Thursday, April 5, 2007

MySpace Makes Nice With Music Widget-Makers


Eliot Van Buskirk 04.05.07

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MySpace is asking developers to register their music catalogs with Audible Magic, the company that provides copyright authorization (aka fingerprints) songs for MySpace, GoFish, Microsoft and MTVN. By doing this, MySpace execs say they're hoping to protect their company from copyright-infringement lawsuits.
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"By using a third-party provider's database," explains Kevorkian, "MySpace can save the time and resources that would otherwise be required to build one from scratch. Monitoring posted content with a database helps to keep MySpace in the good graces of content providers and head off copyright infringement lawsuits in the process."
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But registering a music catalog with Audible Magic isn't a simple matter: Only an artist, label or other copyright holder can submit a song for addition to Audible Magic's database of verified songs.
Vance Ikezoye, president and CEO of Audible Magic, says, "There's a very good chance that the content in question (from smaller artists on Indie911) is not registered in the database. The indie artist can contact Audible Magic through the website to register their content and establish their business rules (how they want their content treated)."

Audible Magic claims to have more than 6 million sound recordings in its database. By comparison, Apple's iTunes store contains about 3.5 million songs.

Currently, Audio Magic is the only company MySpace endorses for cataloging music. This makes Audible Magic's rapidly expanding song database increasingly valuable, as MySpace and other big online social networks rely on it (as well as databases from Advestigo, Auditude, Gracenote, Relatable and Vobile) for protection from charges of copyright infringement.

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