PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Do I have permission to use Realtracks in my original songs when releasing them for downloading ?

Very interesting to read what CDBaby say Dave, and it supports what LANDR told me back in July when I queried why all of my releases were monetized on Spotify, Amazon Play, Google Play, Deezer, etc, but had not been approved for YouTube/Facebook monetization.
They explained that it is because the criteria is different and more strict for YouTube and Facebook.

I did a bit of research on YouTube monetization and discovered that they changed the rules about two years ago with the aim of improving content.
To qualify for YouTube monetization, your channel must now have at least 1000 Subscribers and 4000 Watch Hour time in last 365 days. The video content must also comply with the stricter copyright ownership requirements (as you stated).
See https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/01/additional-changes-to-youtube-partner.html

As my YouTube channel falls a long way short of the required number of subscribers and watch hours, it's totally irrelevant whether the content of any of my videos complies with content requirements anyway, so you can understand why it really doesn't matter to me that my LANDR releases were not approved for YouTube monetization.
However, at the time, I was curious as to the precise reason why LANDR had not approved them, and this was the reason why I queried it with them.
Without referring directly to any of my releases, they simply answered by giving me a list of YouTube's criteria and offered the suggestion that their review system must have flagged something that didn't meet the required criteria.
To their credit, they unexpectedly said that they were happy to approve all of my releases for YouTube monetization on their system but warned me that, in the event of the material being used in a YouTube video, it would ultimately be up to YouTube themselves to decide if it fulfilled their own requirements for monetization.

As the only material I used on these releases was a combination of my own live performances and BIAB Realtracks, I would tend to agree with you that BIAB Realtracks are not exclusively licensed, therefore all that LANDR were doing when they didn't approve some of my releases for YouTube monetization, was letting me know in advance that I could run into problems if I was to use the music in a YouTube video.
Of course, it would depend on the sophistication of YouTube's detection system in identifying BIAB Realtracks within the recording, and their interpretation of what constitutes 'insufficiently distinct'.
So like you say JohnJohnJohn, a lot of BIAB songs use the same Realtracks, and every Realtrack uses the same 8 bars riffs.
Therefore it's not beyond the realms of possibility that a sophisticated AI system could identify a commonly used riff when reviewing a release, and subsequently not approve it for YouTube/Facebook monetization.