Spotify and Apple Music Get First Unofficial Remixes Thanks to New Deal

Spotify has reportedly been in talks to acquire SoundCloud, the free and open music sharing platform, but, with the release of a new DJ Jazzy Jeff song, of all things, that deal may no longer be necessary.

Earlier this year, both Spotify and Apple Music struck deals with Dubset, a streaming service for DJs and remixers, to bring unofficial remixes of songs to their streaming services through its MixBank service. What MixBank does differently than other service, like, say, Soundcloud, is that it scans the uploaded remixed songs, matches the samples to their official songs, and then distributes the royalties based on who owns the original rights to those songs.

The first song to pass through MixBank and be added to Spotify and Apple Music is DJ Jazzy Jeff’s unofficial remix of Anderson .Paak’s “Room in Here.”

Dubset CEO Stephen White told TechCrunch:

Content owners have been very supportive. The publishing and label deals we have under license provides a large catalog to work with, [allowing] some of the content that until now has only been on YouTube and SoundCloud to come to these great paid services where content owners will get paid!

The service doesn’t help artists who are producing entirely original work get their music on the streaming services, a blind spot that SoundCloud does cater to. So it’s not as open a platform as SoundCloud is, but it may be Spotify and Apple’s best option when it comes to managing copyright and royalties for unofficially remixed music.