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Comment by debt | Hacker News Reader

Soundcloud has some of the best damn music. It'd be awful if it disappeared. I'm surprised nobody, including Soundcloud themselves, have developed tools to remix, sample, dj, etc. the music library on Soundcloud. They have tons of great stuff to sample/remix etc.

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I'm not terribly surprised. The rights management around that is incredibly expensive and very complex. I also have vague memories of some startup circa 2011/2012 that did live DJing that ended up dying pretty quickly

It was probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turntable.fm

There was turntable.fm. Now there's https://www.jqbx.fm which is sort of doing live DJing but with Spotify

Ah thank you. That's what I was thinking of

It's easy. Artists define a license for each track which explains whether it can be remixed.

That's not actually true within the US. Each song sample needs to be licensed individually. This becomes more complex when a song you want to remix contains samples of other songs. In general, this has become prohibitively expensive, which is why most modern songs only have a few "samples". Any company that does remixing as suggested above would have to manage the licensing in some way or pass on the risk to the users while still risking lawsuits from the music industry.

Would that be legal? What is the music on Soundcloud licensed under?

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