My son, age 14, is a keen electronic music composer/producer. He's pretty good. He wants to upload his music to platforms like Spotify. He's been told that he has to sign a 'Digital Exploitation Agreement' to a company called Digital Rights Management New Zealand Limited. He needs a parent/guardian to sign it on his behalf. I *revile* the concept of DRM (it's rightly 'Digital *Restrictions* Management' and it's a deeply flawed concept at a fundamental level) & am outspoken against it. 1/2
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I want to encourage his music, but the indemnification, warranties, and the simple fact that the agreement is chock full of meaningless terms like 'intellectual property rights' makes me very angry and not even slightly interested in signing away his rights and taking on responsibilities for his future actions. Am I a bad parent? 2/2
@lightweight Hi Dave, there are heaps more aggregators he can use to get his music on to streaming platforms. Have a check of Tunecore, or encourage him to look at platforms like Bandcamp. He should try and keep as many rights as possible for as long as he can. All he needs is distribution, not representation.
@downbeatdan thanks 馃檭 - yeah, I'm a big fan of Bandcamp. I reckon that should be his distribution. Actually, that's quite useful. Thanks.
I made an app that fully maintains my own static music site here: https://mantisaudiogram.music
I was planning to release it openly once I get a bit further with federation ... until we find a way to store music more reliably in something like BitTorrent forever, my dream would be every artist paying only for a minimal basic web server and then registering it to be part of a global federated system for discovery, playlists etc.
@lightweight @downbeatdan We used an Australian aggregator for our last few releases: https://imusician.pro/en/
When adding music I have to carefully navigate through all their popups and prompts to ensure we're making a single payment for perpetual release, and not entering into a subscription which seems to be their preferred model (and is the reason we left Distrokid). However, at least iMusician does have that single forever payment option, which many aggregators don't. Plus they're Australian, which is better than giving more money to a US-based multinational.
@lightweight @downbeatdan Maybe you could setup a Faircamp website for him? https://faircamp.org/
