By Francis Bea
Music streaming services grant us access to a vast library of music, without the financial cost. Musicians, urging fans to download their album, release free tracks through Bandcamp. It’s not a surprise that as we’ve grown up spoiled by the internet, our interpretation of the lines between piracy, borrowing, and sharing music are ignorantly tailored to our desires. Many content creators, whether in film, publishing, or gaming industries are tip-toeing wearing beer goggles through the legalities of licensing. They’re surprisingly unaware of copyright law and will often publish unlicensed music.
Following up on July’s launch of MaaS (Music as a Service), Audiosocket, a four year old music licensing technology platform and service for indie artists, will draw a definite line with today’s launch of MaaS: Storefront.
Serving as an alternative for communities that can not afford the full API integration typically reserved for its traditional MaaS cousin, Storefront is Audiosocket’s take on a skinnable iTunes-like store, offering communities of content creators access to a catalog of more than 33,000 licensed tracks for use in any manner.
If you’re wondering why you can’t just use tracks from Spotify, or other Internet music services, for a commercial project, you’re one of many that ignored the fine print that states that the streaming service “grants you a limited, non-exclusive, revocable license to make personal non-commercial use.”
Audiosocket’s President and co-founder, Jenn Miller indicated that, “those companies do not have the rights to license music for anything other than streaming. [Audiosocket] provides the rights for ANY type of media use.”
Outside of the growing pains of copyright and licensing, the MaaS platform both as a technology and service, alleviates creative pain points of content creators. Audiosocket emphasizes its category based MaaS search algorithm, including genre, mood, and tempo, which expedites what would have been a tedious search for that perfect song to go with a scene. But to maintain the quality of tracks offered to their partners, Audiosocket’s acceptance rate of bands to add to the catalog is lower than receiving an acceptance letter from an Ivy League college.
“Yes, we only accept about 2-3% of the “auditions” we receive. It is a tough roster to be a part of, but we place over 1/3rd of our artists every pay cycle (6 months),” Jenn revealed.
Audiosocket confirmed that they will be launching with film partners including, IndieFlix, LearnCreate and The National Film Festival for Talented Youth.
Francis Bea is a New York City based writer, PR person, and tech junkie who’s solving the music industry’s woes with his start-ups, Musefy.com and Proptone.com. You can find him on @francisybea and @musefy.
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