In a world where viralization is key, it is absolutely ridiculous that automated systems will harass streamers for streaming a video of a product that has a fully paid licensed tune on it. Streamers will be forced to cripple the audio, lose a ton of views because they’re forced to reupload and, more often than not, get pissed off and abort any attempt of streaming the product alltogether. This will stop viralization on its tracks. And no, preemptively contacting every streamer in the world and giving them a code is not a realistic solution.
This is plain sabotage and turns this whole site pretty much into a death trap for any product with viralization expectations. To add tragedy to the situation, many people won’t even realise this is happening unless a streamer happens to contact them. Many products may have bit the dust because of this without the creators even knowing the reason.
I would recommend everyone to stay away from this site if you expect your product to have any kind of impact.
Nor is it a legal one. One license is good for one end-product, not a bunch of them.
If streamers publish content with copyrighted material, why should they be exempt from licensing the copyrighted material?
It has nothing to do with this site but with how YouTube works, and copyrights in general.
Still inviable.
We have purchased other tunes from many places, but the ones in this group of sites are the only ones who have consistently caused trouble.
This service is cheap…ish, but too risky. It’s better to just pay a musician to make a tune from scratch and own full rights on it, more costly and maybe less flashy tunes, but it’s not worth the headache.
A transfer of rights has a very high cost, if you call on a professional composer he will not transfer his rights unless the sum is very substantial. When you buy a bottle of coca cola, you don’t buy the brand, you don’t get royalties, otherwise the can would be worth millions of dollars.
The shop keeper doesn’t need permission from the guy who designed the logo to display the cans in his store or serve them at his restaurant. That would make selling the product inviable. This is the issue I’m talking about here.
We’ve hired musicians before. Some are unwilling to part with the rights and others are more than okay with it, or at the very least guarantee they will not interfer with people streaming your game. Video games in particular need to have no strings attached because they rely HEAVILY in viralization to be commercially viable. Imagine the chaos if the artists who sell models in an asset store did the same thing. Or the voice actors. Or the writers.
If you have the once in a lifetime strike of luck that a youtuber with ten million followers decides to stream a playthrough of your indie game and then a random musician jumps out of the shadows and demands him a cut of his enormous share because he made a 20 second victory jingle that sounds faintly in the background during a cutscene, then the streamer won’t even think about it. They will delete the video and jump to the next game and the developer will be none the wiser that they have just lost a fortune in sales. If they’re lucky.
Legal or not, this is a very serious issue and it makes the use of this kind of licenses inviable. I certainly know we won’t be using them anymore.
No idea about other fields like movies, but as it is now, in video games it’s definitely a deathtrap.
How do major game releases deal with it?
Your tone let transpire the contempt you have for us music authors and our work. Fair enough. Don’t use music then since you don’t want to deal with it. But again, this is not something related to the Envato ecosystem, but to music in general.
Instead of complaining to us authors about how greedy and selfish we are and how it’s creating a problem for you, maybe you could ask around how game developers deal with this and try to find a solution.
Here is for your information the declaration of dubbing rights from SACEM, the French copyright society to which I am affiliated and the oldest and most powerful in the world (1851). Yes, the dubbings are also subject to copyright.
Mise en page 1 (sacem.fr)