Hey guys, welcome to electronic dance money, your number one business resource for making money as electronic musicians and producers.
Yo, what’s up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of electronic dance money. I’m your host Christian casino. We’re back with Darren Bruce from the DJ sessions. Part Two, we’re gonna be diving into some copyright stuff. Darren, how are you doing? How was your holiday? It was great. It was busy. I’m glad that the year is over in reflection. You know, I’m sure a lot of people are saying that right now. But honestly, we had a great year. I mean, the readjustment up to you know,
I,
my year was incredible. Like, you know, most people didn’t have a great year, my year was fucking phenomenal. So I really can’t complain about 2020, other than not being able to go to places like normal. Yeah, that was one of the things we found out early in the year, you know, and obviously, it’s kind of like a lot of what we were doing well, what I’ve been doing for the last 28 years, had prepared me a lot for 120. What happened? I’m, primarily one of the reasons why you’re having me on the show is is you know, getting into the online digital space, and having to navigate those waters. And after navigating those waters for so long. I mean, what I love to see, you know, I always love being the first one I do something, you know, or at least being a pioneer. But to see such a massive migration of people jumping online and having the medium that you’ve been using for so long, be validated in I mean, exponentially. In almost impossibly, could you see this kind of growth happened to something like YouTube took a while podcasting took a while to see people jump on board. And now you have the word live stream or podcast in a sentence and people really get it people understand it. Yeah, it’s definitely it’s definitely become legitimize for sure. And I can only imagine. Yeah, like you said, kind of what you’ve been, you know, what you’ve been grinding at for? well over a decade now is now the main stream and people like you’ve been ahead of the game for so long now. And people are just now trying to figure this out. So it’s, I can only imagine what that’s like to be, you know, almost like, vindicated. I was gonna use the term vindicated. But that sounds like I might have had a vengeance or something. Yeah, maybe indications not the right word. But it’s, it feels more legit. You know, you’ve got a legit business that people are, you’re in a good market that everyone’s trying to be a part of now. Yeah. And that was the one thing is a year ago, if I was saying to somebody, oh, yeah, I have a live streaming DJ show. And so we’re a feature partner of Twitch, they’d be like, what’s twitch? Yeah, they’d roll the enroller eyes. And then you’d say, Oh, we stream DJ live online. And their immediate response would also follow up with Why would I want to watch a DJ online? Yeah, and it’s like, well, if there’s any By the way, if there’s any new listeners that are listening right now, if this is your first episode, or you didn’t listen to the last episode, definitely go listen to the last episode, because you’re probably seeing or going, who’s this Darren guy? Or if you’re a completely new listener, you’re like, who are both of these guys? Well go check out the last episode Darren we go extensively into his backgrounds a great introduction to who Darren is, why you should listen to him and why the DJ Sessions is I mean, changing the game in terms of live streaming, but going into all this you know, Darren’s learned a lot of lessons and part of what this entire you know, part one and part two, we’re talking we’re gonna be talking about copywriting this episode because man, the world of copywriting is being flipped upside down. There’s it’s not even just live streaming, either. That’s kind of taking hit with the copywriting stuff. And I’m very curious as to what you think. I’m gonna save it because it’s gonna be a really interesting topic once we kind of transition into that. And by the way, I do have to say for the listeners, my girlfriend Marty, who you guys have long term listeners have heard of on a an episode like 20 episodes ago, where we talked about financial stuff. She’s not here today. So my animals are running rampant and they are being very active today. So I apologize. Be here, but for some reason, so we just got back from vacation. For two weeks, I was gone visiting family. We had people here at our apartment and watching our cats. And I have no idea why. But we come back and my my cat punkin has been going crazy whining like never before trying to go outside. And he never does. I was like, did they let him out? Which I really don’t care, but he’s been going insane. So I apologize if you guys have to deal with him meowing in the background, I’m trying to corral him out of here and get him into the bedroom or something. But that’s all good. Anyway, let’s die. I’m really curious to start this conversation off. Before we get into like the current state of what’s happening with copyright, especially in the live streaming world. Because, man, Was there some drama in like, I think what was like April or May, I think is when it really started to hit the fan. Yeah.
Well, the well, March, April, June, I can give you a timeline. Well, we can cover the timeline of well, we’ll cover the timeline. But to start it out. Why don’t we I mean, kind of like what we did last episode where we kind of went into your background. I mean, what’s your experience with copyright? Yeah. And not to get you know, we don’t have to go into insane detail. But like, just what has been, what was it like 10 years ago? And then I mean, I guess leading into what it’s kind of what’s going on now? Well, it’s when he mentioned that. And it’s awesome that you’re getting me in this interview because I just came off an interview that I did with Gordon fire mark, who’s an attorney out of La better have just said his name, right. I think I said his name right. I’m sure I said his name. Right. Yeah. Gordon fire mark a I mean, his his resume, he does a podcast called the podcast lawyer. You know, he actually teaches entertainment law at Columbia College, Hollywood, who I might need to get this guy’s information. Oh, yeah. Hey, it gets better. He’s an intellectual property and media law at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. He also teaches contract law at Pepperdine. So I just had him on as a guest right before this episode. And it was great, too. I can do a lot of research online. But there’s a lot of articles, a lot of stuff out there. When you know what you’re looking for. It’s going to read the same boilerplate, the same thing over and over again. But But this guy was just refreshing to talk to you, because he knows his stuff. He’s been in the game. He was in public access back in, oh, gosh, it was 10 years, probably before I was because he started entertainment law in 92. That’s when I started in public access. He actually both started in public access television. And we talked about, you know, the rules back then, the copyright law was made in 1976. So public acts, you know, that was mainly made for film and television, those were the only mediums that copyright law really played a role in because you were making something with using somebody else’s work, you are copying the work. And so you know, public access came about and we were on television, you know, it’s on television, and they kind of did their things to make sure we were okay and protected under the news. But, you know, they also know, basically summed up is the people, we’re gonna go start suing people on public access for using their work, because they knew they didn’t have any money. Right? I mean, they’re okay, we’re gonna go out, probably that much of an audience either, really? Not much. I mean, we’re gonna sue them for damages. Because, I mean, we had no way to even track numbers. When we were doing shows on public access, you couldn’t say, Oh, we have 1000 we have, it wasn’t broadcast television, where when I moved into that world, after public access to NBC and Fox, where we had Nielsen ratings, you can find out what our demographics were, we could find out how many viewers were watching, we could see our numbers grow, they could actually go back and pull those deals and said, We know 25,000 people are watching this show. So we’re gonna see for those damages if you don’t have the rights to the music. So you know, I had to quickly in 2000, educate myself from being an over glorified production assistant on a public access television show to associate producer of a broadcast network show. And all that kept popping up with these terms, hop synchronization, use, Master use contracts, actually contracts I still use to this day. They kind of don’t change the parameters don’t change but but I was new to this. And I’m like, you mean I have to get sober the band wants to play on our show. I have to get a contract to use their song. I have to get a synchronization because I’m singing the song to a video. And there was and then I have to get performance rights. And then I have to get personal use personal release of the band. Basically, I was I was putting four to five contracts in front of these bands these days. The local band to put them on a show. These bands didn’t have attorneys, they didn’t know what’s going on. So the throwing these contracts, they’re sitting there going, what the hell is all this? I’m like, this is so we can protect ourselves. So you can’t back come back and sue us find the right basically not not, it’s basically saying we got the rights to use your music. And a lot of bands were like, We don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know, it’s not because they were independent, they didn’t have a label that they were working with it understood this, you know. And so navigating that was interesting.
But needed in getting this still all move forward going into the podcasting world, you know, where now you were using somebody else’s music, they have copyrights, and we’d have to have the rights to use that music and distribute whether you’re making a penny on it or not. Okay, now, there is what comes into play called fair use, and fair use. Arch our content of our shows, we’re using the music to create content for people to come watch it. Very useful is in the play. Where is the vine, I use this example in the interview I just did. If you and I are walking down the Vegas Strip, and a prince song comes on in the background, and you happen to say you tripped and fell and it was a funny video, and we put it online and it gets a million downloads and views on on YouTube. YouTube may come in and they might they might say, Hey, we’re gonna flag that. Because you’re using a print song and your video, they don’t know what the video is. They don’t care about the content, they care about the song, we can come back and we can challenge and say, Hey, whoa, this is fair use, man. This is background using come from a hotel. That wasn’t the primary content of our video, even though they were saying let’s go crazy may have been playing in the background, and we’re falling on the ground drunk rolling around laughing. That wasn’t the primary. And so they might lift that and say, You’re right, that was background. fair use. We can’t your original because it’s a one time off thing. What about a person that goes around filming funny videos over and over again, people falling down and I have music playing in the background? Well, then my primary content is distributing that using music in the background is part of that content. So it might not fall under fair use? Whoo, that’s just the snowflake to the tip of the iceberg. When it really comes down to it has its fair use. So, you know, what I found is, is when we moved up from podcasting, which, you know, that’s not will disseminate through, you know, apple, Stitcher, I heart all those places. But none of those places, post our content. We’re hosting our content on our own servers. And so it’s up to us, they don’t need apple and all those people, they don’t have to worry about copyrights, because they’re not the ones hosting the content. They are a medium that is accessing an XML document that link for people in laymen terms who don’t understand podcasting, or this stuff. They’re hosting the link, and that link points back to a server. And that’s where the content is being hosted. So, again, the responsibility of licenses falls upon us, when you use something like YouTube, or Twitch, or video hosting provider, they are hosting the content. So you have to have the licenses to put it on their servers to host that content there. And if you don’t have it, they will take it down Facebook, and now what that was, you know, video on demand when when YouTube came out, there’s a huge thing, the issue that YouTube had to face, and now you have companies, the live streaming companies coming out, you know, Facebook, going into live mixer just went down and sold off the Facebook, twitch coming into play. You know, you have these people putting, not only just music, but video games, the music and video games, Karaoke Songs, they’re performing songs, they don’t have the rights to perform, and or the licenses of the music they’re using to to use that that music. And the problem is, is that companies like YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, they’re monetizing off of that content. So you as the content creator puts his music up, you may not be seeing a dime for it, but they’re selling commercials. They’re making money, and they don’t have the rights. And the DMCA comes in and kind of what’s the Safe Harbor act and says, Hey, you as a company are protected, because we know you can’t monitor. Everything is going to be throwing to your servers. But if you make a process that somebody says, take that down, and you can play with it, you’re okay, you’re protected. And that’s been working so far, that was created in 1996. And there was no YouTube. There was no there was no digital. There was no lives. There wasn’t there wasn’t even an iPod created. There wasn’t we were still making I was working for record stores at that time, was on CDs and tape. I think we were still selling cassette tapes at that time. I mean, there was no I mean, I think maybe you might have been able to do a
live stream of a set somewhere. Close to nine, I’m not sure exactly when it started here, but you can do online live digital streaming to a computer, if you have if you had cable modem, you couldn’t do it on 56 k dial up. But that being said, you know, video online really didn’t become prevalent until you know, later. And then you obviously had that bandwidth doesn’t flow YouTube was Yeah, YouTube is 2005. And so, all that being said, you know, copyright for television, it was kind of if I knew I was doing a show, like a film, where I knew I was doing a TV show. And I knew when it was going to air, how long it was going to air for what the audience was getting the licenses. So that was pretty easy. You take a standard TV show, it’s 30 minutes long, how many songs Can you really put in it? You know, and if you were doing a TV show, you probably if you were going to use copy written music, you can get one or two songs cleared, pretty easy, that shows going to air one time for the season, you’re not putting into DVD, you’re not mass producing this, you’re not leaving them on line forever, it’s not going to be in reruns or anything. It goes on Once done, it’s gone. film, okay, you know, you’re gonna have your distro deal in place, you know, okay, I’m going to put this through this publishing house, we’re going to easy they’re going to go to the, it’s going to be a motion major pitcher and be distributed across America and globally, okay. But the independent filmmaker, they’re probably going to show it a couple of screenings, put it in some film festivals, maybe play the circuit, and distribution there is going to be very limited, cuz you’re only putting in a theater to maybe a few 100 people. So you put all this down when you submit the when you try to get the rights and clearances to the songs. So they knew is wasn’t a cut and dry process. But still pretty easy. Because we’re a film, a 90 minute film, if you have an original score in it, which you probably usually will. And you’re using a couple songs that you maybe don’t have the licenses to, you’re only researching four to five songs. And there was I’m still trying to find these ladies, they’re out of LA, they actually do this as a service for you. It’s like 125 bucks, you send them the songs you want, they will go out and they will find all the rights holders and send that information to you. For $185 they’ll actually submit all the information to the right places, and then come back to you saying okay, this is how much it’s gonna cost. I’m still trying to find them online. I’ve seen it before. I wish I could find them. But you know, 185 bucks, but then you still have the negotiation of of you got to pay for all those licenses. And, you know, I use the example that you know, one of my favorite movies boondock saints. Troy Duffy wanted to use the part where Willem Dafoe gets out of the first time you see Willem Dafoe get out of the car, and he’s going up to the guy who’s in the alleyway. And I use that dada dada dada, dada. In the director’s cut when you’re listening to the Troy Duffy, he wanted to use when the Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin, but they couldn’t secure the rights to it because they wanted too much money for it. And it was an independent film independent produce. No, no, no, we’re not gonna give you rights. And so we had to go with something else. Now like a cult classic. Oh, classic. Exactly. And that’s the kind of, well that’s the exact thing you might be able to all of a sudden, you do sign off, say you’re Led Zeppelin, you say, okay, we’re gonna charge you $50,000 for this movie, we know it’s probably not gonna go anywhere. But all of a sudden, it becomes this cold class. Again, it’s worldwide known as Boom, boom, boom, and they’re like, crap, we could have got two $3 million out of that, or we underbid that, but that’s what you got to worry about. And that’s when it comes to this online stuff is if somebody gets the licensing for a video, and it says, oh, you’re able to use this for 5000 downloads, or you’re able to use this for a year? Well, once I hit 5000 downloads, or that years, I have to pull that episode down. Now and what happens if that episode goes viral in the first three months, it gets, boom, I got to still take it down. And it’s gone. Yeah. And this kind of, you know, this plays into something that I talked about in the very first episode of electronic dance money with Danny troya. From cinco sound. He came on He’s, uh, he used to do I don’t think he’s doing a ton of production anymore. Actually, no, I think he is starting to do more production stuff. But he pretty much primarily does production with hip hop artists. And
he was making at $1.2 thousand a month just selling beats. And he uses uses beat stars for a lot of his licensing and a lot of these, you know, rappers out here are buying leases for beats. But they’re all tied to these at you know, Max 10,000 streams or something, or, I don’t know the logistics of it, and they’re all priced at that. So it’s like $60 and you can get 10,000 streams on this. If it goes over that then we get into some copyright issues. And so a lot of these rappers will cheap out and go oh, I’ll do $60 instead of buying an outright license for $400 And that’s where you’re like,
Oh, well, if
you’re the shit, and you think you’re the shit and you think you’re gonna get a million streams one day, well, then you better buy that $400 license because that’s gonna pay off more than the $60 license when you get fucked. And the producer comes around and goes, Oh, hey, by the way, that’s now my song. And I own the rights to that. So I’m going to be, you know, we’re not gonna renegotiate a contract, I’m just going to take all the money for all the streams for this. Yeah, and I have a good friend of mine, Robert Anderson, who’s written some books upon this very same subject, he does hip hop beats and makes beats and sells them and, and all that he’s very well listed on Spotify. And I love waking up to his rhetoric every morning, you know, there’s at least three or four posts a day. And it sounds like he’s talking shit to people. But what he’s really saying is Wake the fuck up people and get on the pro get on the bandwagon. If you come at me and you think you’re, you’re this and you’re that but you don’t want to pay 40 bucks for a beat or you don’t pay 100 bucks. You’re not in the right game. And you know, if you’re if you’re really not looking at the, at the copyright side of things, don’t. If you hold your breath to wait for this to settle out, you think something’s gonna be made, not only are you not gonna die, you’re not gonna be able to procreate. So that’s fine. I’m not trying to be harsh or rude to anyone. But the truth is, is Yeah, copyright law is being looked at, like I said, just got the interview with a with an attorney about all this, but it will be slow change. And there is no way to really make a blanket statement to get everyone to agree this is what it’s going to be would be almost impossible. So it’s kind of really up in the air of the music industry is really kind of up in the air, especially when it comes to this digital music rights management stuff. It’s it will it’s very weird. It’s kind of like a gray area. You know, it kind of reminds me of it reminds me of when, when weed was legalized in like Washington and Oregon, and there were these extremely fucking gray areas where no one kind of knew what they could or couldn’t do. I mean, all the dispensaries could only deal in cash. They couldn’t store any money in banks, because it was federally illegal. But in the state it was legalized. So technically, it’s legal money. So then you have these, you know, these dispensaries walking around with 10s of 1000s of dollars. And they’re hiring. They’re hiring like me. Yeah, more than that. And they’re hiring these mercenaries to like transfer like transfer money through the city. Like it’s, it’s, and there were so much weird gray area. Now I think things have settled down. I I don’t remember. No, they still haven’t settled down. Damn, not as much. I mean, I’m gonna pause right there. I was very into cannabusiness in 13. Actually a little bit before that when was medical but once 13 that I have an advertising agency called alternative media. And I was all about the legalities of what you gray or you mentioned about talking about advertising for weed for Canada advertising a weed That isn’t what they what they put in the law was completely what they put in I was completely unconstitutional. And not only unconstitutional at the federal level, it was unconstitutional at the state level. But because it was still federally illegal to sell, we didn’t cover constitution, right, I go off on that tag. But you want to go on first amendment and legalities of when? Anyways, yeah, I was on a whole forefront of that with another company might have nothing to do with copyright. But yeah, I kind of surround myself with that stuff. But you’re right, this gray area. And this well, it’s not necessarily what I would call a gray area. It’s all there for copyright. It is there in black and white. It’s understanding it. And when you look at law, when you look at something that’s in black and white, what 90% of people want to do immediately is get pissed off, which means they put emotion into logic into law. And it’s like, wait a second here. Remove the emotion. Read it for what it is understanding of. Okay, so what do I need to do this? I can’t do that. Oh, well, I mean, you don’t get pissed off that Mount Everest exists and it’s an almost impossible climb just because you say you want to go do it and then you find out it’s impossible to do it. You’re like Oh, why did that mountain have to be created? That’s not fair. I want to do in that. You’re like shit, I didn’t really realize it was gonna take that much to climb Mount Everest and I’m not ready for that. And I know my limitations and I also probably don’t want to die. And maybe it maybe that’s not my career path with this.
Music copyright is kind of like that when you want to do it the right way. You know, when you really look at it, you’re and most people what their emotions get into is on playing the music free. The music should be free. We should all get it because music is the world and let’s give it away for free. They don’t understand people pay it. Make that music people pay to publish that music. People are putting that music out there as a commodity, like, get a reference back to Gordon, I was just talking to one of our biggest exports in America is entertainment. Oh, it’s
like, it’s massive.
The entertainment and video game industry alone is a huge export of our of our, of our economy. No offense to anyone living outside of the US. But like TV shows and movies and even radio in other countries is nothing like what it is in the States. I mean, the states are putting out the highest tier of production. I mean, across the board, movies, TV shows, radio shows all across the board. They’re pretty and I say radio shows radio shows that I mean, there are great like DJ radio shows overseas as well. But what I mean by that is like Sirius XM radio shows like howard stern for decades has been a legend in radio. I actually don’t like him anymore. I think he’s caught I think he’s sold out big time. But, um, regardless, you look at I think over and I think it’s in Canada, that they have it in written in their law that they have to like, all network, you know, all media basically has to put out a very specific percentage of original Canadian material in order for like networks to be running and radio shows and whatnot. And so they almost never like they don’t play a lot of American stuff, which is really interesting. And it’s it’s just, it’s real funny. But yes, you’re right, like the entertainment industry here in the US is such a significant part of our culture and our economy. And it does make sense that they’d go to, you know, a lot of musicians in general go to the extent to make sure they’re getting taken care of. That being said, let’s kind of transition to what happened with twitch over I guess, pretty, you know, the last six, seven months, because twitches, I mean, their copyright for music is just what do you think that this the reason for the copyright situation with twitch? And we’ll get into that in just a second, do you think that stems from all of the musicians jumping onto Twitch and realizing that all their music is being played here?
No, I tell you what happened where the real shift happened. Okay, this is 28 years in the making, the moment you gave every individual on the planet, the ability to record video in their pocket, and upload it from anywhere in the world. That opened up the can of worms. Before I had to go to a store and buy a video camera, I had to go film that footage, I had to edit that footage, and there was only one place a few select places I might be able to put that video footage, it was public access, or if I bought network time. Okay. And yeah, everyone might have had video cameras. But how many were aspiring to make a TV show and put it on broadcast TV or even public access, have limited access, because there are only so many times live in a day, you didn’t have the internet and servers in the background there. So we’re still limited amount of space to put this content, even if there were, say in the Seattle area 50,000 people with video cameras, there’s still only a limited number of spots per day, you can put shows on the air. Once you put a video camera in everyone’s pocket and became the call it the selfie or call it the me or call it the narcissistic video market that we’re in. Everyone picks up the cameras are going look at me look at me look at me. And I can distribute because I now have unlimited distribution I have ever distribution. I put a video up on YouTube and it’s been there for 15 years. It doesn’t go away. And I can share that link over and over and over and over again. And I can rehash my old content. I can stop filming right now. And with 1900 shows on the air, I can air one episode a day. What would that be? Five, six, almost seven years. one episode a day, I wouldn’t have to repeat an episode. You couldn’t do that. back then. So you know, but that leading into this, you know the world of podcasting, the world of YouTubing which then obviously got into the world of live streaming and then the world. I mean, the outside world coming to a halt, and everyone, all the content producers, they were still there. But now everyone else is from home and they’re like, wait, I’m doing a zoom call. Wait. I always had this idea about doing a show and I’m already doing talking to my camera for work. Why don’t you start talking to my camera about my cat or my dog or knitting or I’m pissed off at this for politics or whatever I want to do a show now. And we’ve seen a doubling in growth. The podcast world alone has seen a doubling. I don’t know where it’s at exactly today. But I know that statistic was 1 million podcasts in 19. To over 2 million podcasts in 2020. Yeah, I know my listenership through 2020. Like tripled bars bold.
It. Absolutely. It’s skyrocketed. Yeah. And that was I mean, that was not only from a content creation standpoint, have we seen the skyrocketing, but a content consumption? Have we seen that also, because people are not distracted by so much stuff? We’re at home, we’re looking for new content. Yeah, we can binge watch, Cobra Kai, all we want, boom, it’s done. Give me more, give me more, give me more, I want more, I want more. And they’re looking to avenues. And we all go on social media and say, Look at us, look at us look at us, here’s what we got. If you like that subject, you’re gonna jump into it. But what wasn’t addressed to people didn’t know is they just jumped on board, they jumped out and want to say I’m gonna go climb Mount Everest to analogize this, I’m going to go climb Mount Everest, but I’m not gonna get any ropes. I’m not gonna need oxygen, I’m not gonna need any warm clothes, food, training anything, I’m just gonna go out there and do it. And then they get right to the base of the mountain and you go one step on it, and they go, whoever run let’s say somebody’s running Mount Everest, they say, you can’t do this without the proper gear. And they start crying, screaming bloody murder. Why can’t I do this, I paid for the song. I own it on iTunes. I bought it like, No, you can’t do this. This is the rules to climb our mountain. abide by the rules. And we’ll have no problem here. So you have all these people sitting at the base of Mount Everest going well, I want to climb I want to be free, let’s be freed. And they can’t do it. And so you know, you jump on and you see, you know, a company like twitch it comes on. And so you saw this mass migration, I will say Facebook as the Mount Everest of sorts. And you see this, they say, oh, we’re gonna go climb Kilimanjaro. We’ll go next door, because they’re accepting as they’re bringing it over. And so you know, you see this timeline being built in 2020. With everyone migrant is mass migrations and people on Twitch and music, I’m going to strictly rely on content creators that are focusing on music. And I’m not going to focus on the end of the independent music creator, I’m going to talk about people that are using music that they don’t own. When I say, Wait, I’m sorry, that they don’t own the rights to publish. In that way. You can own a song for home use 99 cents, buy it on iTunes, yay. It does not give me performance rights. It does not give me synchronization masteries rights does not give you those rights to use that song in any way other than personal home use. If you grew up in the 80s. And you know you put a VHS tape in and that first thing that says FBI warning says this is only used for personal home use. If you get caught you can be imprisoned for up to 20 years I think it is and a $250,000 fine for each instance, that it did it did today that played in every tape before you put it in. You know and I came from that era you had CDs you couldn’t do. You can burn CDs for the longest time. So you can start burning CDs. So you were lucky they built CDs, we’re gonna protect the industry. And then Apple with digital music rights management when you got to file you can only copy the Bible the computer that we saw that blog, you can download digital music all you want, but I’m trying to get it is that twitch came in and said okay, we we now see a problem with this because people it isn’t just it isn’t just people playing video games on our platform. People are playing videos without music playing in the background. A lot of streamers almost every big streamers was playing it, you know if they’re doing like a just chatting thing where they’re hanging out with their, uh, you know, with their their viewers. They were
usually playing
some sort of mix in the background and they’ve gotten smart. Now they’re going on to YouTube and playing like royalty free, you know, two hour long lo fi mixes or whatever. But yeah, I mean, almost across the board, they had music and what it was, so many videos had to get removed. Like, of any insane I mean, you experienced it right? You had to remove a crazy amount of videos on Twitch. Yeah, yeah. What happened is is twitch came in, in June of this. June of this year, June of last year, and June of 2020. We want to date the episode and said, Hey, our algorithms, they monitor while you’re live streaming, but we won’t take it down. That’s that’s what’s called a primer. I always say it wrong, but it’s, I say f merel. It’s a thermal thermal use, which means you can use it as long as you don’t As long as you this is what the attorney just said, I’m not a legal adviser or legal anything, don’t take this as legal advice. But where’s the interview? real quick? Where’s that interview can be posted so people can go the DJ sessions.com? We’ll be putting that up here. Sure, as we all include that link in the show notes as well. Yeah, it is. It’s gonna be a great one about an hour long, just lots of great stuff. But But he covers this. And the basis of it is if you do not hit a record button, you’re covered. You can stream live all day long. Because it is a one time limited use. Okay, there you go. Doesn’t matter what can’t be posted. Once you hit a record button. you’re copying that. But the issue is the issue there is twitch records every single live stream. So actually, no, you can do that feature. Okay. Yeah, so you turn that feature, I had to go do that, because you segue into what you just said, removing episodes. So what happened is, people were recording on Twitch, and footage was living on Twitch. And even though twitch would pull it down after 14 days, if you were not a affiliate or partner channel, twitch was still copying that music and putting up there and letting it sit there. For those 14 days, they were in violation of copyright law. And if they wanted to find them, and sue them and say, we’re gonna come in for $100,000 a day, you lift it up there for 14 days, for one song, that’s $1.4 million, or loom, which is like shit, so they had to go back and not only they do their video on demand. So there are vo DS were cleared. So if you scream something, their algorithm, read it, go to VOD video on demand. And you would see what I call handlebars, or red red handlebars, six minutes around each song, you get a notice saying these songs weren’t, you can’t use these and blah, blah, blah. Well, what which wasn’t doing is they were not doing this for any of their clips. And if you’re not familiar with clips, our clips are short little segments. So your video game where you’re playing a game for two hours, you don’t want to go highlight and say watch my video for two hours. And watch when I did this really cool thing. You’d make a clip of that two minute segment where you beat that boss or did that really cool move, you put that clip up there? Well, that clip had the copy written music in it. And their algorithms were not covering those clips, they came back to all the gamers and went all the way back to 2010 and said, Hey, you got to remove those clips, because I’m algorithms gonna go in and if you don’t, your account is going to be flagged you got three strikes on Twitch, dude streamers? Fucking freaked out last year, I saw videos on Tick Tock of them just losing their shit. Yeah. Yeah. And they didn’t understand why. And and the majority of people who don’t understand how copyright works, their first inclination is, well, why don’t you guys pay for it, you’re owned by Amazon, you guys have the money, you could do it. And it’s like, no, that’s not our responsibility. If you understand how the DMCA works, and how this works, we’re protected as long as we make methods for people that make claims to remove it for them, but we aren’t responsible for taking care of the licenses that you’re supposed to have. And so a lot of these streamers were pissed, because they had to remove it. And I knew this was coming back in January, late, late January 2020, when I was talking about my music show to twitch, and they’re like, we can feature you on the front page of our site. But you’re gonna have to have the licenses. I said, done. No problem I can get those is that well, that’s not really the problem.
I was like, okay, what’s what is the problem? They said, Well, what about the other 450 videos you have on our site that are all red flag with, you know, anywhere from one to some, some, try some shows and make it through and not be red flag, some shows would come through and have nine red flags on them, you’re only allowed three strikes, not three episodes, three strikes. So three songs in one video could be 123. They could terminate your channel without warning without cause and they don’t, they could literally say we did this because you had strikes on your account doesn’t even have to be multiples. It could be just you know what, you’re done. You’re done. So, you know, a lot of the gamers got pissed off. Now this didn’t affect the music industry because a lot of people don’t go back and to a DJ set or a music musician playing a song, you know, and make a clip of that song. I mean, a musician might make a clip, a three minute clip of their one song they were doing a one hour live performance and break it down into clips. But about a DJ. They don’t make a two minute clip saying check out my mix. Check out where I beat national song they don’t do that. So it it went right over their head. It just completely like doesn’t concern me type of thing. I don’t make clips. And I don’t I don’t let my videos live in video on demand. I’m streaming live. And it’s like, Okay, cool. So I’m into about that was June ish of 2020 come in a few months later, and Twitch issues. So that first the clips was kind of what I call the first great wailing. Oh, what do we do that? Well, actually Sorry, the first great wailing was Facebook shutting down all the DJs. What do we do? Where do we migrate, and they all migrate over to twitch. The second great wailing was when they took clips or started monitoring clips. And that was like, the video gamers. And it didn’t really affect the music. Wait, great whaling 2.5 was when twitch issued an email to everyone a few months ago and said, here’s our take on copyright boom, big long page. I mean, read it all. But in a nutshell said, Don’t use music you don’t own. And we’re gonna start monitoring this and you got to love that November 11. There was like, they gave two weeks, we’re going to start doing this. And I was like, Oh, here it is coming. And I already removed all my videos online. So we just use twitch as the live stream platform featured partner love them. But, um, so that came down the line, and people were like, oh, how does that affect me? Okay, cool. Well, what they aren’t knowing what they don’t know, is what what I call the great whaling 3.0. And that will be coming down the line. And twitch has already gone out and is working with a company over in France, to take their existing algorithm system, they have actually started monitoring their live streams, essentially, they’re gonna start doing what Facebook has already been doing for a while now. Which is taking down the licensing companies are gonna say, hey, there’s a DMCA violation here. We know, you don’t have the rights to this, you know, boom, we’re taking you down. And people are not going to be happy about that. You know, that’s gonna be the third great weigh in and saying, whoa, why are you? Well, we’re all the same old ancient arguments, or, I guess, new ancient arguments, of people, you know, complaining and simply comes back to don’t play music, you don’t own the rights to, you know, as I’m thinking about this, I’m starting to think if you’re enough, if you’re a fucking great producer, who can make a lot of tracks very, very fast. There’s a massive market. Right now, if you can make enough tracks that are like that are four hour mixes, you know, let’s say you, you’re only making like two to three minute long tracks, you grind your fucking ass off enough to make a four hour mix, you could create a business where you sell these mixes for $10 a pop, to the streamers. This is I guess, this isn’t, this is not being done right now. So this is this is bringing up a really interesting market that is going to be needed in the near future that is going to this is a complete, I mean, that’s gonna be a completely new market for producers. So if you’re a producer listening to this, and you’re interested in, you know, the licensing world, that’s your opportunity, that not only not only that, but that’s going to become I predicting that that’s going to become the new internet sensation is the original artists, the artists that create their own original content can give
each other Yeah, the menial. Yeah, and or self distribute, because they’re not only gonna be able to have a twitch channel where they can have, say, 20,000 people watching them with 4000 subscribers, with people giving them bits and emojis, and they’re able to claim all the money off that they can also do a Patreon account, they can do a PayPal, you know, they do other things to get receive money and, and if they were able to make, say 70 $500 a week doing their stuff they’re making 360,000 a year, they own everything they do. Well, that’s the other thing, you know, if you can create a business model around selling, like these types of mixes are all your original content, there’s a lot of streamers out there. And if you you know, there’s probably millions of streamers out there, you sell to 10% not even you sell to 1% of those people at $10 a pop and I think what that’s gonna be like 100 G’s. So, the problem is, though, is that these people, I’m gonna pause it, the problem is going to be though I just thought about this, that person go do that independently, all they want. But guess what they also got to be, they got to be their own accountant. They got to be their own marketing, they got to be their own attorney, they got to go take down and do all their own takedowns of music. And people explained their music to artists that have had their their their music ripped off, had fake accounts created on Spotify. And their musics put up there and people are making money off of their music. And they got to tell Spotify, hey, somebody’s doing this, somebody’s doing this or taking my music, and they got to act as their own attorney. And so that’s the other pitfalls that you get into when you’re not working with a label. Or you’re not working with a publishing company. They handle all that shit for you. So again, that transparency and people not understanding the process of why you would call it sell out to a label is because they’re handling all that shit. That’s why you’re getting this much of the music, and they own the rights to it, and then it can do all that for you. And I wonder if you’re gonna start selling Seeing companies like beatport, and iTunes and other distribution companies, I guess they’re not really there, you know, you just, they’re selling the music. Now, I guess they’re technically distributing it. But I wonder if you’re gonna start seeing them offering new programs of licensing. So like, when you go buy a track, you can also purchase a license for $1. And so these Twitch streamers can now go in and basically create an entire playlist of tracks that they purchased with the licenses. And they can have, let’s say, you know, over a year, they bought 400 tracks, and they just have this playlist on a randomize loop playing the background for them. I’m curious if you’re getting also, you know, that’s an that’s an opportunity for these bigger companies to, you know, rake in the cash cow even more. The problem with that is, and this is exactly one of the questions I was talking about the attorney about is the licensing, the problem is, is in, okay, so you say you’re doing 500 downloads a week? Great Are you let’s say you put a cap on it, this song, you buy it with that extra dollar, that gives you 500 downloads a week, what happens if all of a sudden that podcast gets out, then I put it on the forum, and it gets 75,000 downloads, or 10 million downloads, or, you know, I have this interview with an A list celebrity, and I cleared that track to play because my audience right now is, say 90,000 downloads a week. But that’s a that’s an aggregate of all my podcast downloads, not that specific download, I don’t know how many downloads that’s gonna get I can give an average or an estimate. I see. I see them being able to sell different kinds of licenses, though, as well. And it probably it would probably come down to what the record labels want to do, hey, do we want to add in an exclusive license with this, and maybe they talk to the artists and they say, Hey, we’re gonna sell an exclusive license for this for people to use, and this, that’s going to, let’s say, you know, they’ll decrease your pay by this much you’ll get a bigger audience, and we’ll take a bigger cut of Reno will basically take the license cut or whatever, I don’t know what the hell that legit the logistics of the would look like, I think there’s a lot of opportunity, you know, this, this might be a blessing in disguise for a lot of artists where, you know, there’s gonna be a lot of opportunity for different different markets opening up, I guess you could say, different avenues that artists can take to take advantage of it.
Yeah, it’s it. You’re right, I believe that is going to open up and an artist I was talking to about a month ago, but goes but black liquid, he’s got it how sound of La madama actually, about 11 years ago, Miami winter music conference. And it was pleasure to interview him again. 1011 years later, we’re sitting there talking, he knows he’s watching how all this goes, he works for an internet company, the distribution company, he gets it, he understands the legality of this, he goes, You know what, I’m just sitting back, I got archives of archives of 10 years of music that I own all the rights to everything to I have enough to play DJ sets of my own music of multiple genres of music over and over again. Let me do a show. I think he I think he has like, let’s say like, was it 1700, maybe even more songs. So it’s an hour long set, you can only play 12 songs. This is I can play my own library over and over again. And I own the rights to it. Yeah, this is the movies and everything. This is one of the reasons why artists should strive to be able to create a DJ set with their own original music. This is exactly you know, one of the reasons Okay, so I’ve got a question. And I don’t know if you’re gonna have all the answers to it. And you know, we might be able to just kind of spit ball back and forth. But just a few months ago, it might have been a little bit longer might have been when all this twitch stuff was going around artists were having a fit with Tick Tock because all their sounds, you know, the minute long clips of their music are being used on Tick Tock and they’re not getting a royalties for it. And a lot of these artists though, and record labels are opting into putting the music on Tick Tock for people to use. Now, you know, some artists are getting fed up, they want to get paid for these royalties. Here’s where I I don’t agree with that. I don’t think that artists
should
want to get paid for the royalties of their music being played on Tick Tock because that’s going to very, very, very significantly decrease the amount of people that are actually going to be using your music and decrease the chance of you actually blowing up as an artist. There have been a fucking crazy amount of artists that blew up because of tik tok and their song went viral. Now, they didn’t get left out of the cash cow. I mean, they started playing crazy shows, filling up shows getting millions of streams on on Spotify. People purchasing their music purchasing their merch all that stuff. I want to you know, if you if you start forcing these creators on tik tok to start paying royalties or paying for licenses to use audio, they’re just not going to use them the artists are not going to blow up. And I hate I you know, I really don’t want to say it I hate to use the word you’re getting free exposure. But the truth is, it’s you know, it’s different with Tick tock tick tock is a completely different beast, where you’re getting millions of people hearing, not, sometimes it’s not even a minute long clip of your track, it’s 20 seconds. And if you have a really good track that blows up on Tick tock, then you’ve written a track in a specific way, where you’re gonna want the listener to listen to the track over and over and over again. And those are the tracks that blow up. Now, if you play a 22nd clip on Tick Tock have the best part of the track that’s gonna make people go fuck, I need to listen to this more and they’re gonna go stream it on Spotify 100 times over the next week, that I think is way more profitable to you than forcing creators on tik tok to pay for a license or royalty to use audio. I’m curious what you think of that. I think the music industry and record labels should stay the fuck away from that and just see it as free goddamn advertisement. It’s free, free real estate for them. The question is here, here’s what it really comes down to. Who owns Tick Tock and where do they reside? Hmm. And how much money are they making? By selling advertising? by publishing that then letting that content exist on their platform? If Tick Tock was a free universal service, like public access television was, you know you I mean, if you made lowball I, there may have been some people that made money selling advertising on public access, but your viewership was shit. Yeah, you didn’t have a nut, you would never going to get some via you might have been able to take a public access show and move it to network platform. But that’s a completely another step level. But public access was meant to be what it is access to the public to distribute information because the network, the network’s had control over all of it. If tik tok were truly a 100% replatform like that user generated like, like you had to pay a fee as a user to sign up and it was user supported by donation, some nonprofit organization, you know, like that. Even those people, you can still make them $2 million a year running the nonprofit. And so if somebody’s property now at another company isn’t property necessarily there, their holdings might have $20 billion in holding but they’re still a nonprofit. Okay, but Tick Tock is not its commercial venture. And they’re making bank off those people making those videos again, the me me me generation with a phone in their pocket. Yep, Cookie games, fuck less about paying anyone, because they just want to make their quick video to look cool. So everyone says, Look at me, look at me. Look how funny I am. And I have nothing against Tick Tock. Nothing. It’s users that are doing stuff. Don’t don’t please don’t don’t murder me. Online. I love all content creators of all shapes, sizes and sources and all that fun stuff. But that’s what it really comes down to. And there’s there’s, they know the industry knows that Tick Tock. If you remove the music, on Tick tock, its content creation still be there? I’d say I think Tick Tock would be fucking done if they remove music. What Why? I mean, it is I mean, I mean, I guess if you’re making you have to forgive me, I’m not an avid Tick tock, no, you’re fine. You’re fine. It’s such a major part of the platform. I mean, you flip through audio on there, and I would say it’s probably like 70 to 80% of videos are music related dances, all that sort and it’s one of the reasons I tell my listeners, I’m like, if you’re promoting music, you better be putting it on tik tok. And you better be finding people making dance videos with your tracks, because that’s what’s gonna fucking blow up.
I can see I can see that 100% from the independent producer standpoint, but you’re right people, but people are doing this because they are completely oblivious and completely don’t understand what they’re doing when they’re using the song. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I will put it this way. There was a movie called terms and conditions. Okay, nobody reads the terms and conditions. I used to work in an industry and I won’t say what industry it was. But I can guarantee you when they offered the seven days free trial membership, hey, those people wanted to get into that website, use what was on that website immediately. They did not care about going to read the terms and conditions and they you would be charged for your monthly membership. If you didn’t cancel the seven day membership within four days of the seven day membership. Andy mentioned what industry does that but there’s a lot of industries that actually does that. But I worked in an industry that did that. And they were legally allowed to do that legally allowed to charge with a BS and we happily happily refunded the money back to them to the customer. Once they were able to find this and Contact us. Because those services were rendered that money sat in a bank account, it was interest bearing money. Given that now you’re doing millions and millions of dollars on that, a month, that compound interest starts to grow, give them back to give them back their fee. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, we’ve made money off of that seven days. So we made money off that seven day or made money off that one month fee. Yeah, it’s gonna be $30 to you know, 30 to $50 a month, and you have 30, you have a million to 2 million people doing this. You know, you’re talking 1630 to $60 million a month is sitting in a bank account. Who cares if there’s a 10% 30% 40% retention rate? Even if it’s just for one month? That money just sits in there for one month? What’s the compound interest? You know, I’m not going to calculate it, but it’s money over and over and over and over again, never ending money coming in. So that being said, chick talk is the ones profiting off Yeah, the end user isn’t getting any money in their pocket for putting up that Tick Tock video. But damn well tic tocs property and making bank all that shit. And then yes, and that is people making mini commercials. And, and then what tik tok will do is a look what the industry is doing to us. Look at the bad guys, we want you to all make your fun videos, get them off our backs, which really isn’t the case because it doesn’t work like that in the industry. You’ll fight back when no Tick tock, you’re using our shit. To make money. Pay us our fucking money. You know? Fuck you pay me. Fuck you pay me that’s what you know. And so it’s gonna be in his his interest like I have no, I’ve no fucking idea what to even do with that. And I’m curious as to how much the entertainment industry had a hand in the trying to get tik tok banned. Well watch this. I’m gonna pause it. Here’s the thing. Whereas Tick Tock out of China. Was China. does China recognize DMCA? No,
not at all. They don’t.
There you go. Right there. So guess what? They don’t have to abide by DMCA. They didn’t sign on DMCA. So all those claims that would even come towards Tick Tock? Well, here’s the thing you’re aware, but you have but you have places you have reels on Instagram, which is Tick Tock for Instagram, and they’re still using all music. But who’s Instagram owned by and where do they reside? They’re in the US and where do they reside so us signed on with DMCA better fucking know damn well shit show they are but but but you’re not seeing like the copyright strikes happening yet on reels I mean, you’re not in That’s what I’m talking about. I’m I don’t know where that’s gonna go with the licensing copyright stuff with these platforms like Tiktok. And reels, especially I mean, reels is in the US. So if you have, go ahead, well, I’m just saying like, if you have a song blow up and a record label comes out, then I have no I mean, maybe it’s in the terms and conditions when you upload an audio to you know the sound to it. I have no idea. Well, what my research uncovered last year is that Facebook actually gave about half a billion dollars $500 billion to the RA, and said, We are going into video, stay off our fucking backs. That’s what I read it somewhere. I can’t pull it, quote the article. But that’s what is said to say, Hey, we’re going into this. Pay off our backs, please, we know this is going to come Don’t come Don’t come up with pitchforks and fire and boiling oil and all that shit. So there may be some negotiations that are happening. They’re saying, Hey, we know Facebook as a content provider, they’re going into this world. We know people are going to upload content. We know they’re working to take care of this. Here’s some money to help your organization. I wouldn’t call it a bribe, but might be a little Hey, somebody goes and gives me $500,000 in $500,500,000,000, just to kind of like, Okay, leave them alone. You know, but they know. And I mean, Facebook can afford it. Yeah. You know, and they got the legal team sport. So, again, Facebook has the follow those DMCA guidelines. And they have that if somebody they may have not kicked on the algorithm yet, because they might, they might know that, hey, we can run this thing on Instagram for take mixcloud for example, it’s in beta. We know we can run this for a year before it really gets to the legal process. So let us just go balls out free wild for a year and let everyone upload whatever they want. And then we’ll start going backwards. Is that our SoundCloud?
Yeah, I mean, let everyone do whatever they want Wild Wild West, and then we’ll start coming back in thing.
So
it’s, in my opinion, terrible fucking business practice. I mean, one of the worst because you attract all these people to spy. One having these expectations and then you have companies like SoundCloud who turn around, you know, year four or five into them blowing up and they just copyright strike everything. I mean, cascade had almost all of his music removed from SoundCloud offers own personal account for copyright strikes with Warner Bros. And he’s like, this is I fucking wrote this. What are you doing? This is insane. So yeah, I mean, cascade. That’s a classic example of somebody not having another all the rights to their own music. Yeah, I mean, I guess that not having everything cleared. And so like you were mentioning before is, you know, an artist would go out, or actually I was talking about this with the attorney with Gordon right before this. He said, artists were going out and doing their own live streaming, doing their own podcast and labels came back in the industry. And I said, you need to put a stop to that. Because we’ve marketed you this way. And you’re going out there and doing your own independent thing. You can’t do that or will drop you because you could say the wrong thing. Do the right. We don’t have PR and clearance for all of that, to start managing all these artists doing your own separate thing. And some major he didn’t say what names but what major artists had to say, Look, I’m done. This is gone. I got to remove it from online because I wasn’t cleared to do this under my contract. They weren’t licensed. They didn’t have the rights to go do their own live streaming show. They didn’t have the rights to do their own podcast. They’re their own. You know, their own. I mean, unless you’re Michael Jackson, who’s passed away, George Michael, is he still alive? Or Madonna? I think George Michael still alive. But those were the big powerhouses back then when it came to copyright against Sony. You know, George Michael, Michael Jackson Madonna. And they were coming out saying we want the rights to our music we want this we want to we we made this shit. And you know so you know i’m sure cascade may have gone back and they’ve done some contract. I’m pretty sure all his stuff got back and stuff. But But what what what was weird about cascadas? There was no warning. It was just one day. Yeah, done, removed. And he’s like, What the? I got no strikes, I got no one reached out nothing. It just got up and removed. And I think it was I think it took less than 24 hours because it blew up. This is like four or five years ago, I can’t remember. But let’s start wrapping up. I’ve gotta get going in the next like, five ish minutes. So let’s what should artists be doing with the current copyright situation? And live streaming? Is there resources they can go to to license? Should they be looking at, Okay, I’m gonna be playing these 20 songs in this DJ set? Do they? And then they go reach out to labels and try to get licenses I know that is a shit show. Probably not gonna happen. What What advice would you give to artists, when they’re starting to do live streaming to stay within copyright? Is there any resources you’ve got? Well, let’s let’s let’s The biggest thing we can do is let’s take DJ out of the equation. Because we know what a DJ is doing. Nine times 9.99 times out of 10 The tracks are playing or somebody else’s music, you take the DJ out of the equation. Use music do you have that you can ask somebody to use the permission for to use and get it in writing. And make sure it’s if you’re going to put it online, it’s going to live there forever makes you have perpetual rights to it. And then if anyone ever comes in claims, say no, you keep that in a secured folder lock Dropbox safe deposit fireproof, safety, double, triple get form somewhere. So that way, if anyone ever comes in challenge, you say Nope, I
got the proof right here. That’s pretty much it. I mean, and if you want to watch, I would say you know, Gordon explains it pretty much better than I do. Because I gave kind of the abridged version. When I explain how copyright works the people in a very quick, you know, phone version or interview version, he kind of goes down just a little bit more of the interview I just did with him, which will be coming out here on our website. It’ll be up here soon. Under I’ll probably put it under a list of categories because he’s pretty pretty well known in the in the law world of entertainment law, and you can go there on our website, the DJ sessions.com. And it’s it’s a slew of paperwork that it would just make the first the mind boggle and the process and the length the process and response time and again, they’ll record if I was coming from a major motion picture company. I said, Hey, I want to use this Led Zeppelin song. They already have a music was a music supervisor, I think is what he called it. They have that person that’s in charge doing all that. They’ll say gladly, oh, yeah, $100,000 deal. Sure. Here we but you and I, the independent person, they don’t want to feel one song requests from a million people come and say Can I do this? Can I do they don’t have the bandwidth for it, they don’t have the person power the people power to manage a million requests. Now, you can imagine how what is that a million videos a minute going up to YouTube, a million. I mean, that’s insane. How many hours of live streaming are going out there, and everyone has a field request all these companies. And they have, I mean, you’re trying to do this legally. Now my mom worked for rights and permissions for the U dub, if you put a request in and you do all your ways to expand everything in there, like you’re going out there to do it the right way. And you get nothing back, you can document that. And when somebody comes back and says, Hey, you can say I got this documentation, we try. We tried, we tried, we tried, we tried nothing ever back. So we went ahead and use it. But you got to exhaust those resources. Now that was she was working for the University of Washington press. That’s a book that’s coming out. Okay, they knew the book, once the book started going, they said, We want to use this picture. They start researching that and going down that pathway. And I don’t know if there’s a certain amount of time, like four months, six months, one year, they gotta research back in addresses. I
mean, one point, I
think she was looking at old phone books, you know, for look up a person’s name and the phone book and say, here’s their address, let’s send it to this address to see if that’s the address on file. And, oh, this is a 14 address, and they get forwarded over here, and they hear from the person that Oh, yeah, I did take that picture. Sure, you can use it for 100 bucks. And that’s rights and permissions. They don’t have that. That’s not there. They don’t, they’d rather have you say, don’t use it at all, then make a process that’s going to make it easy for people to do that. And and even then, how many songs they’re gonna have to make collective libraries of all this and negotiation of libraries. I mean, it’s. So I’d say you’re right, that the independent artist that produces their own content is going to be king, queen, leader, whatever you want to call it. But they’re not going to realize that what they get and all this stuff, they’re gonna have to be their own lawyer, their own account. Their own unless marketing director, yeah, you’re making the money, you’re gonna hire somebody. But yeah, you’re still not hiring somebody with the, with the weight of the label? Yeah, exactly. It has attorneys on retainer, and have a marketing internal marketing team of lawyers, they’ve got five, five or 10 lawyers
they can go to
that also has, you know, the rights to negotiate your performance contracts and get you on the circuit tours and all that fun stuff. So there’s a lot that people don’t look into what goes on in the mechanism behind the scenes. And artists say, Well, I only get this much of a percentage of my money from what they’re doing all this work for you. Well, I need more money. Well, where’s it gonna come from? You know, go do it on your own. You’ll find out where these legal costs come from. And then you’ll say, maybe this wasn’t the right profession for me. Maybe I shouldn’t be using other people’s content. To make my content maybe I should be learning how to make my own content and then capitalizing on that I license the tracking the intro of iron. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. Yeah, I think we talked about that in I think we I think I mentioned in the last episode, I can’t remember. But yeah, every episode, I have to go on to I go to sound stripe, I log in, I enter in the episode name. It’s a podcast that I relicense the track every single time every single episode, I have to relicense it. There was a website I’ll drop it right here even though they’re not on fire. By the way, you know, if any artists need need lights need to license tracks sound stripe is a great company to go do it through. And even as artists, you can sign up there and start licensing your own original music, but it’s like cost like a yearly fee that you pay. And get you can use it for video. You can use it for a podcast. I’m not sure like I doubt you can use it for like TV and film. I’d be I that’s more sync did that’s getting into the sink licensing stuff, which is a lot different. Have you heard of podcast? music.com? No, I haven’t checked that one out. That’s the that’s a Gordon kind of turned me on to today. And that’s an interesting one. It looks like they’re building a library of music, that you pay them a monthly fee and you’ll have access to their library. Yep, that’s exactly what sounds trite. But there’s a lot of these licensing companies coming out where they’re bringing on artists, they pay the artists and artists basically create tracks for these companies to put them on their library and they just license them out. Okay, yeah, here it is. I got access to their entire library. And I just go genre. Yep. And you can go down and go pick your world is crazy. And this is you know, 2020 was huge for licensing and I was actually just talking about this with a guy the other week I was having lunch with and if you know I’m probably I need to go back and do another licensing episode and talk about that and I’ve got someone in mind that I’m going to try to bring on the show to talk about licensing because 2020 was a massive year for licensing that I didn’t realize until just the other day. But anyways, regardless, Darrin go ahead and plug away. You know, for the people who haven’t listened to last week’s episode, where can people find you also, by the way, I forgot to mention, there’s a DJs out there that would like to be a part of the DJ sessions, how can they do that? All they need to do is go to our website. I mean, if you’re a viewer, go to our website, the DJ sessions.com. If you’re, you’re wanting to get on the show, or collaborate with us go to the DJ sessions.com and click on the register to play request to play link, you can fill out the information there. We are based out of our home city of Seattle, Washington. But we are working with a wonderful thing called the internet, we can definitely do featurette segments on the show interviews on the show. You know if you’re like me, just want to chat about the industry. I do interviews with people all the time we’re booking, you know, just like what we’re doing here. I was booked as a guest here. And I should have you as a guest on our show.
Anytime, dude,
I’d love. I love talking with you about this stuff. Yeah, it’s fun.
Awesome. Is that it?
That’s it. That’s all I got for you. I mean, I can talk a million miles a minute. Darren, thank you so much for coming on these two parts. Man, this is such a I mean, so I hope the listeners thought this stuff was eye opening. The last episode went well went really well. Yeah, it’s there’s a lot of information. There’s a ton of information. Here it is. And we’re also leaving out a lot too. That’s the thing is we’re just barely scratching the surface of everything. Yeah, I mean, that’s the catch is that basically, you know, people are gonna have to start taking them their own. They’re gonna start having to do their own responsibility, and really understanding how this works. And they’re gonna start getting it in their heads, like, Oh, I’m using, they’ve been pirating and using music illegally for so long Nemec ship is in that world, they were doing it call it underground, there was no monitoring, no policing. Now they’re trying to get into this world and there is policing, and they want to try to treat it like that world over there. And that was all illegal action you’re in same thing with the cannabis industry. Now, they wanted to say, Let everyone do it, let everyone sell it, let it all be free. And I’m like, No, we’re trying to make this legal. So we can monetize it, and then regulate it and all this stuff. So there has to be entities and things put in place. And people say, we’ll just make music free. You know, I’m going down with this to basically people that don’t understand the industry that don’t want us understand the history, because it kills their little ego dream of what they think they are the world that they’re in, which a lot of people are finding out right now and going live on Twitch. Oh, great. You thought you were awesome, because you had that nightclub full of 150 people once a month. But now you go live on Twitch and you get 20 viewers. Okay, you did nothing to build your brand as an online brand new online indie. And now everyone’s trying to do it, you’re lost in the mix. You don’t have that monopoly of a nightclub anymore. You don’t have a monopoly of that venue anymore. With only 12 places or one night a week or you were the only genre this music being played on Saturday night of the week and you build that up. You didn’t you didn’t build and you did that at a local level, which was a local genre of a segment of a genre within a genre sub genre of a genre of a certain of entertainment as a whole. And now you’re up against every entertainer online whether it’s big name a list celebrities, or just zero. I don’t know anyone I’m playing a fucking guitar in my bedroom. It’s a it’s a big world out there live, play and they are not ready for people are like, you know, people ask me all the time. How are you hitting number three in the world on twitch? How are you? Number seven? How you doing? Oh, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, I have a 919 100 plus episodes, I produce compelling content. I have a 9000 person subscriber subscriber base to my email that’s growing every month by like, probably anywhere from, you know, five to 10% I’m marketing on social. Yeah, it’s a lot of work to get into this world of the industry, you got a lot of grind in there but well, and investment if they don’t have money, and they’re not willing to that’s themselves. Nobody just comes along and says here you go. You’re, you got a good voice, but you’re still gonna have to put in the work. And guess what if I’m putting all the money and guess who gets paid out first? The investor? Yeah, he’s only always always the investor in the business owner. But Darren, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. And we’ll talk soon, man. Yeah, let me know this goes up. I’ll talk to you soon too. And thank you again, of course take care. Bye Bye. Thanks for checking out this episode of electronic dance money as always head to Envious audio.com slash Episode 44 to check out the show notes Notes head on over to Apple podcasts to leave a review rate the show let me know what you think of it electronic dance money community on Facebook come hang out with us talk with us. Like I said I pretty sure maybe not this episode but the next episode I will be doing some live streamings I mean, quote unquote live streaming is basically premiering the episodes in that Facebook community. I’ll be hanging out while the live stream is going talking to you guys answering questions, all that fun stuff. Come hang out. Otherwise, I’ll see you guys next time. Take care.