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Comment by matclayton | Hacker News Reader

Co-founder of Mixcloud here. We've been doing live streaming and licensed for years at this point (https://www.mixcloud.com/pro/live) Surprised it took twitch so long to make these deals happen, but it shows how complex these deals are to navigate, and congrats on them for doing so! Interested to see how this pans out and glad to see others in the field figuring out the licensing and not just ignoring it.

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I wonder how long until Twitch also gets forced to some rather arbitrary rules set by the record companies, like how you can't do "best of Daft Punk" on Mixcloud (too many songs by one artist).

Jokes aside, kudos to you for coming up with what's been the only available legal option for the past decade or so! Judging by this, your platform will still have some advantages:

> No Vods, Clips, or Highlights

> DJs opted into the program will not be able to save VODs, Clips, or Highlights to Twitch. VODs, Clips and Highlights involve different rights than live streams. We are creating additional promotional and discovery opportunities to extend the reach and impact of DJ content.

It'll depend a lot on the deals being struck, I can only speculate on the structure. The weird rules stem from the US copyright laws, and are therefore are impossible for a company like ours to get changed. We benefit from lower rates because of this and can make a service which will survive long term, so its a tradeoff we believe is worth it. I would stipulate that by going outside of those rules, they will have to pay a larger chunk of revenue to the labels, and it'll increase the ad load and cut the revenue passed to DJ's. Ultimately we decided that wasn't the approach we wanted to take, and the trade off was a good one, we'll find out with time which way they went.

The structure smells very much like the YouTube deal major labels made when they’d had enough of PROs not negotiating high enough license rates for them.

Which, as an ex-PRO employee, makes me a bit sad to see.

What is PRO ?

One of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_rights_organisatio...

“Performing Rights Organization” - so in the USA, ASCAP, BMI, SESAC. They offer what’s known as “collective licensing” for music rights - essentially an aggregation of a bunch of copyright owners, so that someone who wants to use music can negotiate with the PRO and get access to all its members rights rather than having to go and negotiate with thousands of individual music publishers, songwriters, etc.

Switched over to you for events that I run years ago after dealing with the nightmare of twitch and couldn't be happier. Y'all have a good product. Much prefer working with you to the likes of Twitch, anyway.

Thank you, massively appreciate it :) Any feedback just hit up support@mixcloud.com and they'll pass it all on to the right folk!

What is the maximum bit rate for mixcloud mixes? The audio quality of anything I upload sounds terribly degraded especially when I share it with someone who is not signed in

Depends on if you are on free or Pro account as the uploader, if you are on Pro we up the bitrate substantially. Beyond this, it also depends on the device the user is listening on, we'll switch over to Opus when possible, which makes a big difference. If you want to max out the quality I would recommend you get Pro and ensure you listen on Chrome (or mobile apps). We'll do up to 320k on aac and 192k on opus. On Live we do something similar and last time I checked we did substantially higher rates than twitch on audio, but lower bitrates on the video.

I'm curious if Twitch explored a partnership with you all at Mixcloud, given you had the deals and infra all built out. In hindsight that would've been a much more efficient process For Twitch, but as a former employee I also understand Twitch is averse to integrations with third-party companies that create dependencies on their ability to control their own destiny.

We've talked to twitch on and off over the years, but nothing specific to this. Music licensing data pipelines are a massively complex topic and very hard to get right. Its one of those areas you can only appreciate having done it. It looks trivial from the outside, my guess is they will be starting that work now, and in about 6-12 months time the complex reality of it will start to set in. Ironically the hardest part isn't even figuring out the track, its figuring out which major label owns the rights for it, in the territory it was streamed, on the day it was streamed. This is even more complex on the publishing side, where you can have multiple writers.

Hey Mat, I've been working on a music platform called dns.xyz. would love to know if we could partner to let people upload and sell dj sets, and rev share with you for being in the clear wrt rights. I'm @dnsceo

I love it, but that name…

Selling is a whole other set of issues and one we could likely solve, but not one we’ve worked through.

Selling is something we do well. We're very badmcamp-y. Lmk if you wanna chat, shokunin at dns.xyz

Twitch has lot more content creators who aren’t streaming music so getting a deal done immediately wasn’t their #1 priority.

100% its way less than 1% of their streams, the CEO said as much recently. However that doesn't mean that the music labels are ok with copyright infringement being on the platform. I guess this is the real question, they clearly had to do a deal or shut it DJ's on the service. They chose to do the deals, so will they now lean into it as its an active area for investment, or was it a necessity to avoid a lawsuit etc. Time will tell, and its great to see them addressing this problem and the playing field being levelled for everyone else we was already paying for rights.

Not sure what Mixcloud is, just seeing this for the first time, are you a Twitch like streaming service?

We’re an online platform dedicated to DJs, licensed with free and paid tiers. We mainly do ondemand streaming but added live in 2020.

Interesting! Never heard of Mixcloud before. Thank you. Personally I like the model where the you pay an X amount per month for your licensing versus the “we take whatever we feel like after the fact” that seems to be Twitch model. I stream relatively small music producers and why should I pay for licensing something from a big artist?

I know this is a complicated subject but thats how it feels on my end.

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