| HN Mirror

To ChrisArgyle: Oh yes, I understand that. Even worse are the wannabe rap artists who will use the entire artist name and title of a track to "trojan horse" their own rap rendition and trick people into playing their music to drive up play counts. They're still getting away with this somehow.

But the commercial trance songs themselves are sampling other tracks (although doing it much better), and also licensing issues down to the one-shot drum samples they're using.

One of my tracks takes a Beyonce vocal stab and it processes it so much you won't recognize who the singer was - unless you knew the steps to reverse engineer it - and, you'd be surprised to find many talented audio engineers who are much better than I can do this easily. When I hear songs on the radio which use a similar technique, I can pick this up instantly. AFAIK, my track hasn't been pulled off SC yet.

Did you also know that many companies (Verizon and TMobile have been known to do this) have audio engineers who will "reverse engineer" a song their marketing team likes from an indie artist to recreate it so they don't have to pay royalties? Its not hard to trick these algorithms, and in many cases they come up with false positives anyways.

Most of the (commercial) "Industry" itself is running off uncredited samples, many of which have been cut from 1960-1980s Jazz/Blues tracks. These tracks still are technically copyrighted[0], but the artists are often not knowledgable over who is sampling their tracks, or in many cases they don't care / want people to sample their stuff. Most of their record labels have also long since died off which would have tried to protect their works as well. You would be shocked to find how wide the range of genres are of producers that are doing this.

In sum, it stinks of a moneygrab. Soundcloud became big enough to get into DMCA's non-artistic crosshairs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...