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Apple Music to add fully licensed remixes and DJ mixes to its catalog

Apple Music screencap canvasApple Music has inked a deal with Dubset Media Holdings to add remixes and DJ mixes to the streaming service’s library. That type of music has usually been left out of legal streaming platforms because of the complexity of correctly identifying all the rights holders who should receive royalties from the final creation. However, digital distributor Dubset uses proprietary technology to analyze these music files, identify the recordings used in them, and break out the requisite royalty payments for them.

Dubset specializes in legal distribution of mixes and remixes, with services for DJs and managers, rights holders, and music platforms. Its MixBank software ‘fingerprints’ a song, comparing the recordings used against a database from the metadata experts at Gracenote. A second program called MixScan combs through a track and identifies not just licensed music, but also its start and stop points.

This type of content has long been the purview of services such as YouTube, SoundCloud, Digitally Imported, and Mixcloud However, many of them have struggled to create a system of royalty payments that seemed to entirely satisfy major labels. Dubset CEO Stephen White said an average mix could include 25-30 songs, which would mean payments to the same number of labels and likely multiple publishers as well. Dubset as deals with more than 14,000 labels and publishers at this point.

“The goal is to bring this to all 400 distributors worldwide,” White said. “When you think about unlocking these millions of hours of content being created, it’s significant monetization for the industry.” So even though Apple Music might be the first big parner for Dubset, it seems unlikely it will be the last.

Anna Washenko

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