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posted by chromas on Friday September 21 2018, @01:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ dept.

Spotify to let artists post music without labels:

In a move with the power to shake up the music industry, Spotify said Thursday that it will allow select artists to upload songs directly without record labels or distributors.

Spotify, by far the biggest player in the fast-growing format of streaming, said that the feature for now is only in the test phase for select US-based independent artists who have secured their own copyrights.

But the feature, if eventually put to scale, could in the long run drastically change the business decisions for artists who would not need to go through a label or one of the batch of new companies, such as TuneCore, that provide uploading services for independent artists.

Spotify said artists would simply upload their songs to the platform, first seeing a preview of how it will look, with the Swedish company automatically sending royalties each month.


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  • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday September 21 2018, @03:17PM (3 children)

    by Pino P (4721) on Friday September 21 2018, @03:17PM (#738166) Journal

    The artist gets the copyright as soon as they create the work!

    Not necessarily. Your composition might turn out to be an accidental infringement, and no copyright subsists in work that is used unlawfully. (See 17 USC 103(a) [copyright.gov].) For example, George Harrison thought he wrote the song "My Sweet Lord", but it turned out to be a subconscious cover of "He's So Fine" by The Chiffons written by Ronald Mack. So how is it even possible to know whether you own a valid copyright in a song you wrote?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Tara Li on Friday September 21 2018, @04:38PM (2 children)

    by Tara Li (6248) on Friday September 21 2018, @04:38PM (#738212)

    I really think that's more a problem with the legal system. Just listened to each, as well as a "Beetle's Minute" video on YouTube comparing the two, and... Seriously, those are considered the same song? I'm not hearing it. This strikes me, at best, as a "a donut and a coffee cup are the same shape" comparison, where perhaps in the most technical sense in some particular branch of musicology it might be true - but the average listener is going to look at you like you're crazy.

    Of course, longer term, you run into Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants" problem.

    • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday September 21 2018, @10:25PM (1 child)

      by Pino P (4721) on Friday September 21 2018, @10:25PM (#738389) Journal

      Ignore the accompaniment and lyrics and look at the basic melodic structure of both "HSF" and "MSL". They both have this structure:

      Repeat 4 times these quarter notes at 8-beat intervals, with nonsense words between: D B B~A
      Repeat 3 times these eighth notes at 8-beat intervals, with nonsense words between: D E G E G G

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 22 2018, @02:59AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 22 2018, @02:59AM (#738462)

        So you can now get copyright and presumably exclusive use of a string of 34 characters.
        Well, fuck the copyright industry. DBBADBBADBBADBBADEGEGGDEGEGGDEGEGG.
        Here, I'll do it again DBBADBBADBBADBBADEGEGGDEGEGGDEGEGG.