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An alternative to SoundCloud, MixCloud and similar services
I'm a software developer, that has pretty much loved music my entire life, and I've at times listened to music almost all my waking hours.I'm now in the middle of my thirties, and these last couple of years I've also been playing the guitar, singing and doing some piano and drumming as well.
Now, to me it seems natural that one learns to play instruments, by playing songs one has grown up with and know, it's a natural place to start. So for some time I created simple cover versions of songs, and uploaded them to SoundCloud.
Around this last Christmas (...) I got a notice from SoundCloud that my account had "two strikes" with a dire warning of my account being "terminated", where they had taken down my track "Summer (original by Calvin Harris) Simple Mic". Now it is funny that I get a notice like that on the 1st day of Christmas (25th of December). Another funny thing is that I asked to get a copy of my track, but they denied that request and said that
"This was reported to us by an anti-piracy agency on behalf of Sony. We won't be able to reinstate this, not even privately, unless you have permission from Sony to have it on SoundCloud."
Now, luckily I had a copy of the track on my computer, but it would have been a bit more sticky situtation if I didn't. Now this track is 01:19 long, that is just under 80 seconds and recorded on a simple microphone, but they still saw it necessary to take it down. If it was because I made a remark somewhere that you could just put that snippet on repeat and there you had pretty much the entire song I don't know.
Anyway, because of this, I got somewhat stressed and decided to move my cover songs to MixCloud, because there you can tag the artist and the song in uploaded tracks, and the artists (and MixCloud) get some revenue, and that seemed like the best thing I could do.
However, I recently reviewed the terms on the MixCloud site, and it basically says that they can do whatever they want with what I upload, forever. This wasn't what I expected; what I expected was that I could put things up there as a temporary solution, and take things down if necessary, or take things down if something I create has potential to make money. Now, I guess I could leave everything I have up there as the recordings aren't high quality, but it would be nice to have a reasonable amount of control of what I've created.
So my expectations of MixCloud and what is in their terms of service didn't match up, and I sent an email to MixCloud asking about this, but the reply I got was
"For licensing reasons we don't host individual tracks (even if it's your own track), so unfortunately we've had to disable your single track upload."
Which wasn't close to what I emailed them about
"
Expected Behaviour
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My impression of the site was that one could upload things, and take them down and that was pretty much it, you and the original content owners got a cut through radio-style fees.
Actual Behaviour
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However, I've read the terms you have, and found that for example having others create derivates, that I'm liable for being in the middle, that you can use my content perpetually etc. is not something I expected.
"
So now I'm in a situation where I have created content which I'm unsure about who has the rights to do what with, and I also can't continue doing podcasts and cover songs because I don't have a place to share these things.
Does anyone know of alternatives to these services that work like I want them to? Comments or emails to morphex@gmail.com are much appreciated.
[Permalink] [By morphex] [Music (Atom feed)] [12 Apr 10:08 Europe/Oslo]