Why I Joined AdRev, And Why You Should Too.

Envato Authors Audio Authors
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ok, to be clear, i am using adrev, and in most instances we agree.

  1. do we agree that protecting your work is a good thing? YES
  2. do we agree that making sure some other jerk doesn’t claim your work is a good thing? YES
  3. do we agree that being compensated for illegal use of your work alleviates some of the sting? YES
  4. do we agree that not taking action to protect your work is not prudent? YES
  5. do we agree that asking the client to show a receipt isn’t an overreach? YES…BUT…

…here’s where i think i (and others like @tunesurfers) take issue. to label anyone who gets irritated at adrev and the way they do business as someone from the “entitlement generation” is not entirely fair in my opinion.

i’m gonna use this purely as an illustration. i fully acknowledge this isn’t an accurate comparison when it comes to licensing/ownership but i can’t off the top of my head think of a real world example that is exactly analogous - i am just trying to illustrate the feeling i imagine i would have if i were a client. when i go to costco (which for those countries that don’t have one, is a bulk retailer), after you are done checking out and paying for your goods, there is a costco employee waiting at the door who asks for your receipt. you show your receipt, they check the contents of your cart and you are on your merry way. if this is how the process worked, then i don’t think you would ever find any customer complaining, and if you did, then they are truly an entitled a-hole. the problem is, adrev doesn’t exist just to stop and question those people that filled their cart and snuck out the back door. now, every time someone pulls out the apples they bought at costco, adrev magically appears in their house and demands to see their receipt. and even if this doesn’t strike you as annoying, the real problem i have is while they are looking for said receipt, adrev is busily going through their couch cushions grabbing loose change. clients don’t have the opportunity to show that receipt until adrev is already there.

will clients’ perception change? probably. will @TimMcMorris and @pinkzebra joining up hasten this change? probably. do i think tim and pz and everyone else here should be compensated for illegal use of their work? yes! but do i find it troubling that now that they are aligned with adrev, adrev will show up in hundreds of thousands of people’s homes asking for a receipt and happily grab a handful of change as they are being ushered out? i do find that annoying. and although they are providing me the service of protecting my work and giving me a cut of that money, i can’t help but feel a little sheepish unleashing this annoyance into everyone’s homes. if we are talking about the client who occasionally purchases a license, maybe it’s no big deal. but imagine you are a big company that shops at costco and you fill your cart with a hundred items. now, instead of showing your receipt once after checkout, every time you pull out a new item, vinny the adrev collector (he demanded a name at this point) shows up at your house and you have to produce that piece of paper to get him to leave. i could imagine wanting to shop elsewhere to stop finding vinny on my couch and my change dish cleared out.

i’m not naive - i know the internet can’t possibly be policed or controlled as easily as a costco, and yes, perhaps most of the usages online are illegal as @E_soundtrax has found in his case, so maybe the bulk of homes adrev shows up in are criminals’ homes. but to not provide legitimate customers a way to avoid this is unfortunate. and of course, @E_soundtrax, we are all just speculating, but who knows? maybe without adrev your track would have been licensed thousands of times. we can all postulate how we think adrev affects or doesn’t affect our sales, but we’ll never really know.

@SteelSound also had an interesting conspiracy theory that tim refuted. but how far-fetched an idea is it? how easily could they have gotten someone to do it? if adrev worked the way i wished it did, vinny would show up for work in a sentra. by getting tim and pz onboard, he’ll soon be driving a lamborghini and wearing gold chains.

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It’s interesting how this topic brings out all sorts of emotions and conspiracy theories. Probably because of how small we all feel in the big scheme of things, this all in one way or another affecting our musical endeavours, the great uncertainty of things, and I guess it’s only human to paint the world in our own colours. I’m glad this forum exists, it’s good to speak out and learn I’m not totally alone in my dark studio. I guess this “community” thing is creeping up on me a bit, in a good way :sunglasses:

Now I want to put some oil on the water if I may, some of the things said here kind of stirs me up and doesn’t really harmonise with my current world view.

One, @Alumo hinted AJ may have offset search result ranking on the base of being listed with ContentID. Well, firstly to me that doesn’t sound like something AJ would do at all, secondly I have a quite solid case that none of my own tracks were “pushed down” after registering with AdRev. I track my top search result listings regularly and whatever happened to my items seems to have happened for legit reasons (e.g. the new algorithms and facet search being implemented earlier this year). I say this because I want to believe AJ is really on our side in this, they want us to collectively succeed and allowing us to use AdRev while informing buyers is a clean compromise IMO. That being said, I can’t guarantee the AdRev listing doesn’t have a negative impact on AJ sales because of buyer behaviour, that’s something we all need to figure out by trial and error. Unless of course AJ at some point will publish some stats for us to ponder.

Two, @SteelSound and @StudioMonkey illustrates how AdRev possibly manipulates their own system for monetary gain, while mostly ignoring rights holders and playing a short-term bluff game. Well, I can’t vouch for AdRev (or Youtube) and I can’t say anything of their ultimate intentions, but it just seems more likely than not that they’re actually just trying to run a decent business and whatever indications of error or conspiracy we may come across is more easily explained with plain growth pains and/or third party influences. For every up and running company on the web there is a thousand or more shady people trying to break the system, fake identities, uploading other people’s material and whatnot. That’s what we DO know, the world is full of criminal activity, I say let’s stick to that insight for now and not jump the gun on the ones actually trying to pay us.

Three, and this goes for a lot of authors here (and probably in other marketplaces as well), a drop in sales is always a cause for concern and it probably feels good to have someone or something to blame. The “AJ Sales monitor” thread is choke full of conspiracy theories and desperate attempts to discern patterns of all sorts. I won’t go into full debunking mode now as it would take me all night but let’s face it - ALL sales drop eventually, it’s inevitable and it follows mainly from the insane influx of new items. There is only one safe remedy inside these walls (except for AJ raising the bar on approvals, sigh) and that is uploading more and better music. Not more and better than what we did last week, or last day, but more and better than everybody, all the time. Complaining about that a track uploaded a few years ago “suddenly” stopped selling big numbers, that’s just a bit out-worldly to someone like me who came a bit late into the game and always had these “dinosaur items” trumping me in the search pages and top-selling charts. In my book those who had a top seller for more than a few months should be grateful and proud to have achieved that level of success in this crowded market. A “drop in sales” cry for a single item sounds to me much like a “drop in the ocean” if you get the analogy. All sales drop, anything else is an anomaly.

And to get back to the topic… In the end I think it boils down to our personalities and ideals, what kind of attitude we have to changes in the market, new players like AdRev etc. Some of us are more or less careful, some are more or less prone to find someone to blame, and so on. I am obviously the kind that is willing to take risks with my own work, and if worst case scenario is that someone else is making money off of my music, that’s kind of fine with me. New day, new track. I will however always consider alternative strategies and partners based on the bottom line. That’s the thing, there’s no bottom line if there’s no turnover in the first place.

I’m not saying all is sunshine. I totally agree ContentID, Youtube, AJ, PRO societies - all these ventures that make up our world - have lessons to learn and needs to grow into efficiency over time. I just want to be there when it happens :sunglasses:

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123

Not sure I get this argument - taking money ‘out’ of their pockets? That money doesn’t exist until they want to monetise their video (and not all video makers do). AdRev has been around for long enough that anyone monetising their videos on a regular basis will be quick to clear a claim as they’ll come across AdRev-registered music at some point.

I’d prefer to see stats on that rather than make the assumption that everyone is innocent. I’ve seen instances of people recording my music on their phones then putting that recording back into their videos as well as a huge number of downloads of tracks of mine on SoundCloud with only a few licenses having been purchased.

There are also plenty of cases where watermarked previews have been used in videos - yes, they might have bought a license to just use a watermarked track, but it’s happened too many times for me to believe that now. I’ve also seen a bunch of services that allow people to ‘splice’ out watermarks and people ripping directly from other peoples’ videos (you can hear the audio edits made from an original video if you’re wondering how), so not all watermark-free videos are legitimate either. It really is the Wild West out there.

The entitlement attitude is one of feeling you should have everything for free while this is first and foremost about copyright protection and then recuperating lost revenue. Very different to just expecting handouts.

We all agree that a system that just third-party matches any videos containing our music could be improved, but I believe it’s more about facilitating the process of clearing claims rather than reverting to the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ approach, don’t you agree? Otherwise, as @Alumo said, what is the point in buying a license? It’s not exactly a pretty thing to just pin up on the wall…

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Not sure I get this argument - taking money ‘out’ of their pockets? That
money doesn’t exist until they want to monetise their video (and not
all video makers do).

But that money do exist when they want to monetise their video and many video makers do. Are we going to debate whether the glass is empty or full when in reality it is half full?

I can give you a ton of examples how legitimate customers might fail to clear the claims at least for a while. Do you collect their ad revenue for the timeframe they didn’t clear the claim or not? Do you refund it when they clear the claim?

If you guys don’t like the words punishment or taking money out of their pockets please provide a better word for this situation as I’m not a native English speaker. Should I say confiscating?

Don’t get this as a personal attack for Adrev registered authors who’s only aim is to protect their work. I’m criticizing the flaws in Adrev’s business model for doing that.

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Just to be clear here. There are 7406/2 = 3703 videos using your music, not 7406. Each video is counted twice. Still, more than 2363 but let’s not blow it out of proportion. :smile:

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Here’s my personal opinion, personal opinions not being able to be disputed… criticized maybe, but not disputed.

AdRev is used by major publishers that own the top production music library distributors such as Universal (owns Killertracks and FirstComm), Warner/Chappell and BMG, as well as large independent production music libraries like Extreme Music and MegaTrax, and trailer/production music companies like Immediate Music and Position Music. That tells me, personally, being enrolled in Content ID is a good business practice that is becoming more or less a standard in the industry we’re all part of.

Whether or not you think AdRev is good for this level of the market due to client unfamiliarity is up to you, but I think some of the incomes that I’ve seen being earned from AdRev by people selling here at AJ justify the use even if it’s not that high. It’s better than nothing. There will always be people who complain about anything, so some buyers not familiar with Content ID will not understand if you don’t tell them in advance. But if you tell them in advance, there should be no issues.

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And as all AJ tracks are now identified as Content ID-registered or not (and there is an FAQ on the subject linked to from each item page), most people shouldn’t have any issues understanding what it’s all about.

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not to be a downer, but the fact that major companies are involved certainly doesn’t fill me with a warm and fuzzy feeling. perhaps you’ve heard of all the backroom deals that the majors cut with all the streaming services, effectively screwing all writers and composers out of the lion share of royalties?..what can i say, i’m a suspicious old industry hand.

but again, like i said above, if the choice is employing vinny the adrev collector and getting some form of protection or having your intellectual property swinging in the wind, i’m (begrudgingly) letting vinny do his thing.

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The reason that all of these major libraries and record companies use AdRev/content id is that they are exclusive. Simple as that. This conforms with YT content id criteria and they will clear any YT channel etc. Envato on the other hand leave it up to the author to handle everything, AJ more a marketplace than a library in a lot of respects. Comparing the two is not valid, completely different models.
Also as I have stated many times before, Youtubes content id EULA insists that the tracks be exclusive to one entity, that obviously being the case with major libraries etc. If your tracks here are non exclusive and you have them with other libraries, that clearly does not conform with Youtubes terms, no matter what AdRev tell you.

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“Exclusive to one entity” in this case, means that there is only one rights-holder to the track. It has nothing to do with whether the track is sold in one or several marketplaces (why would this matter anyway?)

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Content ID will match a user’s reference content against every upload to YouTube. Therefore, applicants must have the exclusive rights to the material that is evaluated. Common examples of items that may not be exclusive to individuals include:

mashups, “best of”s, compilations, and remixes of other works
video gameplay, software visuals, trailers
unlicensed music and video
music or video that was licensed, but without exclusivity
recordings of performances (including concerts, events, speeches, shows)
If accepted to use the Content ID tools, applicants will be required to complete an agreement explicitly stating that only content with exclusive rights can be used as references. Additionally, accepted applicants will need to provide the geographic locations of exclusive ownership, if not worldwide.

Content ID applicants may be rejected if other tools better suit their needs. These other tools include the copyright notification web form and the Content Verification Program (CVP). More information about content management options may be found here.

From YT application criteria,

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The idea here is that the “applicants must have the exclusive rights to the material”.

The sentence “music or video that was licensed, but without exclusivity” is to be applied to the licensee, not the author.

It means you cannot register a track for which you have a non-exclusive license (ie, there are others using the same music, for which they also have a license), as “Content ID will match a user’s reference content against every upload to YouTube”.

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134

Sorry, I have no idea how you came to that conclusion. It is written in very plain English and explains it simply. It is the TOS for applicants to the system . Nowhere does it mention “licensee” or end users.

applicants must have the exclusive rights. is self explanatory . They then go on to explain what they mean. music or video that was licensed, but without exclusivity.

If your music is in lots of non exclusive libraries you do not hold the streaming rights, by definition you have let xyz library grant them on your behalf. Thats how the licensing business works.

  1. If a library is the applicant then it must have exclusive rights.
  2. If its a individual its very difficult without a third party (this is why Adrev exist). By definition you cannot have exclusive streaming rights if your tracks are in multiple libraries.

Perhaps Alumo could ask Adrev how they circumvent this anomaly. I know numerous non exclusive library owners who have come to this conclusion after dialogue with Youtube.

This has nothing to do with Copyright it has to do with the rights granted to libraries to act on your behalf.

http://musiclibraryreport.com/forums/topic/copyright-violation-adrev-youtube-content-id/page/10/

Follow link to a Library owners perspective “Jay” on the thread as to exclusivity and what it means, and the pitfalls of content id for non excessive catalogues.

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You are wrong Skyline and PurpleFog is right.

“music or video that was licensed, but without exclusivity” means that YOU, the person who registers the track/video cannot have purchased a license for the material, unless it is exclusive. Otherwise it would have said “music or video that HAS BEEN licensed to others, but without exclusivity”.

For example, video can also be fingerprinted.

It is very common to use stock footage but you cannot fingerprint the video if you’ve used non-exclusive stock footage since other videos may use that same clip and get flagged.

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As you said it is written in very plain English and is pretty much self explanatory. I guess we have different interpretations of it.

I was not aware that I had waived my streaming rights to AJ. Will have to look into that.

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You are not waiving but letting AJ grant them as below.

What do the Music Licenses mean by “most web uses”

Most web uses includes general online and streaming-only purposes, such as using the item in an end product uploaded to YouTube/Vimeo, displayed on your website, as part of a browser-based game, etc.

It does not include things like online Broadcast (internet TV, internet radio, etc) or use in “on-demand”, “customize your own product” web applications and services.

Non-Exclusive music is the main problem with CID since there are several companies selling the same music if any one company puts the music into the CID system, then clients of all other companies licensing these songs will experience copyright claims causing problems for all of these libraries. We deal with the licensing of Exclusive and Non-Exclusive music but we have decided not to go near Non-Exclusive CID as it’s literally a mess.

quotes from above link, this is from a well known library owner/publisher not me !!!

I’m sure many composers have their music in CID as well as libraries and have no idea that they are in breach of their agreement with whatever CID company they choose (AdRev, Audiam etc.). Adrev no doubt has an air tight agreement that composers have to sign that is essentially having the composer also agree to YouTube’s terms of service. So if it comes down to a lawsuit over a license or over an ad being placed on a video (doesn’t matter if the license is $25 or $50,000) if for example it is a Corporate Video for Pepsi and an ad is placed on the video for let’s say Coke, there will surely be a lawsuit. So this would first come down on the library that licensed the music, but then it will be made apparent that the CID ad has nothing to do with the library, it was the composer who put the song into CID and is responsible for the offending ad. This would divert the responsibility to the composer since the composer technically didn’t have the right to put this song into CID since they gave up their exclusive streaming rights the second they signed the contract with the library. Also the AdRev contract would be secondary evidence that the composer once again was aware and guaranteed and warranted that the music they entered into CID complies with YouTubes terms (mainly exclusive streaming rights). So getting back to your question, I’m sure YouTube (Google) and AdRev won’t care until there is litigation since they would both be profiting but once there is litigation, that’s when it all comes down to the contract language and what YOU signed. Google and Adrev are more than protected with their legal documentation.

This is information I choose to place my trust in. If anyone here has the sufficient legal/library ownership credentials to oppose what “Jay” says then by all means do so. I would suggest that the majority here are composers, and while we all have opinions on topics, opinions dont protect you when entering into legal agreements.

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Anyone can ask them about this. Just drop them an email at contact@adrev.net and ask them about it yourself. We went over all this last year and I just don’t have the time these days to keep retreading old ground. Sorry about that.

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I just did, as you seem to be always emailing about issues and have a working relationship with them you might get a quicker reply. Sorry about that.

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Hey that’s my line, give it back!

No, I don’t get any preferential treatment from AdRev. I used to have more time on my hands so was in a position to be generally proactive over queries that arose here. These days I’m too tied down and any efforts I do make are generally met with heated resistance and/or little appreciation anyway.

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The link you provide actually disproves your position. The conflict only arises if the library itself is the applicant and the same music is also in other libraries that are trying to apply for CID. That’s what you have to be careful about. As Envato doesn’t register the work here with CID it isn’t a problem. But yes, if you are non exclusive and you have your music in another library that is actively registering their content, and you yourself try to register, too, there will be problems. Exclusivity in this language clearly is talking about the rights holder (who holds the copyright) and not whether or not you are a non-exclusive or exclusive author.

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