Hey Scamo - Thanks for your comment. You’re definitely not a pessimist - more of a pragmatist . Regarding our references to Spotify and Beatport, it’s not an official message but an easy way for users to understand what we do. (Numerous companies have used this approach to help describe their start ups, like LinkedIn: Facebook for business, Vevo: YouTube for music videos, SocialCam: Instagram for video).
We will have more info on artist/label relationships, once our website is up and running, which should happen in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.
I am a pessimist, and to me it sounds like another nail in the coffin of the music industry… as it stands producers only get a small cut of beatports profits. Most goes to beatport for hosting the file, with the rest going to an agent who is required to get your tunes listed in the first place.
The only reason spotify is legal is because they pay royalties from the advertising and most importantly it is DRM protected so at no time does the listener own the music. Grooveshark do the same thing with VDJ. Everything is DRM protected & when you are playing a “netsearch” track you cannot record. You do have an offline cache but must verify your subscription is valid every month to be able to play the music, when your subscription expires so too does your ability to play the music.
Without extra measures to ensure DRM protection I can’t see this being legal as effectively you are selling the music you don’t own for virtually nothing, just like record pools which get shut down all the time, and the only excuse for their existence is they are for dj’s only to promote the artists, but now that everyone is a bedroom dj that excuse doesn’t fly anymore.
Interesting post. I would have thought it’d be the other way around, that Beatport gets the smaller cut, as its not their music they sell. It really doesn’t cost all that much to host or run their platform either. Don’t mean to be rude or pushy, but how do you know all this and can you back it up your points with some kind of proof?
My mate “chris dynasty” who produces hard techno and runs tranztek records told me so, he also said get’s more from trackitdown but barely gets anything from beatport although sells more tracks there. He isn’t a huge international act but is frequently in the top 10 of his genre and still has to work to survive when really he should be able to focus on producing full time and paying on the weekends. But the way it’s set up now new talent isn’t fostered.
I don’t have any proof as such but I believe him as we grew up, partied, worked & lived together. He has no reason to lie.
Very, very few EDM tracks generate any revenues beyond $50 excluding all the Guetta/Rhianna stuff which is backed by a huge marketing budget. So they are really mostly for promotion for the producer for more DJ gigs. Wish it was different but that’s how it is nowadays. Just to get played is a victory.
I love the idea and was contemplating something similar not long ago, i came across a few problems like getting the tracks into your software of choice, it would involve a download of some sort to get traktor to recognise it, unless NI were involved how would you get it to work?
true, if it was a streaming service it would also save hard drive space, which was my main idea for it, although you would have to have a solid internet connection, maybe a kind of cloud storage style thing
Hey Synthet1c - thanks for your note. You raise a lot of good points that are top of mind for DJ/artists/producers and we are trying to contribute to the ecosystem in a positive way.
Regarding our approach to DRM, our platform doesn’t work in the same way that Grooveshark works. For obvious reasons, we can’t go into many specifics on this forum, but we can say that the technology behind our subscription model is 100% legal and has been approved for use by the labels and aggregators we work with.
Stay tuned. Our site will be up soon and we’ll be able to share more information then.
It’s true that there’s not a lot of revenue from EDM. But we think the way forward for artists is to pay for use of their content in discovery, DJ and buy modes. Through these channels we encourage royalty distribution by keeping everything 100% legal with all the appropriate rights in place. The idea behind Pulselocker is to promote the work of independent producers, while giving DJs access to the deepest catalog we can offer.
That’s the secret sauce . In the very near future, we’ll be able to share more details around how we get our platform to work with Serato/Traktor/VirtualDJ/etc.
I’m gonna join the pessimist camp here. In theory this seems great, I just have trouble getting my head around the legal aspects.
Being in Australia I’m just going to assume you haven’t secured licensing for that territory so I can’t have a look for myself.
Have you actually convinced major labels to get on board with this? Or just the smaller “dance” labels? Have you spoken to the actual rights associations in most of the countries? Surely you’d need their permission as well, otherwise how is an artist in Australia/NZ for example going to receive their “cut” of royalties? Or is it just going to be within the Spotify system still? Ie. One play on “Pulselocker” will equal one play on “Spotify” or will it only be releases in specific territories?
Also obviously you’d need a premium account with Spotify?
Is the music “high quality” or “standard”? Or does that depend on what you have enabled in the Spotify preferences?
It just baffles me any major label would support something like this? Surely it’s just going to cannibalise already small sales?
It’s a great idea for the consumer but absolutely terrible for the people that make and sell music…
Sorry for all the questions, I’m just quite curious from a law student perspective.
Hi. This is Ryan. I am the CTO of Pulselocker. I have been a DJ for 15 years and have released music on the major download sites under aliases.
We are a separate service. We do not work with spotify. You do not need a spotify account. We have our own licensing deals, and we work with all providers of relevant content, be it majors or indies. I can’t, unfortunately, disclose the closed deals we have.
High quality = 320kbps aac/m4a with WAV coming soon.
We pay artists and collecting societies and have all the legitimate rights to offer the services we do.
We offer the ability to legally purchase the music on our network.
If you are curious about rights/payments and how they work in a situation like this, there are a lot of resources online to look at. I agree, its a complex business, but we’re not in any way fly-by-night and nor are we in any business to take money from artists. (We are the artists.) If you’re looking for those types, look straight at the ftps, filesharing services, and the ‘download blogs’ that feed into them.
I welcome the debate on the service, as it will help us improve.
Thanks for your responses,
I’m quite aware of how royalties work, and how rights associations go about collecting them.
Ok, so it’s not related to Spotify then? I think I misunderstood the opening post. Don’t get me wrong, if it’s done right I’m sure it’s a great idea for consumers, I just find it hard to fathom that labels would be for this idea and I’ve already had a chat with a few fairly established Australian EDM artists this afternoon and none of them had heard of this…
It took Spotify months and months and months of negotiating to get into Australia, I mean they’ve done the ground work but it goes to show it’s not easy..
That said any plans to extend beyond the US/Europe?
No problem. I mean, we get it. We have kept the service under wraps until we knew we had enough tech and content to launch even a small service. Tell your Aussie EDM’ers to contact content @ pulselocker dot com and we’d be happy to work with them. We do work with some Aussie companies for sure.
I think there is an assumption that there is a well paying ecosystem for artists to make money from the recorded song – there is not for many artists, esp. indies. Though we are representing far more than just EDM, EDM is largely supported by live performance, for example. There is a huge piracy problem, and that’s what we tackle. DJs will still buy tunes with pulselocker, still buy vinyl for limited edition stuff. I know I will.
And yes, we plan on going to as many territories as possible.
I can’t see how following the trend of chocking artists of money they earned with their time and skill that goes into their productions is a good thing for the artist. There is a lot of money in music but administration and distribution always takes the lions share of something they had no part in creating… That seems wrong to me..
for example my mate spent about 4 - 8 hours a day for 5 years infront of a computer teaching himself how to produce before releasing anything, then did a 2 year full time course in Music Production to further his skills, has spent thousands on software & thousands on hardware… At the end of the day he still needs to work to support himself despite selling thousands of copies of his tracks every release. He doesn’t whine about it but to me it seems wrong that he doesn’t receive the largest reward.
Conversely any website producer only needs to spend about 1 - 2 years learning HTML, Javascript, SQL & PHP before they can produce a professional looking and highly functional website.
. Regarding our references to Spotify and Beatport, it’s not an official message but an easy way for users to understand what we do. (Numerous companies have used this approach to help describe their start ups, like LinkedIn: Facebook for business, Vevo: YouTube for music videos, SocialCam: Instagram for video).