Apple Music Becomes First Streaming Service to Include Underground DJ Remixes and Mashups

Apple has announced a new partnership with Dubset Media Holdings to stream thousands of remixed songs and DJ mixes, both based on original recordings, that were previously unavailable due to copyright issues. Apple Music will be the first streaming music service to provide access to these previously unlicensed tracks, according to Billboard.

Dubset will use a technology called MixBank to analyze a remix or DJ mix file, identify existing recordings within the file, pay the necessary rights holders, and distribute the mix through Apple Music and other streaming services. The process can take about 15 minutes for a 60-minute recording.

But licensing remixes and DJ mixes, both based on original recordings, is incredibly complex. A single mix could have upward of 600 different rights holders. According to CEO Stephen White, a typical mix has 25 to 30 songs that require payments to 25 to 30 record labels and anywhere from two to ten publishers for each track. […]

MixBank matches the recordings used in the remix or DJ mix against a database of three-audio snippets from Gracenote, where White was CEO prior to joining Dubset. He says fingerprinting is a “brute force” tool that can provide MixBand with up to 100 possible matches for each three-second match.

The rise in popularity of the EDM genre has resulted in an increasing number of user-generated remixes, mash-ups, and DJ mixes of popular songs, and this partnership will help bring those underground tracks to Apple Music and potentially "all 400 distributors worldwide" in the future, said White.

Dubset will retain a percentage of revenue for providing in-house licensing and pay the DJ or remixer a share of that amount. The service "allows everyone to make money on this content for the first time," according to White. The digital distributor has agreements with over 14,000 labels and publishers.

In related news, Beats 1 recently announced that popular EDM artist deadmau5 will host his own show this Friday at 3:00 p.m. Pacific.