How to steal an old song and make it your own
So many old songs do not have “audio fingerprints” in music recognition databases, and that spells big trouble when new artists sample old works without credit
Readers Note : If you know about audio fingerprints, content ID, etc there’s a more brief synopsis of this post I wrote, here:
How do you assign credits to music that isn’t officially digitized?
I applaud The Recording Academy for its new #GiveCredit campaign ; essentially a marketing campaign to “increase visibility of the producers, engineers, songwriters, mixers, instrumentalists and others who help bring our favorite songs to life.”
Deborah Dugan, president and CEO of the Recording Academy tells Billboard Magazine:
“Credits have been a casualty of the digital age, for all that we gained with streaming we lost in the opportunity for recognition and even discovery.”
This is very true, but something else happened in the digital age with regards to credits. In the process of the digitization of music: most songs were made available on major streaming music services, but older songs, those out of print, or tunes that have their copyrights and publishing in dispute, or just plain forgotten about music never made it into the digital world. Or at least officially.
When I say “officially” I mean music that is serviced by record labels through digital distributors to music streaming services (aka DSPs) like Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, TIDAL, Deezer and so many others.
What happens to “unofficial music”? Where can you find it?
YouTube continues to be the most comprehensive library of the world’s music. Yes YouTube is also an end point for digital distributors to deliver officially licensed music, but all that “unofficial” music — out of print songs and albums, music with rights in dispute, obscure songs and old music that never got re-distributed via digital methods— also appears on YouTube. Mainly these are music fans uploading this unofficial music to YouTube.
These fans uploading unofficial music are not doing so with the intention to violate copyright or pirate music. I believe the uploads are a result of scarcity — there is no where else to find the music and hear it, unless you were to go digging at some physical record store with an extensive offering of used vinyl and snatch it up to play on your record player. Beyond digging for out of print vinyl at retail record stores, Discogs is a great resource; a giant online market place of record collectors who can buy and sell vinyl matched through user want lists. But Discogs users aren’t trading music files, they are buying and selling vinyl and using shipping methods to deliver the goods.
Official Music Has “Audio Fingerprints”
Any music that IS “officially” licensed to YouTube and other DSPs, goes through the process of digitization before it appears on a streaming service. During this process, a select group of technology companies create “audio fingerprints” also known as “acoustic fingerprints”. A audio fingerprint essentially a piece of technology / data that distills the audio of a song into a trackable piece of software code. There are all kinds of uses for this code, the audio fingerprint. Music monitoring software and services can listen to audio streams, like broadcast and internet radio and report back on what songs are being played in a radio show just by matching the samples of the streamed audio against a large database of audio fingerprints.
The main use of audio fingerprinting I am talking about here in this post is to detect songs that may be simply copying existing copyrighted compositions.
Some companies that offer this music recognition feature using a database of audio fingerprints are Audible Magic, Gracenote, PEX, BMAT.
Digital music distributors deliver their music catalogs and new releases to these companies. Using proprietary software the companies make the audio fingerprints from each song delivered and build large databases for music content recognition. YouTube has its own ContentID solution built on its own fingerprinting technology and database.
Here’s where it gets tricky — “unofficial songs” as I identified and talked about earlier in this post — do not typically have audio fingerprints residing at YouTube or any of these other audio fingerprint companies.
So here’s what can happen as a result. A musical artist samples an existing song that is “unofficial” not really available on streaming services, maybe it is on vinyl only, and it has not been digitally reissued.
Now said artist may have actually licensed the sample, but the audio fingerprint of the original sample isn’t in any audio fingerprinting database.
So now what happens next is the new song which contains the sample is distributed to Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, and of course YouTube and many other music services.
And the new song gets an audio fingerprint and the old song doesn’t have its own fingerprint in the system.
And what happens next is, the digital distributor of the NEW song starts claiming rights on the old song that the new song samples.
YouTube is the best place to see what happens when a song with a sample of an older song that is not officially digitally distributed.
This is where you can see the idea of “How to steal an old song and make it your own” in action.
Examples:
First, an easy one. Asphalt Jungle, a disco funk project that came out of Philadelphia in 1979. “Freakin Time” was the only song that came from the project spearheaded by session drummer Keith Benson. It was released on a small record label called T.E.C. Records.
Despite it’s small release, it’s a cult classic in the world of funk and disco music, and a favorite among dance music DJs. It received a vinyl reissue on T.E.C. Records in 2012.
“Freakin Time” remains out of print but has been digitally re-released as a “disco edit” two times **, once in 2016 by the DJ / producer team In Flagranti under the same title, and then again this year 2019 by a European artist name Motte under the title “Freakin Baby”. ** At least that I am aware of, there could be other disco edits of it.
Now all of the user uploaded versions of the unofficially distributed Asphalt Jungle “Freakin Time” resolve via YouTube’s ContentID to these two disco edits, even though Asphalt Jungle’s version is the original source audio.
Since I’m a musician and I like to see the credits proper, this kind of mis-crediting drives me nuts. And the mis-crediting is automated by audio fingerprinting technology. Since Asphalt Jungle’s version likely never got a proper audio fingerprint and In Flagranti and Motte’s versions did, any other versions of Asphalt Jungle’s “Freakin Time” will be credited to those other two artists. That also potentially means lost streaming income by the original artist.
Hiroshi Suzuki’s “Romance” is a song from his album “Cat” released in originally by Columbia Records in Japan in 1975. The song is widely available on YouTube via unofficial user uploads. The video that corresponds to the audio of the song is simply the album cover.
The “Cat” album is available on some U.S. streaming services, like Apple Music, but elsewhere it seems to be out of print, like on Spotify. “Romance” from the “Cat” album is such a heavily sampled song, in the worlds of hip-hop and dance music. In fact so much so, that a Japanese music fan built a Spotify playlist of all the songs that sample “Romance”
Cargi Yalcin, the user who uploaded Hiroshi Suzuki’s “Romance”, now has about 5.6 million views (or listens) of the tune on his YouTube channel. There are dozens more user uploads of this same song, but Cargi’s upload is the most watched.
When I started writing this post a few weeks ago, the number was at 5.4 million views which makes me think YouTube recommendation algorithms are pushing this tune to fans into jazz, soul and funk. That’s how I first stumbled across the tune.
When looking at YouTube’s Content ID section under the video of Hiroshi Suzuki’s “Romance” on Cagri’s channel, denoted by the words “Music in this Video” we see that YouTube has recognized the music by Hiroshi Suzuki as another artist’s song: Dwij’s “The Real Thing”, which was released almost 40 years later, in 2014.
But why? This post is clearly Hiroshi Suzuki’s song.
Dwij’s “The Real Thing” tune is based almost entirely on Hiroshi Suzuki’s “Romance” … listen:
Dwij’s “The Real Thing” speeds up the original song “Romance” by Hiroshi Suzuki and adds a new stuttering drum beat, but it’s essentially the same tune. Listen:
It’s my take that because Hiroshi Suzuki’s “Romance” is not officially digitally distributed, that the Dwij’s “The Real Thing” becomes the official audio fingerprint and source of truth as the original composition.
Now all audio content uploaded that is Hiroshi Suzuki’s “Romance” is matched and identified to be Dwij’s “The Real Thing”.
That may be true, but I talked to an audio fingerprinting technology expert who tells me:
Depending on the content identification service, the fingerprints of recent catalogs can be favored. That is specific to the algorithm being used in terms of how they disambiguate multiple matches. Each service is different in this regard.
What happens when Content ID gets it wrong?
So basically, maybe audio fingerprints are being made for new songs that reference old songs that do not have their own audio fingerprints in music databases. But there’s also the chance that both songs — the old ones and the new ones — have audio fingerprints, but the content identification services favor the newer fingerprint over the older one.
In fact, digging deeper on Hiroshi Suzuki on YouTube, I found that his record label Columbia Records Japan re-uploaded the official audio for “Romance” earlier this year in May.
Fortunately, nowhere in the “Music in this Video” section do we see Dwij or his record label / publisher trying to claim the rights to this Hiroshi Suzuki song via YouTube Content ID.
My guess is that it’s easier for digital distributors like Kontor New Media — the distributor for Dwij’s “The Real Thing” — to claim the rights on older music sampled by their artists, when it’s uploaded by fans like Cargi Yalcin. I can’t see Kontor New Media trying to claim Columbia Records Japan’s content.
It’s also continues to be crazy to me that YouTube search will always favor the “most popular” piece of content related to a search term versus the “most official”.
Meaning that if I search for Hiroshi Suzuki “Romance” on YouTube I will always see Cargi Yalcin’s user uploaded, unofficial version, with almost 6 million views versus Columbia Records Japan’s licensed version which appears about 13 slots down in the search in a section titled “For You” not even in the top search results. The Columbia Records Japan version today only has 55,000 views (listens).
Even when credit is given, audio fingerprints can turn the story around …
Caribou aka Dan Snaith is a very well regarded dance music producer. His latest project titled Daphni has a tune out called “Sizzling”, released earlier this summer of 2019.
In this instance, Daphni actually licensed the original source of his tune, a 1981 song called “Sizzlin Hot” by a Bermuda disco funk band named Paradise. The Paradise version of the song got a digital reissue in 2018.
The digital distribution of Paradise’s reissue of “Sizzlin Hot” is handled by Distrokid. DistroKid handles tens, if not hundreds of thousands of releases for independent artists. It’s a very easy to use, self service distribution platform for music artists who are looking to quickly release their music to all streaming platforms.
Meanwhile, the digital distribution of the updated 2019 version of this song by Daphni is handled by IDOL Distribution which is more focused on serving independent record label clients. In this case IDOL is serving up 2019’s “Sizzling” for Daphni on behalf of his record label, Jiaolong.
Now the long out of print “Sizzlin Hot” - originally by Paradise - has at least a dozen user uploads on YouTube that were put up before the digital reissue. Via YouTube Content ID, these old versions are being claimed as the new Daphni version by IDOL distribution.
It’s doubtful that the record label that reissued Paradise’s original 1981 album — Frederiksberg Records — took the time via DistroKid to claim all rights to YouTube content featuring its original source audio.
As a result, IDOL Distribution which is using ContentID to claim rights, is now getting the rights to the older version of “Sizzlin Hot”, at least the user uploaded versions on YouTube.
While both versions of Sizzlin — both the 1981 and 2019 version — do credit the original composer, Grant Williams, this flip-flop in terms of acknowledging what the original source audio is, is just another example of how audio fingerprints can be confused and disambiguated when there is both an old version and new version of a song that has the same source audio.
