About a year ago, I gave a guest lecture for a colleague's course about sampling and copyright law. At the end of the presentation, I talked about a company called Dubset that was working on licensing remixes, DJ sets, and other sample-based compositions. Their software, MixScan, can analyze audio tracks and identify source songs relatively quickly; the comany then set up licensing deals with record labels that own a lot of copyrighted popular music recordings. At the time of my lecture, Dubset was offering these mixes and DJ sets for streaming via their website, which got relatively little traffic.
Last week, musicologist Anthony Cushing brought this article to my attention. As it turns out, Dubset and Apple have entered into an agreement, and Dubset's licensed remixes are now available via Apple Music!
Just to be clear, there is still no set rate for clearing a sample for use in a new recording. The fee is based on negotiations between Dubset and the copyright holders. The important thing to remember, however, is that licensed samples and pay-to-stream services provide revenue to artists, both big- and small-time. And this is brand new revenue.
DJs and bedroom composers used to release their remixes exclusively via illegal filesharing networks, which meant that no one could get paid for anything (neither the artists of the source songs nor the DJs themselves). This legal distribution system means new money that no one was seeing up until very recently. Siva Vaidhyanathan remarked that one of the greatest failures of the Grey Album (2004) was that no one (the Beatles, Jay-Z, or Danger Mouse) made a single cent off of it. People's behavior isn't likely to change - remixes are a huge part of our current musical landscape - but this marks a change in the system to accommodate practice, which, in my opinion, is a big step forward.