Streaming is obviously how everyone listens to music now. If it’s not on YouTube, it’s probably not worth listening to, right? But things are changing pretty quickly for career DJs. Here are a few recent developments happening in the world of music publishing.
Beatport removes the clutter
There’s way more music being released than listened to. Huge catalogs of yesterday’s vinyl, cassette and CD are being uploaded to YouTube every minute. There’s an overabundance of material. And now, Beatport has announced a new “yearly storage clean-up procedure” that will remove certain tracks that have never sold. The de-cluttering of their back catalog will begin in 2019, removing all tracks that have enjoyed zero sales before January 1, 2019.
Mixcloud announces paid tier
Similarly, Mixcloud has announced that going forward, the platform will allow fewer freedoms for free listeners while also lifting restrictions on paid subscribers. Free users of the platform will still be able to listen for free and share links, but will only be able to skip forwards while listening to a show, not backwards. A show will only be available to a free listener 3 times every two weeks. Furthermore, free listeners will be unable to hear shows with 4 tracks by the same artist or more than 3 tracks from an album. Check out more info on Mixcloud’s subscription tiers.
Why is this important for DJs?
Most professional and semi-professional DJs eventually end up producing their own material. It’s just a smart move to own intellectual property in order to supplement performance fees with streaming revenue and possible sync license deals. With the announcement that two major platforms are essentially becoming more restrictive, the hope for DJs and producers is that more people pay more for the incredible value held by online streaming.
The culture of paying to stream music needs to be more prevalent. And at this stage, any content creator aiming to avoid a nightmarishly homogenous pool of musical averageness should be the champions of any other cause than major streaming platforms.
John Bartmann is a music producer and DJ.