Apple Music has created a process to rightfully compensate DJs for their music, Billboard first reported on Thursday.
In a first for streaming platforms, the company’s new process employs the music recognition tool Shazam, which it acquired in 2018, to identify songs utilized in a DJ mix. From there, the app can pay the rights holders of the song, as well as the DJ and mix supplier.
Oliver Schusser, Vice President of Apple Music and Beats, told the publication that Shazam is capable of identifying songs with a “very, very high degree of success.”
“For a lot of dance music and DJs who make music, the music never really found it to streaming services because there just wasn’t a great process for how labels could clear the music that’s in a DJ mix, because the labels or the distributors didn’t know what was in the mix,” he continued.
DJ mixes have traditionally been obsolete on subscription-based streaming platforms due to copyright issues. It also isn’t unusual for a mix to contain a dozen or so songs, making the task of gaining rights and paying publishers a difficult one, if not virtually impossible. In 2016, however, Apple Music launched a partnership with an audio distribution program used by DJs called Dubset, which allowed the company to begin analyzing the songs incorporated in the remixes and DJ mixes.
It seems that its new usage of Shazam serves to broaden this venture through the advancement of Apple Music’s infrastructure. With the new process, the company will pay royalties to DJs and mix suppliers on a quarterly basis from a special pool of funds.
Billboard wrote that since introducing the process, Apple Music boasts “around 1,200 mixes currently available, which have received over 300 million streams to date.”
In other music news, check out the BET Awards nominations for 2021.
