Amidst news of unreleased music impersonators, partnership ensures protection of artist’s original content on music streaming services and social platforms
June 12, 2019 (LOS GATOS, Calif.) – Audible Magic, music’s industry standard for content identification linked to digital rights, announced a strategic partnership with leading music distribution service DistroKid to combat the rising trend of “fraudulent artists” stealing and uploading unreleased original content. The move will help protect artists worldwide by verifying the authenticity of both tracks and artists that the music originated from before music is distributed to streaming services.
When an artist requests to upload song files via DistroKid, Audible Magic’s RightsRx™ solution checks its comprehensive registry of over 20 million media assets to ensure the artist-uploaded content is conflict-free before distribution to streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and more. In its ongoing effort to promote artist authenticity, DistroKid will also be the first distributor to implement Audible Magic’s cutting-edge detection tool, Broad Spectrum. An extension of Audible Magic’s content identification service, Broad Spectrum can uniquely identify extreme manipulations of rate, pitch and tempo using only small clips of audio.
“In this day and age, it’s imperative for artists everywhere to register their content to not only claim ownership, avoiding impersonators, but to also ensure that they are being accurately credited and compensated,” said Vance Ikezoye, president and chief executive officer at Audible Magic. “DistroKid has a positive reputation amongst artists for making distribution fast, reliable and easy. This partnership signals our joint commitment to an industry working towards clean data, proper rights management and improved artist attribution.”
Additionally, in response to the increase in fake artists attempts to steal and distribute unreleased music, DistroKid is announcing a new and free service called DistroLock (https://distrolock.com). Launching today, DistroLock allows any musical artist to upload and register their unreleased audio files through the platform, which will encode a unique audio fingerprint and add it to Audible Magic’s registry. DistroKid developed this platform with Audible Magic’s insights as an industry-wide solution that will request to block the unauthorized release of an artist’s music (or “leaks”) from appearing on streaming services and social platforms. DistroLock also includes an API that will allow other distributors and streaming services to easily validate the authenticity of music uploaded to their respective platforms before making it available to the public.
“Until now, there hasn’t been a definitive way for artists to say, ‘this is my audio, don’t let anyone else release it,’” said DistroKid chief executive officer Philip Kaplan. “With the launch of DistroLock, any musician can preemptively register their
audio to help ensure that unauthorized releases don’t see the light of day. This partnership with Audible Magic and the creation of DistroLock will help artists by ensuring that their original content is uploaded and distributed fairly, with accuracy and speed.”
About DistroKid
DistroKid was founded in 2013 to provide musicians, managers, and record labels with online tools and services that are innovative, easy-to-use, and affordable. More than 400,000 artists rely on DistroKid and include hobbyists, up-and-coming musicians, top YouTubers, and international superstars like 21 Savage, Ludacris, Will Smith, Tom Waits, and more. DistroKid’s expanding array of services include music distribution, monetization, metadata customization, storage, and promotion. DistroKid’s small staff, coupled with largely automated backend, has enabled DistroKid to process more than 7 million songs—while simultaneously providing fast, personal & friendly customer service to artists of every size.
About Audible Magic
For more than 20 years, Audible Magic has continuously created innovative, industry-leading solutions that protect digital media and accelerate its monetization. An Emmy-winning pioneer in proprietary content recognition solutions, its core identification platform performs billions of nearly instantaneous content match transactions every month. Audible Magic has become the trusted intermediary between the majority of rightsholders (music labels, distributors, publishers and collectives) and digital service providers (such as Facebook, SoundCloud, Dailymotion, and Twitch), navigating the complexities of content identification, ownership determination, and rights administration.