How is 8tracks legal

Top Artists. Top Charts. Hot Songs. Billboard Top Videos. Top Articles. By Marc Schneider. Copied to clipboard. Over the last 12 years, a lot has changed in the online-music industry, and those shifts eventually left 8tracks without many options except to call it a day.

Yet finding funding became almost impossible from the get-go as investors sought unicorn-level valuations instead of reliable businesses with lower returns. Porter spoke with Intelligencer last weeks about what went right and what went wrong. How was 8tracks conceived? The idea goes way back.

I worked for an accounting firm called Arthur Andersen, back when that existed. The thing that I thought was so interesting about the music scene there was, for electronic music, it was really focused around the DJ rather than individual artists.

DJs who played at clubs, who put out compilation CDs. The emphasis was on the curator rather than the creator. This paradigm of the DJ as focal point made even more sense in this world where there was information overload.

You really needed a great filter to help separate signal from noise. There was a specific feature of Napster that painted a vision of that. It was this unorganized form of social music discovery at a grassroots level, and I thought that was really cool.

I thought maybe there was a way to add some organization to that platform. The world had changed and you needed to bootstrap your way out of the gate and then once you had some traction then you could begin discussing funding with VCs. So we bootstrapped and launched in the summer of This was a couple of years before Instagram rolled out, and it was a cool way to create a work where the whole was greater than the sum of the parts.

You had this cover art and a description, and it was almost emulating the mixtape concept. There was also this freeform tagging structure that was useful for music. You could label your playlist by a genre or by an artist, but we found that users started tagging in the human dimension, like with an activity or a mood.

We were sort of the pioneers in programming in that way. So people could listen to those playlists on 8tracks directly? Were you hosting the music yourself? At that point it was an iTunes-dominated world. It had to have at least eight songs, and if you do the math at about four minutes a song, the idea was that would provide a natural breakpoint where we could put an ad or something.

And we would stream together a set of similar playlists, but each of those playlists was curated by a person. People at the micro level, and algorithms at the macro level.

What body governs the Compulsory License? It allows an entity to stream in the U. They put in place a process that would set the rates, where a copyright royalty board would review existing deals and testimony from the record labels and the webcasters and come to a decision about what the rates ought to be.

Those rates get reset every five years. That was the regime under which we operated for the sound recording royalties. Those royalties go to the songwriter. At the time you launched, those royalties were not excessive? At the time we launched, those royalties were definitely cheaper.

What was unique about our situation was that just the year prior, in , the rates came down. There had been a lot of pushback from Pandora and its listeners that Congress strongly encouraged an alternative set of rates.

One of the new categories was the Small Webcaster license. The rates under the Small Webcaster arrangement were a percentage of revenue or a percentage of expenses, subject to a minimum. What was nice about those rates is that they grew as you grew. That was great for us because it allowed us to scale up in a sensible way. How did people find 8tracks?

At the outset, it was just a lot of my friends that lived in downtown New York and Williamsburg. We did get some good early press. There was a piece comparing us to Muxtape, which was another kind of hipster Williamsburg favorite of that era. They had just gotten shut down by the labels, so we were the better legal alternative or something.

And then we just steadily grew. Missing Muxtape? A small service called 8tracks is trying to fill the void while avoiding the pitfalls. Playing off the same concept, 8tracks lets you upload up to 30 minutes of music into a custom playlist, which can then be publicly shared with other users. You can search for music using artists, genres, or usernames.

So how is this legal while Muxtape ran into trouble?