Apple Music and Spotify have started offering users access to unofficial, user-uploaded music remixes, courtesy of a deal with Dubset Media Holdings.
The company uses algorithms to sort out licensing and royalty payments for musical remixes. It’s an incredibly complicated problem to tackle, since a single remix might have upward of 600 different rights holders.
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Remixes are a part of internet culture, but companies like Apple find themselves in a legal quandary when it comes to distributing them. The companies could be seen as profiting from music they don’t own the rights to.
A bit like a more complex version of Shazam, Dubset runs music submitted by users through its MixBank software to find the likely source of each sample used.
Apple signed a deal with Dubset back in March, and Spotify followed a couple of months later.
“Content owners have been very supportive,” Dubset CEO Stephen White told TechCrunch. “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!”
At present, only a few single-track remixes have been made available on the service, including DJ Jazzy Jeff’s remix of “Room in Here” by Anderson .Paak. Going forward, the service could be expanded to include multi-song mixes, longer DJ sets and more.
