The Pop Corporation

DJs have been looking online to promote their sets for a while now, and at each turn, there’s is always the sticky problem of getting paid. Of course, in clubs and bars, DJs sling out other people’s music and there’s a tacit understanding between all parties that effectively, it’s free promotion for the artist and the DJ gets paid because they’re the people stood in the corner doing the work for 6 hours.

PRS are a company that charges venues and radio stations and aims to recoup money for public performances of work for artists, but the reality of PRS is that very few musicians ever see that money, so what are they really for? They also charge artists themselves to recoup that money, so if you’re a band paying PRS and not seeing that same money back, it all seems a bit pointless.

So, DJs have been uploading to the likes of Soundcloud and Mixcloud, and at times, there’s been legal issues with copyrighted materials and record labels have sent lawyers after the platforms with a variety of outcomes. At present, Mixcloud seems to have the mostly sensible outcome, but alas, they’re not making the money they’d like to pay for all those servers DJs are using.

The advent of Twitch has seen another platform where DJs can show off their sets, but that’s all about to change too. CEO Dan Clancy says that DJs will now have to disclose their earnings with record labels, and now, they’ll “have to share money with the labels”.

“It doesn’t come for free,” he continued, noting that Twitch will have to pay record labels what they’re owed and Twitch won’t be stumping up the money alone: “we’re going to split whatever the cost is.” This is, in part, a bid to stop DCMA takedown requests, which naturally are annoying and break up the pace of streaming and the like.

Clancy is suggesting that Twitch are going to track the music played by DJ streams and once copyrighted music is detected, DJs will be asked to disclose their earnings to record labels. Whether record labels will go through the effort of working out a way to make this easy for DJs to do, and indeed, whether DJs can just shrug and avoid the whole thing, is another matter entirely.

One thing that could be cool is that this could see a boom in DJs playing more music not on labels and unsigned artists, but you suspect that this won’t be the case.