PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Songwriting Copyright question.

This is not a TuneCore issue. You will find similar language on the contracts for all the distributors, including Distrokid, CDBaby, etc.

Remember that anybody can put their own music up on YouTube and Facebook. You don't need TuneCore. If you get the views, you can monetize it. You only need a distributor for Spotify and streaming services. What they alone can provide for YouTube is their ContentID service, which means that if anybody uses your music in their YouTube videos--you'll be paid.

ContentID is not about copyright. It actually has nothing to do with whether your music is original and whether you have the legal rights to use any software you use. It's just that whoever registers the content first --owns it. If somebody gets a copy of your song and registers it with ContentID, then they get the money when you later put your own song up on YouTube. Of course there is a process where you can dispute this.

What Tunecore means by "samples" is the kind of stuff bedroom producers download from sites like Splice. A very specific drum pattern on a certain drum set. A female vocalist singing "Oh baby!' A guitar playing a specific solo. Some bedroom producers just download a lot of stuff and assemble their songs that way. They may not record anything themselves. Put stuff created by others into Ableton and Acid. This kind of thing can create big issues for ContentID. What if that sample--which the producer has the rights to--was used first by Rihanna? That's a headache. To not have to deal with a million disputes like this, YouTube just created ContentID, and the distributors do not want music that's made from samples downloaded from Splice, because they don't want problems dealing with YouTube. In fact they don't want songs that even have one sample downloaded from Splice.

Almost all pop music is made from virtual instruments that are made from samples--a virtual piano, a guitar, a violin, a drum machine. Of course you can play a piano part from a virtual instrument that's made from samples. That is not what distributors mean by "samples." Where it gets complicated is when you have something that is a pattern that is recognizable and might as well be a sample. For example, a distinctive preset on a synth. I always try to mess around with anything I use, so it's unique to me.

Which leads us to Band-in-a-Box. Could it trigger ContentID? It's unlikely, because the algorithm generates unique results from the same chord progressions, and the more complex your chord progressions, the more unique it gets. But IMHO Band-in-a-box is a gray area if all you use is Band-in--a-Box. This is not a legal issue, because nobody knows what will trigger ContentID. It's a computer, not a court where you debate fair use or anything. But if it goes wrong, you will have violated your contract with Tunecore.

I personally don't think that BIAB is samples in the way they are asking, but I still mess around with it to be sure. For example, on the song I'm currently working on, I have an audio track that's a drum part from BIAB. I've converted that to MIDI, put a different drum set on it and changed the patterns to mesh better with my song. At this point, I don't think there's any chance it will trigger ContentID. It's no different than if I made it with EZDrummer.

If you use a sample from Splice in a track that gets ContentID from Tunecore, it will probably be okay. But if it triggers ContentID because somebody used it first--then you may be tossed off TuneCore. With BIAB, nobody can say for sure. My songs are 90% played or programmed by me, with help from software like BIAB and EZKeys.

BIAB tracks are fine for Spotify, Apple, Amazon and the rest. Social media is more complicated, because it's not about whether you have the legal rights to use the music commercially. It's about ContentID.

But again, you can put your music up on YouTube and monetize it. Probably the worst thing that would happen is you'd get a notice from them that the computer has tagged your music as being created by somebody else. Maybe they used the same chords on the same BIAB Style. Then you can dispute it.