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Billboard:

Dubset Media Holdings has announced a partnership that will allow Apple Music to stream remixes and DJ mixes that had previous been absent from licensed services due to copyright issues. Thousands upon thousands cool mash-ups and hour-long mixes have effectively been pulled out of the underground and placed onto the world’s second-largest music subscription service.

And:

Licensing remixes and DJ mixes, both based on original recordings, is incredibly complex. A single mix could have upward of 600 different rights holders. According to CEO Stephen White, a typical mix has 25 to 30 songs that require payments to 25 to 30 record labels and anywhere from two to ten publishers for each track. The licensing has been done in-house at Dubset. Thus far the company has agreements with over 14,000 labels and publishers.

MixBank matches the recordings used in the remix or DJ mix against a database of three-second audio snippets from Gracenote, where White was CEO prior to joining Dubset. He says fingerprinting is a “brute force” tool that can provide MixBank with up to 100 possible matches for each three-second match. The more difficult final step is performed by MixScan, proprietary piece of software that pulls apart the mixes and figures out what’s inside. MixScan identifies the recording and its stop and start point in each mix, then finds the corresponding rights holders in a dataset together through multiple partnerships and direct feeds.

As a fan of mashups (songs created by mashing together snippets of songs to a guiding beat), I think this is great news. Since they can’t be sold legally because they are too difficult to properly license, mashups are strictly an underground commodity. It’d be lovely to see Apple Music add mashup playlists, a mashup radio station.

[H/T en-REE-ko]