knaught

Interesting, would you mind sharing the album? There might be some weirdness with album searching with our latest updates.

We're back now, give it a whirl!

Apologies for the delay, we're back now!

Right? They have the real numbers, they just purposefully obfuscate it.

Spotify is throttling us very hard right now. Check back tomorrow, you should most definitely look that artist up.

I apologize for jumping to that so quickly. I respect your response, and you're correct. There is a lot of nuance to this. It's a best estimate because we don't have all of the information, how much is on Spotify vs other platforms, US plays vs non-US plays.

All that being said, the low-end of the estimate is VERY real, because we sum up an actual number provided by The MLC. For their unmatched data, they provide a range of one dollar sign ($) $0.01 - $0.99, ($$) $1.00 - $10.00, ($$$) $10.01 - $50.00, ($$$$) $50.01 - $250, and ($$$$$) $250.01 and above. Those exact figures get worked into the estimate, and are real hard baselines that we use for the estimate. There is no inflation from us on those figures. When a track has an unbounded (five dollar sign), we then use Spotify counts to estimate where in the range it falls.

I appreciate the thoughtful conversation.

Music is broken down into two copyrights: Masters and Publishing.

Masters is the recording themselves, made by recording artists, distributed by record labels and distributors (DistoKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, etc.)

Publishing is the "work" or the song... made by songwriters, and royalties are processed by Music Publishers and PROs (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC).

A good way to wrap your head around it is... I can record a cover of Katy Perry's Firework... I can distribute that master (and make money) to DSPs like Spotify etc... but I do not own the "song" Firework.

The Mechanical Licensing Collective (the MLC) is the body that governs US digital streaming mechanical royalties, which is a right on the publishing side.

We just added more capacity, and are adding even more here in a bit.

Appreciate it, we blew through 250K tracks in an hour, the HN hug is real. We have added more capacity.

Thanks for letting me know, I'm checking the logs now.

When the Music Modernization Act passed in 2018... all US digital streaming mechanical royalties we're just held until the MLC was operational in 2021. So this is money owed from 2018 through 2026, it adds up.

I bet you're a blast at parties. Everything about this is publicly verifiable.

Excellent point, I'll fix that.

Amazing! The only stream count we can find that is publicly available is Spotify, so we use it as a reference point in our calculation, and it's why we give a range. If they have heavy plays on a different streaming platform like Apple, we don't have a good way of finding that number.

The estimate range is our best guess for money specifically in the MLC, which is for US digital streaming mechanicals for all DSPs (Spotify, Apple, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon, etc.)

I agree with you that pro-rata streaming royalties are not ideal. DSPs like Deezer do have 'artist centric' royalty systems, which I think are great.

That being said, the MLC has been holding this money for 6 years, and by law (The Music Modernization Act 2018), they can't hold it forever, so they have to disperse it somehow. So the best thing for artists to do here is go register their songs so they get their money.

The code behind this is a whole AWS stack built as part of our larger infrastructure. It's not just a simple script, it's a full data pipeline. The MLC data is ~400GB of raw TSV data dropped on an FTP server every week, which we then process, index, make available internally for our tools. The Blackbox site is a frontend that leverages this infrastructure.

That being said, everything we use here, the MLC Bulk Data feed and the Spotify API are publicly available.

https://www.themlc.com/bulk-database-feed ($100 sign up fee and $25/mo)

We currently have a prototype of Loom running in HTML5 via WebGL and emscripten. We also have a much earlier version of Loom running under Flash Player using FlasCC. We could also potentially target NaCL in Chrome.

Each option has its positives and negatives.

With Adobe dropping the 'Flash Tax', it makes targeting Flash a much more desirable option, however there is a ton of merit to having things run in HTML5 (either WebGL or Canvas).

The long story short is, browser support is on the roadmap, but which path to take is unclear. So we're open to input from the community on this.

Cheers, Nate

The Engine Company is a small company (5 of us) based in Eugene, OR. We are self funded so we don't have any VCs that we have to please.

We feel our licensing terms are very fair: http://theengine.co/license

Haha.. good catch. Already have submitted a pull request with the fix for it.

Cheers!