A recent study has found that over a million “manipulated” songs are currently on various streaming sites, such as Spotify.
Tech company Pex is responsible for analysing copyrighted content on digital services. The data they collated, as of November 2023, shows that over one million tracks on streaming services, including Apple Music, TIDAL and Spotify, have been manipulated.
When a song is manipulated, it has been modified from its original form. For instance, the track could be sped up or slowed down. Some of the most listened-to modified songs include faster versions of Childish Gambino’s ‘Heartbeat’ and Lady Gaga’s ‘Bloody Mary’, which have 19million and 25million streams, respectively.
These manipulated tracks infringe on copyright law, given there is no legal license to use them. The original artists of the songs do not receive any royalties for their use.
Pex CEO Rasty Turek told Music Business World: “There is [a] huge following of people trying to essentially enjoy content like this. Nightcore mixes and so on. And I do think that there is a legitimate seed to the movement. If people enjoy this kind of music, they should absolutely have access to it.”
He continued, “But at the same time, proper attribution should be required, and this is much more up to the platforms and services than it is up to the artist to essentially go and fish out.”
Spotify has been taking steps to combat the large amount of music uploaded onto its site by shifting royalty allocation. Over a quarter of all the music on Spotify is not played. The Swedish streaming platform’s new policy will require songs to have over 1000 streams before getting any royalties; however, it is unclear how this policy will prevent the use of manipulated music.
Meanwhile, on January 17th, Members of the European Parliament voted to support the establishment of a new legal framework within the EU to channel equitable compensation to recording musicians from streaming platforms.
Read more at
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/streaming-platforms-have-over-a-million-manipulated-tracks-study-finds/
