In the early 2000s, musicians the world over were beginning to sweat over the advent of Napster and the growing ubiquity of the world wide web. With music listeners now able to share their favourite tunes for free, labels were unprepared for the significant toll that the information superhighway would take on their bottom lines.
Nowadays, having your album leaked and shared amongst thousands if not millions on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks is par for the course. There’s even a website solely dedicated to monitoring if an album has leaked or not. Musicians, meanwhile, are looking for new and innovative ways to distribute their work and turn a profit.
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One tactic that has become conventional wisdom is to go further than building a fan base around your music, and instead aim to foster a community-like atmosphere through the use of social media and other avenues. But what happens when the community itself is sabotaging your attempts at sustaining your career?
This is the problem currently plaguing the world of dance music in Australia, one of the most rapidly rising genres in terms of popularity and turnover. As Stoney Roads reports, a disturbing trend has emerged on SoundCloud, wherein up-and-coming producers are effectively pirating the works of bigger producers.
What makes it so worrying, however, is that not only are they pirating music that hasn’t even seen official release, they’re reaping a major benefit from it. Legendary Australian DJ Glover recently took to Facebook to decry the practice of ripping unreleased tracks from recorded DJ mixes and uploading them to SoundCloud.
“What’s up with these young dudes ripping unreleased tunes from a DJ’s sets and then ‘releasing’ it as a free download when you like their fan page? IT NOT EVEN YOUR TRACK FFS,” Glover wrote. Producers looking to boost their profile reportedly upload the unreleased tracks and make them available for download in exchange for Facebook or SoundCloud likes, an important modern currency.
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According to Stoney Roads, producers often upload these with the claim that the tracks are either their own or a simple edit of the track, when in fact the track remains unchanged. Some even go the extra mile of editing small portions of tracks or even recreating them identically to get past SoundCloud’s sonic fingerprint detection system.
Glover’s Facebook post received support from many fans, with one follower uploading an alleged “edit” of a track by prominent producers Deniz Koyu, Nicky Romero & Tommy Trash, apparently done by amateur producer Mike Destiny. However, Stoney Roads notes that Mike Destiny has also made claims that he recreated the track and that it is a vocal version.
