A Lawyer's Vantage on Splice's TOS, Sample Usage & Content ID

Discussion in 'Education' started by eXACT_Beats_, Jul 27, 2024.

  1. eXACT_Beats_

    eXACT_Beats_ Audiosexual

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    I'm ducking forums right now, but I decided to throw this up real quick since anyone working in or around the industry or artists should be aware of this stuff and the mess it's all become these past few years.

    I'd recommend watching the whole video, but a couple notable markers are @9:00 & @14:00 if you can't watch the entire thing.


    (Disclaimer: This is from DJ Pain 1 channel, but that doesn't mean it's a "beatmaking" video; this is potentially informative to anyone who makes any genre of music using sample content from major sites, though specifically (obviously,) Splice users, with TuneCore being brought up briefly, and many other sites alluded to who follow similar TOS patterns Incidentally, most of DJ Pain 1's videos are industry-related and are informative overviews of the current state of music as a business and how it pertains to artists.)


    My Inconsequential Splice Experience:
    I've never used Splice because every time I've approached them initially with questions about subscriptions and even *basic terms and usage that aren't specifically and clearly stated, they're either condescending as all fuck (despite my phrasing, which would lead most to assume that my IQ is higher than my shoe size,) or they give me the straw man routine, i.e.:
    Me: "So I don't need to advise secondary clearance if I sell a composition with this as an element, correct?"
    Splice: "Many artists use our samples everyday and have sold beats to multi-platinum artists."
    Me: "... beats or not, once cleared, will the recipient of the final composition be legally..."
    Splice: "If you sign up immediately you get fourteen gigaduckets of Splice moneys!! Eh?! Eh?!"
    At one point, an entire email response tried to just bypass all my questions by citing how many samples are purchased by artists every month and the plethora of genres they accomodated.
    Ridiculous-ness-icity at its finest. If I ask if your restaurant's salad contains any personal allergens, I don't need you to inform me of how many people order it every day and don't suffer any ill effects.
    And, honestly, I barely have a horse in this race since I usually don't use samples, and if I do I use them as song-starters, so it's not *nearly as frustrating to me as it would be to many, I just miss out on some drums packs, but it's still plenty disconcerting.
     
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