists that you actually, you know, we have to go back even beyond that and start looking at how people are credited so that they can get their money.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
02:52
Yeah. And music business always been such a great hub for that conversation. It's really goes back to the years and years that Bill Wilson spent building that event and particularly the metadata conversations around it and he would bang that drum louder than anybody else because that's the way that payment works in the digital world If you don't have proper credits and proper data to be able to match rights to usage and content then the usage doesn't happen or people don't get paid and the industry and the consumer suffers the most.
Share
03:33
So having that proper infrastructure there. And that rights information and proper metadata is what enables us to use the lyrics with proper licenses and get publishers and songwriters paid for that use.
Share
03:47
Exactly.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
03:48
So now talk about what an important part lyrics play in that system.
Share
03:53
So a big part of it is enabling the consumers to connect with the music. If you think about your favorite songs, all of those are ones that, you know the lyrics to when you're at a concert, the best songs that are played are the ones that everybody is singing along with because they know all the words and being able to have those associated with the music at the point of consumption of that music just makes the experience so much better.
Share
04:25
And we see users spending more and more time with streaming services when lyrics are included, we know from the labels that we don't work with them. We work with the publishers, but we hear from labels all the time that they're always trying to make sure that their lyrics are available on these services because people are more likely to include them in playlists. If the lyrics are there, the playlists get more usage. If the if the lyrics are in there and that just generates more royalties for everybody.
Share
04:54
And of course, there's also the aspect of getting it right. You know, if you're not sure what the lyrics are, you're going to be a lot more hesitant to start belting that out with your friends or at a show. You don't want to be the first that screws that up.
Share
05:08
Well, can we talk about that for a second? Because that's something I'm really interested in.
Share
05:12
You know, you see those sites that have lyrics, but like you can tell that they were just thrown up there by some child, like they definitely are not the right lyrics, you know, they're they're very questionable. I mean, I'm assuming that your product, what you guys do doesn't necessarily overlap with that or does it?
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Darryl Ballantine
05:33
It doesn't mean we'll license a lot of those sites and a number of them if we have the lyrics available, will override their user submissions with are vetted content, but not all of them do.
Share
05:47
So, yeah, you can end up with some pretty terrible lyrics on there and pretty inaccurate stuff. User generated content for something like lyrics. It just doesn't really work well, especially after you get past the really popular stuff. The quality and the oversight of the crowd. It doesn't get very deep into the catalog. So that's why we have a huge content team scattered all over the globe. We have most of our content team is here in
Toronto
working on our Seventh Corps languages, but we also have offices in Morocco
and Vietnam
working on local languages there to make sure that everything is accurate.Share
06:28
We stream everything and transcribe everything to have the best accuracy around so that you don't have that kind of user generated low quality content. And you know, when you're working with the people that that we are, they have pretty stringent demands when it comes to quality.
Share
06:47
So that's been our focus from, from day one is making sure that everything is right.
Share
06:53
Yeah. And you told me about this when we met in person and I just thought it was amazing to think of this team of, I don't know, dozens of people around the globe sitting listening to music and transcribing.
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Darryl Ballantine
07:06
Yeah, it's it's about 50 people globally right now. And they focus on yeah, just making sure that everything's right. Our team in
Toronto
also works on license management and other parts of the content side as well. But yeah, that's their focus is getting it right.Share
07:22
It's an important part for sure.
Share
07:23
So now how did you get into this? I mean, this seems like a pretty niche thing to do. How did this come up?
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Darryl Ballantine
07:31
It kind of just happened, we were in university when we were first getting things started and I was always that guy that everybody would come to, who could name that tune. I was the one who he would say who sings this song or what's the name of the song that goes like this? And I would usually no the answer.
Share
07:51
And sadly, I've basically lost all that knowledge now. But one of my co founders Chris Book was trying to figure out the name of the song and I actually didn't know what it was and he went and tried to figure it out online and came back and said all the lyrics sites that they're sucked. None of them let you search by lyrics and let's start our own.
Share
08:13
So sure that was March of 2000, we decided to try to start a lyric site. Quickly realized that we needed licensing for that. So we didn't have it up for very long. But one thing led to another and three years later I ended up doing an internship at
EMI
in L. A. And on the label side.Share
08:32
And then a year after that, when I was supposed to go back and work at EMI I full time, we decided to restart the lyrics business as an aggregator. Though, the industry had progressed more and was willing to license things on the internet rather than shut them down. And we started getting licenses to be able to monetize all the activity that we knew was happening on these lyrics sites.
Share
08:56
That is amazing.
Share
08:57
So now, you know, it's like publishers I imagine are sort of the people who are specifically benefiting.
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Darryl Ballantine
09:04
They're the biggest beneficiaries. Yeah, they're the ones that we pay the royalties to.
Share
09:08
Exactly.
Share
09:10
And what have you seen in terms of royalties, are they increasing considerably? Yeah, I mean, we've grown every year, every year since the beginning, we've paid out more royalties than we have in the year prior, and it continues to get bigger and bigger.
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Darryl Ballantine
09:24
And as you see, the growth of streaming services as they get bigger, so do we just naturally, but as more and more services adding lyrics functionality, it just compounds it even more.
Share
09:37
Plus all the new services that we're launching to earn even more royalties for publishers and songwriters, like our merch division that we talked about before is a great opportunity for publishers and songwriters to earn additional income from an area that was a little bit lacking and a lot of it was unlicensed,
Share
09:57
Right?
Share
09:58
I mean, this is exciting for people like me, you know, record label owners and, you know, this would be the same for managers as well as independent artists, but most independent artists who have a team, you know, even if you don't have a team, this is something that is interesting to you because one of the biggest problems we've had on the internet, you know, it's like, anything else, like you just said, sort of, you know, the internet started one way and then it changed over time to, to turn into something that you guys could create a product for.
Share
10:26
But that's one of the problems is it was sort of an unregulated marketplace for a really long time. And now it's starting to finally be regulated in a way that like, for example, you know, if there's someone out there who thinks it's a great idea to print some
Elliott Smith
lyrics on a T shirt and then sell that t shirt on their website.Share
10:43
I had no way of knowing that, you know, for years and years.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
10:46
And now we do one of the big things that we're working on there is the monetization of existing activity and this is what we did with lyric websites.
Share
10:57
We went to those lyric websites and we didn't want to shut them down, we wanted to license them, we wanted them to continue to exist in a way that was financially viable for them and for the rights holders and we want to do the same thing with lyric merchandise, being able to go to all the platforms that enable that type of activity and work with the platforms and work with the sellers directly to not have them stop selling it, but have them pay a fair licensing fee for it and collect that and distribute it to the rights holders using our royalty system.
Share
11:36
There's no reason why they can't continue. It's just the artists and in this case, when I say artists, I'm really talking about the writers, but they need to be compensated. They need to be paid for the use of their work. And I don't think that there's anybody in the world that would argue with that. So let's just figure out a fair price and monetize the existing activity and create a new revenue stream.
Share
11:60
Absolutely, totally. Well, you guys at Lyricfind do so many things that are cool that there's probably not enough time for us to talk about all of them, but I did want you to talk a little bit about lyric search.
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Darryl Ballantine
12:10
Yes, search is a great tool for discovery.
Share
12:13
If you think about every time you had a song running through your head and you don't know who sings it or what the name of it is is the only way to find that song is by searching for the lyrics, you know, or if you're out at a store or somewhere out in public and you hear a song that's playing and you know, you can't get your phone out fast enough to tag it with SAM or sound hound, what are you going to remember?
Share
12:38
You're going to remember a line or two from the song to be able to search for it. So having that ability to search through the database really enhances the discovery process.
Share
12:50
So if you think about even as a small independent artists that isn't necessarily going to make a ton of money off of the displays of lyrics, the ability for them to be discovered by people who hear their music somewhere else and are hearing it for the first time and I would have no way to find it. Otherwise having their lyrics in our database, enables that discovery to happen.
Share
13:18
It enables people to use voice search to ask for a song to be played.
Share
13:23
It enables them to, to search online through the various different platforms and figure out who that artist is and what that song is and that can lead them to not just additional streaming royalties or downloads, but also building up a great fan relationship where they buy your merchandise, they go to your shows and they introduce other people to your music. So it just compounds the benefits.
Share
13:51
Absolutely. I think if you guys haven't already started talking to smart speaker manufacturers, you totally should because that would be like the greatest Yeah,
Share
Darryl Ballantine
14:00
I mean we we work with both
Amazon
and Google
for their lyrics implementations. So it's it's certainly a big focus of ours. And Amazon
has said publicly many times that search by lyrics is the biggest music search use case with Alexa, which makes sense.Share
14:21
Yeah, yeah, exactly. In my house. That's totally we do that all the time.
Share
14:27
Well, Darryl Ballantyne Ceo and founder of Lyricfind thanks so much for coming and being with me on the future of what today.
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Darryl Ballantine
14:33
Well, thank you for having me. It's always great to talk.
Share
Amadeu Chaplain
15:09
Because this story's fleeing in any just smart and too soon.
Share
15:16
Sometimes I laugh.
Share
15:36
Oh, might not be good.
Share
15:59
But you know what I try.
Share
17:31
That was jay walker blues by the
Minx
.Share
17:35
If you're enjoying this program, please subscribe to our show on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review.
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17:41
Follow us on twitter and instagram at KRS F O W. And subscribe to our newsletter to find out what's coming up next.
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Break
18:23
You're listening to the future of what. I'm talking to. Amadeu Chaplain of Pex, Amadiyah, Welcome to the future of what.
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Amadeu Chaplain
18:30
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to have you.
Share
18:33
So Pex. This is a global video and music search engine but I definitely am going to need you to explain to me and my listeners what it is that you guys do.
Share
Amadeu Chaplain
18:43
Absolutely. So it's a search engine in the sense that if you think of Google you type in a word and then you see all instances of that word appearing on the internet.
Share
18:55
And so we built a search engine for music and video so that when you plug into our system a song or video, we then find all instances of that song or part of that song or part of that video reappearing on any of the open streaming platforms like YouTube Facebook instagram twitter, we follow about 30 streaming platforms out there.
Share
19:24
And that helps us to find all the re out loads of your song, of your music, of your videos and aggregate that data to so that you better understand how large your global audiences, not just on your channels, but with everybody else that is using your content out there.
Share
19:45
So there's sort of two things that this is accomplishing. One is to do some data analysis and find out who's listening and watching where and how and then the other is kind of like a rights management thing. So people can make sure that they're not missing out on certain income streams. Is that right?
Share
Amadeu Chaplain
20:03
That's right. So with that technology, you get a constant real time flow where you can see every time your music or you know, even down to just 1/2 of that content appearing in another piece of somebody else's work. So say there's a wedding video or cat video or somebody doing a mix and putting it on
SoundCloud
, all of those individual instances appear in our interface.Share
20:38
And so you can see, oh here, that person used five seconds of my content at three minutes in their song that they uploaded, etcetera. And then you can decide what actions you want to take on that. You just want to know that it's there for now, there's nothing else that lets you kind of understand where it is and what people are doing with it.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
21:01
That's the first thing then, do you want to monetize it?
Share
Amadeu Chaplain
21:05
Does that person have a license to use your content? Do you use the technologies that are out there to just claim part of the revenue on the advertising that's playing on that video? So that's another way of monetizing it. And then the third thing that you might want to do is take it down if it's completely unauthorized and you don't want it out there.
Share
21:25
So that's kind of the rights management piece. And so this is kind of a list like you would imagine on
Google
with every instance of your work appearing somewhere else. And then there's the analytics aspect of things where we can see in total how many people use your content, it might be, you know, 100,000 people on your personal channel.Share
Speaker 3
21:51
And you know that there was a sync license that you obtained for a show. And so it's going to appear there too.
Share
Amadeu Chaplain
21:56
But then there is all these other instances that might make it 100 times more than that.
Share
22:04
And so understanding how large your audience is and where they're hearing or watching your content if it's on TikTok, if it's on twitter, if it's on instagram wherever it is and really understanding who's using your content, what they're doing with it and the aggregate of that is also part of what we do. Do you do it for the US only or is it international?
Share
Speaker 3
22:27
You know, it's international.
Share
Amadeu Chaplain
22:29
So we also tracked platforms like, well obviously the platforms like
YouTube
and instagram and twitter are completely international. And so we see anything that pops up on there that is publicly available. But then there's also platforms like Youku and China and D K and Russia
.Share
22:47
You know, there's more than a billion videos right now on VK and
Russia
. So it's a massive platform that people might not think about, but through which a lot of people in the world consume music and videos. And so that's also kind of a large audience out there and who is your client?Share
23:07
Immediately it pops into my mind that labels would want to use this managers and artists themselves. Is that really who you're targeting for a client base. Yeah, anyone who creates content. So it might be managers.
Share
23:21
So we work with all the kind of major music industry players, publishing companies, recording labels, but also production music companies and then, you know, film studios viral video companies that aggregate, you know, these kind of gifts form type videos because our engine will start the content even down to one second.
Share
23:47
So even if there is a meme or GIF that's created out there will start that too. There is anyone also doing any kind of marketing work. So advertising and the like anyone who creates content or who wants to understand how content travels.
Share
24:05
So what we'll also get from our search engine is this overall view of the platforms that are out there? How many videos are uploaded every day on
YouTube
or on Facebook
? How much music is contained in those videos? How big is gaming really on these platforms? All these kind of questions are things that we can answer, are you guys putting out any white papers on the data that you're finding?Share
Darryl Ballantine
24:35
Are you working with any schools that are doing research on this?
Share
Amadeu Chaplain
24:38
Because this seems like it's really great data that someone should be reporting on?
Share
24:43
Yeah, we have, we have a lot of data and so we do publish things sometimes to time. We also are working with
Carnegie Mellon
and some of their students with Harvard
as well. And so we're definitely giving our data so that there can be some analytics done to it and and and further work and then we have people in how to do that too.Share
25:06
And so you know, in terms of having the same workforce as well as other companies out there might it's not quite the same, but we definitely published the content as and when we think it might be interesting.
Share
25:19
Yeah, it seems really fascinating to me. Do you guys have any thoughts, I mean, just sort of pulling out of the conversation specifically about you guys, do you guys have any thoughts on what the passage of the european copyright directive?
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Darryl Ballantine
25:31
Like how that might affect the industry?
Share
Amadeu Chaplain
25:33
Absolutely. So that's also something that we're definitely working on, essentially, the passage of the directive changes things for platforms and for creators.
Share
25:46
So what's really missing out there is attribution. So that's why we call this our attribution engine. And the problem with platforms is that when the content is uploaded they might not know who was the original creator. And so they have some licenses maybe with the major some don't have any licenses at all.
Share
26:08
And so the directive does multiple things. A it makes it necessary for the platform to speak. These licenses in the first place.
Share
26:17
So that copyrighted work is licensed and their users might be able to use it and upload it to their own videos. And then it makes it also a mandatory for them to have some kind of detection system in place to better understand when individual users are uploading a mix or a remix to understand that there might be copyrighted content in there and that they are now viable for distributing that content.
Share
26:47
And so on. The side of the creators were building an engine where they can freely upload their content and be given the attribution every time their content is re uploaded by other people. So not only when themselves uploaded, but also when everybody else uses that.
Share
27:05
And on the platform side, understand who that content belongs to, even if it's not on their account on other people's accounts and be able to appropriately pay them for their work. That's exciting.
Share
27:19
In terms of samples or little pieces of songs that maybe people are using in remixes or something.
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Darryl Ballantine
27:25
How difficult is that to find as opposed to a full song?
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Amadeu Chaplain
27:31
Well, the current market standards is to limit the fingerprints, it's called the fingerprints that we take. So that works a little bit like she's, it takes a song and it creates a coded version of it.
Share
27:44
And then that's how we then here that it's the same music or the same video. And so that's how it works. And the current market standards for That is to recognize it at about 20 seconds.
Share
27:58
What We do is we go down to 1/2 a recognizable content and we also allow for extreme distortions, quality differences. If the content is just the melody, it'll be recognized. So we go a lot further than what's currently existing on the market to make it extremely accurate, wow. And does that work?
Share
Darryl Ballantine
28:22
I mean, I know that there have been very famous lawsuits recently about, you know infringement where people are saying that certain songs sound enough like other songs to be liable for damages. So it does seem like perhaps I'd be hard.
Share
Amadeu Chaplain
28:37
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think there's two aspects of it.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
28:41
There's you know, recognizing this song and then there is the aspect of you know, the legal aspect behind and what's allowed, what's not allowed and so you know, sometimes it gets into things that are way beyond what the technology here's or fines and more about what the lawyers argue essentially and what the artists claim where they inspired by it was just completely random.
Share
Speaker 3
29:07
Then it gets into kind of a different argument. One thing that is particularly challenging is for example beats a lot of beats might sound the same. So things like that are definitely challenges that. You know, we're always working on and improving, wow.
Share
29:23
So is the fingerprinting technology that you use?
Share
Darryl Ballantine
29:25
Is that proprietary or is there an industry standard for that?
Share
Amadeu Chaplain
29:28
No, that's proprietary. That's our own fingerprinting technology, wow.
Share
Speaker 3
29:32
So was the person who started pecks a software engineer?
Share
29:36
Yeah, he's a software engineer. His name is rescued.
Share
29:39
He is a former security engineer and so understands kind of large data sets very well and he started the company essentially wanting to create like a spasm, but for video so we could be in a room, there's something on the screen you want to know what that is.
Share
29:57
Oh you point your phone at it and then it tells you, oh, this is Episode three of season one of the Big Bang theory, and that's what you're watching. And you know, essentially there was not a lot of interest for that, but with there was an interest in with more this attribution for everything that gets re uploaded online. And so that's how tax was created.
Share
30:23
Well, that is fascinating and also incredibly useful. Isn't that funny how sometimes a lot of tech comes online as, you know, sort of of solution in search of a problem. And that is definitely something where this tech found its problem because that is a huge problem in the music industry and something we've all been working on for a really long time.
Share
30:43
So, exactly. And I used to work on the top from side and actually it was really frustrating because we knew that copyrighted content was getting uploaded on our platform and we had already put in place some market standard solutions to counter that. And you know, really, it just wasn't working. It wasn't doing the trick.
Share
31:04
And there was way too much scale for us to deal with. And so that was really the issue was also how much content is uploaded. So if you Look at
YouTube
, for example, there's more than 700 hours of content, episode it every minute. So when you need to fingerprints all of that content to make sure that there is no copyright on any of this content.Share
31:28
That's a huge technical challenge beyond the fingerprint. It's also the scale that's a huge issue and that's just one platform. You know, there's 40 that we track and some of them are absolutely Huge and now we have more than 17 billion videos and songs in our database which represents all of the content that supported on these platforms.
Share
31:49
And so that was really a massive issue. And one that you know,
YouTube
when they developed their content I. D. Solution, they spent more than $100 million to do it and that's just for their own platform.Share
32:03
And so what we managed to do is make it so technically performance that it costs just a fraction of that. And that's really also part of the issue, wow.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
32:15
Fantastic.
Share
Speaker 3
32:16
Well Amadiyah chaplain from Pecs, thank you so much for being with me today on the future of what? Thank you so much for having me.
Share
32:39
Yeah, why would somebody do this?
Share
33:00
Never before stronger when they felt the ones with all the secrets are the ones that vision, the truth will always show the ones with all the answers are the ones that never know fortune forever.
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Darryl Ballantine
35:36
A okay a okay that was here we are by red cabin.
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36:23
When Kill Rock Stars was looking for someone to take over our fulfillment operation.
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36:27
Merch. Table stepped up to do the heavy lifting, moving our entire stock to their warehouse and helping us create merch. Our fans love with merch tables support. We've been able to focus on the music and artists that matter to us.
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36:39
KRS loves merch. Table See what they can do for your business at Merch Table dot com.
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36:46
You're listening to the future of what after the show. Take a moment to leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts.
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36:52
It helps people find the show and we love hearing from you.
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36:55
You're listening to the future of what I'm talking to
Stephen White
from Dub Set.Share
36:60
Stephen, Welcome to the future of what.
Share
Speaker 5
37:02
Thanks for having me.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
37:03
So first of all, we are talking this week about music attributions credits. You know the fact that this has really risen to be an important topic in the music industry today and Dub set is an interesting platform. I wondered if you could first tell us a little bit about what Dub set does and then we can talk about how it's helpful with accreditation.
Share
Speaker 5
37:24
Sure. So Dub settles the platform for the identification clearance and legal distribution of mixed content and remixed content. So anything that's been changed from its original form and put into either a long form DJ mix or an unofficial remix.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
37:42
So, can you talk a little bit about, you know the post sample world that we live in like what went down with that? I mean, I think a lot of people are probably pretty confused about how that whole thing happened.
Share
Speaker 5
37:54
Well, I mean, I think a couple of things happen first is software has evolved to the point where you really don't have to be an audio engineer anymore to sample content. And so as it became easier and easier for consumers to sample, there was an explosion of content creation that happened.
Share
38:17
And at the same time, distribution platforms like
YouTube
were born and that provided an outlet for this content to be distributed at the time, You know, this is you know, over 10 years ago, the recognition technologies that were in place at that point really weren't to the point where they could handle the amount of volume and the amount of content that ended up being distributed and so services like YouTube
when they were acquired by Google
and then SoundCloud
, coming after it ended up having to put a blanket deals in place with rights holders to allow for this type of behavior to happen.Share
39:01
And that really was the birth of this kind of post sampling era where anybody can take anything create something new and just put it out there in the world in a way that doesn't require some of the licensing and some of the permissions that used to be required to do these kind of things.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
39:17
Is there any law about this at this point?
Share
Speaker 5
39:20
Is there something that it's like if you're using a sample that's less than 30 seconds long or something that's okay, but longer and you have to get it properly licensed. No.
Share
39:28
You know, in hip hop, there was a couple of cases back in the early days of hip hop where they were, you know, looking at failure use and how much a piece of populated material could be used without having to obtain a license.
Share
39:41
And what they found was, you know, if you could recognize the original song, it was long enough to recognize the original song, you need a license and so that means there really is no protection for you if you're using somebody else's stuff, you know, you have to have a license, you have to do it the right way.
Share
39:58
There's no free license or compulsory license around any of this stuff. The way there is with some other uses of contact.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
40:06
So everybody has to get licensed. So that's what Dub said has been set up to help with.
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Speaker 5
40:10
Yeah. And then the way, you know, the way the licensing works historically is, you know, you have to figure out, you know what the song is that you're using. You have to figure out who recorded that song. So who's the artist that recorded it.
Share
40:21
You have to figure out who wrote the song or you know how many writers wrote the song and who the publishers were And then you have to go to all those different entities and put these bespoke licenses in place which could take anywhere from 12 months to 24 months to negotiate and can cost you a tremendous amount of money and legal fees in addition to any kind of advances and things on top to use the content.
Share
40:45
So what that means is the average person.
Share
40:48
I was just not able to do this. And even for small artists, it just was such a prohibitive, you know, methodology that most people just stopped doing. It just stopped using samples unless they were going to distribute their stuff into SoundCloud and
YouTube
and just use it as a mechanism to become discovered.Share
41:06
You know, folks like SAn Holo for example, you know, using Marvin, Gaye sample or a dr dre sample, wanting to get discovered and signed to Sony Music and then stop using samples altogether. So, so what we've done is we've we've created a platform that combines a content recognition technology called mix can with a set of broad licenses that give us catalog wide use of today over 55 million tracks.
Share
41:35
And then it's a it's a rules based system so that the rights holders can set rules around how their contents used and then what that does. It allows us to process content that's created by content creators at scale, clear it legally distributed in a way that the content creator doesn't have to worry about all this licensing, it's all taken care of by Dub set.
Share
41:55
We do all the licensing for you. You can just bring your content to us, we will clear it, we will distributed on your behalf. It can now legally be distributed out to our distribution partners like
Apple
and Spotify and Title. And you can then, you know, get your content out there in the world.Share
Darryl Ballantine
42:13
That's really interesting, because I feel like there are other platforms which do it the opposite way, the person who creates a beat or a melody or some, you know, piece a little piece of music. There are platforms out there where they can take their stuff and enter into a deal where other people can come to that site to use it. So that's different.
Share
Speaker 5
42:33
Yeah, let's splice and platforms like that, that is different. Yeah, we're focused on commercially distributed content. So if you if you want to use a sample of somebody else's song or you wanna create a mix or a remix of somebody else's song and you want to do that using the commercial catalog that's currently in existence, subset can make that available to you.
Share
42:55
We're not a platform for, you know, pairing up a beat maker with a producer. Splice does that well, other folks do that. Well, we're also not a sight for kind of bespoke, you know, sample licensing, There's folks that do that as well.
Share
43:11
What we've tried to do is create a platform that takes this amazing amount of content really focused on DJ to start, because DJ in our mind, you know, DJs are kind of the ultimate content creators, ultimate content curators, especially in the hip hop and electronic and dance genres, you know, kind of create these amazing musical journeys for you as a consumer and none of that content was able to leave, you know, these UGC platforms and we just we thought that was absolutely crazy, why can't you go listen to a DJ?
Share
43:45
Jazzy Jeff sat on Aqua music or Spotify? There's no reason you shouldn't be able to.
Share
43:52
And so we created a system to clear that content enable those mixes and those remixes to be distributed. So you guys find the original music creators and get those people paid under a specific license. So we've entered into deals with all of the rights holders, the labels and publishers Over 55,000 labels and publishers on the platform.
Share
44:13
We enter into deals directly with the content creators, the DJ, and then for some of the DJ that they can participate in revenue today for most of the DJs, we offer them free services, we offer them free clearance, we offer them three distributions, We set up the artist pages for them inside of
Apple
music and Spotify, and we give them the ability to distribute the content that they're creating risk free, meaning that we take on 100% of the responsibility for clearing and distributing that content with no liability rests back to the content creator.Share
Darryl Ballantine
44:48
So you do that for free, but they have to pay the rights holders.
Share
Speaker 5
44:52
No, they don't pay anything. So it's free for the content creators, they don't charge them anything for those services. Nor do we share the revenue. That's that's created from the monetization of that content that all goes back to the original rights holders.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
45:05
Oh, I got it, I got it.
Share
Speaker 5
45:07
I was trying to figure out where the money went.
Share
Amadeu Chaplain
45:08
Now. I get it.
Share
Speaker 5
45:10
Yes, the money all goes back to the original labels and publishers. But the goal here again for the DJs is to give them a path to be able to legally distribute their stuff, create, you know, direct to fan interactions, create fan bases on these platforms and be able to use those to understand where their fans are, helps them figure out where they should be touring.
Share
45:31
It gives them the ability to, you know, get their content out of the world without having to worry about it.
Share
Amadeu Chaplain
45:35
That's really interesting. That's a very unique, specific thing that you guys are doing.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
45:40
Do you feel like this has a wider application as time goes on to some of those people who perhaps unlike DJs, aren't really thinking about it in those terms, but are just using music in their
UGC
uploads, the platform itself.Share
Speaker 5
45:54
The combination of a licensing marketplace and it really is kind of a marketplace because it allows the rights holders to set these rules that can be specific to specific types of usage. In other words, you know, if you're using music for
UGC
video, here's the set of rules, if you're using music for a podcast, here's a set of rules.Share
46:15
If you're using music for DJ mix here, the set of rules, the combination of that with content identification system like ours has very, very broad applications you can apply it to, I just mentioned a few of them podcasting, UGC video,
UGC
, audio and video combined, you can apply it to still photos, you can apply it to written word in books.Share
46:37
There's many different applications to the technology across the whole spectrum of concentration because in all aspects of concentration, there's the same problem happening where people have access and the ability to use these pieces and bits and parts of other things and without a strong identification platform in front of a set of licenses, you have no way of knowing what they're using.
Share
47:03
Once you know what they're using, then a licensing structure that is rules based, it can scale is hugely important to be able to make sure you can process the vast amounts of content that are being created every day and then enable that stuff to be monetized appropriately.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
47:18
It's especially, I mean, you mentioned podcasts, I think that's so useful for people who do podcasts to know about because I'm asked that question almost every day.
Share
Speaker 5
47:27
How do you properly licensed music for a podcast and you know, with podcasts, I mean, I don't even know what the number is, but I'm sure there's hundreds of new podcasts today, if not more, more, more thousands and expected to be, you know, hundreds of thousands over the next couple of years.
Share
47:43
And so it's something that we're very focused on that right now. We think it's a really big opportunity. I mean, we do have the entire catalog of music that we license.
Share
47:54
So, you know, making that catalog available for podcasters to be able to tap into that catalog and use commercial music in the podcast under license with a known set of licensing terms we think is very, very valuable to the marketplace, valuable to podcasters, to their creativity and ability to tap in and used sets of libraries, but also very valuable to the rights holders to know that they can, you know, license this stuff at scale and allow it to be used.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
48:21
And so how much has your organization grown since you've started it?
Share
Speaker 5
48:24
You know, we're still relatively small, were a little less than just under 30 people. You know, we've grown obviously from, you know, two or 3 to 30. And so, you know, over the course of a couple of years, but it's been a really heavy build here.
Share
48:38
We've had to build out a significant live technology, We had to put a, you know, a tremendous number of licensing deals in place. And so it's taking some time to do that. But we're really on the cusp of some huge, huge growth here over the course of the next couple of years, So the company will double triple in size, you know, over the course of the next 12-18 months.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
48:58
Yeah, I was, I was just thinking it must be because this is such an important solution to something that's a real problem in the industry and I feel like I've been really lucky because I feel like in the last 10 years the last 10 years have been filled with tech solutions to problems that I don't personally have and like very few people I know actually have, But all of a sudden, just in the last like six months I've been meeting people like you who have these really important solutions to really true, serious problems in the industry.
Share
49:24
So it's very exciting.
Share
Speaker 5
49:26
It's a really interesting time, I think there's across the industry, there's a set of entrepreneurs who are really focused on really rebuilding some of the infrastructure of the industry in a modern way that works for, you know, today's use cases and we think for future applications as well, it's an exciting time because you know, when you start to look at all of these pieces, it really is a full kind of rebuild of the core foundation of the business and using technology in ways that enable scales and unlock creativity that let creators be creators without having to worry about the underlying plumbing of how this all works.
Share
50:10
It's super exciting and we think we're doing something really important, we know of others that are doing great, important work as well in similar fashion.
Share
50:20
So we're really excited about what it means for creativity. It unlocks, you know, the ability for artists to be artists and creators to be creators and just to do what they do best, which is be creative, right?
Share
50:31
And it also gets the artists paid the musicians, you know, the people who created the original content, which I think is the step that has been lacking for years now, is this kind of very blinding focus in the media and in the industry to talk about streaming.
Share
50:48
You know, I think we tend to lump a lot of what we're talking about here today into that bucket and it is, there are lots of different pieces and parts to streaming, I think we all can get very focused on, you know, a Spotify penny weight, but in the day we want to make sure that in a world where it's really about collecting pennies or pieces of pennies that you've got, you know, as broad a funnel possible, open to the artists to collect every penny possible, because it it really is hugely important to artists, especially independent artists, that they get paid every single piece of revenue that they do across the entire industry, because that's the only way it's going to be a, you know, a viable career for somebody.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
51:32
Exactly, and on that note,
Stephen White
is the ceo of Dub set. Thanks so much Stephen for being with me today on the future of what.Share
Speaker 5
51:40
Thanks for having me again.
Share
Darryl Ballantine
55:01
That was a hand grenade by team dress and that's our show. The music we played today was used by permission.
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Speaker 5
55:10
You heard the
Minx
, red cabin team dress and of course, our theme song, Mind Your Own Business by the Delta five. Subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review for more info on our shows. Check out our website at Kill Rock Stars dot com slash the future of what and sign up for our newsletter.Share
55:26
Her program was engineered by Brent Asbury at beta petrol and is produced by Will Watts. I'm Porsche Sabban, president of
Kill Rock Stars
.Share
Darryl Ballantine
55:34
See you next week.
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Darryl Ballantine
Amadeu Chaplain