Apple Music to compensate artists & rights holders in DJ mixes

Apple Music has overcome its problem of identifying and compensating the various rights holders on DJ mixes on its platform.

It has done this by building new technology and tools on the audio recognition app Shazam, which it acquired  in 2018 for US$400 million.

The Shazam tool can identify the songs within a DJ mix and directly pay individual creators, event promoters, mix suppliers like festivals, club nights and indie labels, and multiple artists who are part of the track.

Apple Music and Beats VP, Oliver Schusser, said the process took nearly a year of working with third parties to get the degree of recognition to an acceptable level.

“We’ve created a tool, where effectively we let DJ mixes run through the Shazam technology and Shazam identifies exactly what’s in a mix and they do that with a very, very high degree of success,” he said.

“For a lot of dance music and DJs who make music, the music never really found it to streaming services because there just wasn’t a great process for how labels could clear the music that’s in a DJ mix, because the labels or the distributors didn’t know what was in the mix.”

The new feature allows subscribers to see the names of individual tracks, skip songs within the mix, listen with lossless audio on most mixes, and save them to their library for viewing offline.

Apple Music already hosts thousands of mixes, including sets from Tomorrowland’s digital festivals from 2020 and 2021.

The company said engagement on its dedicated genre page for DJ Mixes within the Apple Music app, has tripled in the last 12 months, with over 300 million streams of DJ Mixes so far.

Recent mixes have appeared from Tiësto, Carl Cox and Charlotte de Witte, among others.

de Witte saud she’s excited to have the opportunity to provide online mixes again.

“Apple Music is the first platform that offers continuous mixes where there’s a fair fee involved for the artists whose tracks are included in the mixes and for the artist making those mixes. It’s a step in the right direction where everyone gets treated fairly,” de Witte said.

Apple also plans to introduce even more, including 14 archival sets like those in Studio K7!’s DJ Kicks that have not been available to EDM fans for 15 years.

Apple hasn’t started user-generated content (UGC) as yet, but is expected to do so given that it is forecast to be worth over $6 billion to the music industry by 2022.