If you're a serious beatmaker/producer, especially Hip Hop, who takes your production seriously. If you're making living out of it, then this might just be the best thing that can happen for you. Hip Hop is a heavily sample based genre. It started with sampled beats back in the days. However, with the word "Sample", follows the ever so known, "Copyright/License" concerns. It's not easy for producers to deal with getting the samples they use on their productions cleared for commercial release. The hassle, let alone fees is a pain in the...well yeah. This don't apply to Hip Hop alone, it relates to any producer from any genre. If you sample, you know the pain.
Well, that's all about to change. Keep in mind that this is for those who actually are serious of their production and are willing handle the rightful fees and revenue shares. (However, I do have my own personal take on this project which I will state it in the conclusion below.)
Enters Tracklib! First Ever Sample Store!
Tracklib is a Swedish company that is privately funded by Scandinavian and also international industrialists and entrepreneurs . It was initially founded and built back in 2014 by 5 individuals, Eric Amarillo, Pär Almqvist, Pia Philipsson, Anil Raj and Johan Wiström. Now, they have 16 people in their team and managed to expand their headquarters from their home land Stockholm, all the way to London and New York. Tracklib launched a private beta back in May 2017 and instantly grabbed the attention of a few big names like Hank Shocklee, Prince Paul, Questlove, Mr.Green, Erick Sermon and Statik Selektah to name a few.
The idea behind this company's development was to find a way to make music licensing a far more simple and straight forward process than the usual, conventional process which is a huge headache and not to mention, complicating when it comes to using samples in own productions without any legal issues. So, the guys at Tracklib decided to come up with a company and site that covers a few major aspects to make life easier for everyone.
- Make sampling fast, easy, affordable and legal for everyone.
- Preserve the musical legacies of the still around and late legends.
- Create a new revenue system for the music industry.
- An effort to create a situation for everyone to benefit from. (Labels, publishers, artists, producers, writers and musicians. (Excerpt from Tracklib "'About' section")
- Combining the whole process and effectively change the way the industry works within the production, licensing and earning system.
The company launched an early access to the public in early 2018 and it is quickly becoming what they envisioned it to be. Head over to Tracklib and explore. It's on Early Access at the time of this post.
A Walk Through The Site
Main Home Page (Before Sign-in)
I have to give props to them for the effort on this company. Even the website looks really beautiful! Everything is stated straight and simple. No super fancy designs or UI but instead, everything is stated in the most simplest way possible with very less tabs and pages to jump to. The whole experience is extremely user-friendly. (The emojis are always very emotional here! Don't hurt them.)
Once you're on the site, you see a "Home" and "Licensing" tab. A "Sign-up" tab and a link to their video about the project, with Prince Paul showing how stoked he is with the project while Erick Sermon is like "Should I be smiling about his euphoria?" in the background. Next, you will see a short description of how the system works. (The emojis got their back!). Followed by a few feedback from the industry people and lastly a few important links for the users to look at. (About, Legal, Contact, Press, Blog and Social Media Links).
Home Page (After Sign-in)
Boom! More straight forward stuff! That's the best thing about this site. Once you log in, you see "Home", "Tracks", "Your Tracks", "Licensing", "Profile" and "Checkout Cart". They also have a suggestions for collections of songs selected by the producers/artists/DJ they choose usually as the first thing you see after log in. As you scroll down, you will see some list of songs that's currently "Hot" on their site and lastly a section that allows you to choose songs from the many genres available on their database.
Profile Setting
There's nothing super complicated here. Just basic details like Username, Email, Profile Description, Country, Company Name, Full Name, Address, Password change and Payment Method. Details that are optional are labeled as so. So not all the information is compulsory. Nice!
Tracks
This is a gold mine! There a plethora of songs selections from any genre, any era, artists, etc. The list just goes on and on. They constantly add more songs to the database almost everyday. All the songs that are available here are in the best quality you can get, 16bit wav file. You have the option to choose songs by sort and many other options. You can also filter them according to the Genre, Region, Song Key, Track Types (stems like bass, brass, synth etc), BPM and the Year range of the song. The amount of flexibility you get here is phenomenal. Being able to filter songs as detailed as you can will allow you to find the right songs you wish to get for sampling. Very well thought out system.
You can audition all the songs, just as easy. The UI and system works similar to SoundCloud or our Dsound. Just click as you go and they continue to play in the bottom as well. Just listening to the songs, you can clearly tell how clean and high quality the songs are made available for you. It's not easy if we were to get the samples on our own with such quality. That's a big plus.
Licensing
This is pretty neat. The process is like breezing through a usual online store. 2 things can happen. You can purchase just the track/sample and leave but can't use it for commercial release. Only personal, non-profit and non-commercial or online release. Or you can purchase the sample and license it straight away, giving you full freedom to use the samples as you wish.
As you can see in the image from the site above, they summarized in 4 steps. Any track on Tracklib can be bought for only $1.99 (keep in mind that this is only for purchasing the track. You CANNOT use is for commercial and public release). You can license the songs you've bought accordingly. Once you have chosen and purchased the the proper license that fit your criteria, you will receive a PDF documentation stating the license ownership. Super simple right? The important thing to remember here is a single license is only valid for one specific track produced with the sample. So every time you produce another track, you need to purchase the license for the track.
The licensing has 3 different categories you can choose from and purchase, Short, Standard and Full, which determines how much of the original song you're using as sample to your production. A, B and C, is how they categorized the songs in their database. Some songs will fall under A, some B, but as stated 99% of their tracks fall under C, the cheapest license. The difference between each category is the length of the sample and the revenue percentage that you share with the original publishers. To take an example from the table above, if you purchase a "Standard Sample" license in Category C, which gives you a 15 minutes worth of sample max, you will share 10% of the publishing and 10% of the master side revenues of the income from the song you produced. The same applies to all the categories accordingly. (Refer to the table above.)
The company also stressed that you should register your tracks with a revenue collections agency and to be released through a proper publishing and distribution label. This is so that the original publishers and songwriters will get their proper shares. More in detailed information about this is provided in the documentation of the licensing.
Conclusion
From a personal stand point, this is a great initiative and company. I have seen how hassling sample clearance process can be in the conventional way. Sometimes, you would be paying way more than you ever made from the produced track, just for the sample used in it. I believe paying a flat rate and getting the samples cleared beforehand, solves a lot of unwanted issues down the road. We have heard news that artists get sued millions of dollars for the samples they used in a song. Well that's publishing companies playing smart. Target the selling artists, let them sample, be quiet about it, and when the song hits the charts and makes tons of money, they step in and file a report.
I believe with Tracklib, this sort of situations can be avoided before the track is even produced and released. There are ups and downs. Some might have opinions on the license and shares. It's all relevant. So it's just the matter of personal preference now. If this services is making things easy for you as they wish for it to be, then it's for you. If it's not, then it's not. Nothing wrong there. I guess my point is, it's great to see people taking initiatives to help both parties here, the samplers and original artists and publishers of the samples. Because at the end, sampling can be considered as "less original" to some. But it's been done for decades now and it has also became an art. So to bring it down to the line here, samplers should get the props for being creative in using another's music piece and turn it into something new. While the original artists and publishers should always get the rightful credits and revenue, as well as the respect and appreciation to the original music. The samples wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for them. So the mutual understanding should always be there. It's about music. So any initiative to make it spread wider is always good in my book.
Now that Tracklib paved the way in this "Sample Store" industry, we might see competitors coming soon. Competition is great as long as it's healthy. But that's for the future. For now, my respect goes to Tracklib for the efforts and finally launching this platform. I hope more good things to happen and come from them. This could seriously bring in more quality producers who can take their productions to the next level. Might be a real game changer too. So salute to the team!
With that said, Thank You for reading. Share your thoughts. Until next time, have fun sampling #steemians!
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