Getting Started

YouTube Distribution(Content ID):
YouTube is probably the biggest and most popular online streaming platform in the world. It has more content than the iTunes store and more users than all well-known streaming services combined. Google-owned YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, view and share (music) videos. Most of the content on YouTube is user-generated, but professional media companies and content owners also offer their content on the site. By delivering your content to YouTube labels are able to monetize each and every view of a video on YouTube containing their content or a snippet thereof. Labels delivering content directly to YouTube will have access to YouTube’s Content Management System (“CMS”),allowing them to manage their content on YouTube.All content delivered to YouTube will automatically become part of YouTube’s audio-fingerprinting system/ CMS system, which automatically detects and provides the option to monetize videos that contain the label’s content. Further to this, aggregation clients are also able to have their channels added to our YouTube Multi Channel Network (MCN), so videos are able to be claimed as music videos, which are monetized at a slightly higher rate than standard UGC.

YouTube Music/Premium Distribution
YouTube Music/Premium replaces YouTube’s previously released subscription service ‘YouTube Red’ which was only released in the US, Mexico,Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.After rebranding the service to YouTube Music,YouTube Music was also made live in Argentina,Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay as well as the territories Red was initially launched in. The service now comes at two price points 9.99 USD/GBP/EUR a month for YouTube Music and 11.99 USD/GBP/EUR a month for YouTube Premium.

– YouTube Music subscribers will have on-demand access to ad-free music, offline playback, instant switching between audio-visual and audio-only streaming and the ability to listen to music from the YouTube app in the background on mobile devices.YouTube Music does not include access to YouTube’s original content, this is only available to YouTube Premium subscribers.

-YouTube Premium subscribers get access to all features YouTube Music subscribers are entitled to as well as ad-free, offline playback and the ability to play videos from the YouTube app in the background on mobile devices of ALL video types. Premium members also get access to YouTube’s original video content.

When delivering to the YouTube Music feed,YouTube generates an automatically created “art track” which is a packshot video featuring the audio that was delivered alongside the artwork.
Distribution to YouTube is available on VerseOne Distribution.

Soundcloud transformed into music distribution platform for up and coming musicians and creators to share their music much later but it was initially launched in 2008 as a platform to allow musicians to collaborate by facilitating the sharing and discussion of recordings. Since its launch, the platform has gained a global following and has become one of the most well known music sharing and streaming platforms hosting music from both indie and signed artists, as well as podcasts and other forms of audio.The open user-generated content platform model allows users to upload their tracks for streaming and/or downloading and to connect directly with fans globally.

In 2016 Soundcloud launched its first subscription streaming tiers, SoundCloud Go and SoundCloud Go+, and has rolled out the services to select countries.

175m users now use SoundCloud worldwide, of which 76m are monthly active users. The service currently features over 180m tracks, which makes SoundCloud one of the streaming services with the largest and most diverse catalogues. SoundCloud Go and SoundCloud Go+ currently have little over 500,000 paying subscribers.The service is particularly popular amongst creators, and has even spurred its own music genre being “mumble rap” also called “SoundCloud rap”

The SoundCloud service currently consists of three type of services:
– a free-to-the-user ad-funded on demand streaming service that provides access to all user uploaded material available on SoundCloud. SoundCloud’s freemium service is available worldwide, but is only monetized in a few territories being (TBC)

– SoundCloud Pro: an on-demand subscription streaming service that provides access to all user uploaded material available on SoundCloud without advertisements and including the ability to listen offline though caching. Subscriptions are available at $/€/GBP 5,99 per month. SoundCloud Go is currently available in the AU, NZ, US, UK, IE, FR, CA, DE, NL, BE, IT, PT, ES, CH.

– SoundCloud Pro+: an on-demand subscription streaming services that provides access to all user uploaded material available on SoundCloud as well as a licensed catalog of over 30m recordings, without advertisements and including the ability to listen offline through caching and access pre-programmed playlists. Subscriptions are available at $/€/GBP 9,99 per month. SoundCloud Go+ is currently available in the AU, NZ, US, UK, IE, FR, CA, DE, NL, BE, IT, PT, ES, CH.
Distribution to Soundcloud is available on VerseOne Distribution.

TikTok is an immensely popular mobile short user-generated video creation and viewing application. It enables its users to create short videos that include clips of a sound recording (of less than thirty seconds), which videos can be shared and streamed by others.

TikTok originates from China, where it was launched as ‘Douyin’ in late 2016.The service was rolled out globally as ‘TikTok’ in the following year. In November 2017 ByteDance acquired the popular Musical.ly app, a short video-based social media service similar to TikTok, for $800m to $1 billion USD in a bid to gain more traction outside of China.TikTok was eventually merged with the Musical.ly app in August 2018.

The platform has already been responsible for the launch of new artists careers, of which the story of Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ is most notable.

TikTok uses sound recordings in various ways:
– Audio Library;TikTok provides an audio library from which TikTok users can select pre-cleared sound recordings to use in their TikTok videos.The audio library allows users to listen to 30 second clips of sound recordings only.
– Usage in TikTok Videos by creators:TikTok users can use sound recordings in their TikTok videos. Users can either upload or record the songs themselves or pick them from TikTok’s audio library. Users can make available the TikTok videos they created to others for playback, either on TikTok itself or through email or social platforms.TikTok videos are not longer than 30 seconds and may not contain more than one sound recording with a duration longer than 30 seconds.
– Streaming as part of TikTok video: TikTok users can stream all TikTok videos uploaded to the platform by others, including any recordings used in those videos. Distribution to TikTok is available on VerseOne Distribution.

Founded in 2004 as the principal source of music for DJs, Beatport, a division of LiveStyle, is today the worldwide home of electronic music for DJs, producers, and their fans.The Beatport Store is a download store and offers music in premium digital formats and provides unique music discovery tools created for and by DJs. Each week, Beatport’s music collection is refreshed with hundreds of exclusive tracks by the world’s top electronic music artists. Beatport has offices in Denver, Los Angeles and Berlin.

ALC Download store:
Beatport’s music download store remains one of the leading Western online providers of music, tools and resources customized for the unique needs and demands of DJs, producers, and other music creators.The store offers a catalogue of high-definition dance tracks (available in WAV, MP3, and AIFF formats) from the world’s top and emerging artists, some of it exclusive only to Beatport.
Beatport also offers stem-files. A stem file is an open, multi-channel audio file that contains a track split into four musical elements—bass, drums, vocals, and melody.With each element available independently, a DJ can mix live.This way a DJ can create track edits, mash-ups, a cappellas, etc, in and out of the mix.

– Special features of the Download store:
Charts: Beatport’s sales charts track what DJs choose to buy from week to week, as well as serving as the barometer for what fans are hearing at clubs and events worldwide.
Hype Chart: A discovery platform that showcases independent and boutique labels and is used to spotlight smaller, upcoming artists.
Beatport Sounds: A full selection of sounds, beats, and samples to complement any production needs. Beatport Pro for Mac: Supporting Mac platforms, Beatport’s music management software allows DJs to both organize their massive digital libraries and directly access the Pro store to download new tracks.

Beatport offers two kinds of subscriptions. A download- and a streaming subscription:

Beatsource is a download and subscription streaming service for DJs. Beatsource is a joint venture between Beatport and DJ City. Beatsource specifically focuses on seven genres: Hip-Hop, R&B, Pop, Dance Latin, Reggae & Dancehall.
Beatsource offers the same services with the same functionality as Beatport, but then with a focus on different genres.

Audible Magic is a content-recognition service that, through its database of audio and video fingerprints, offers services to various media platforms like Twitch, TikTok and Facebook to help them to monitor (and block) unauthorized audio and video usage in uploads and live stream by their users on their platform.When content is delivered to Audible Magic it will be blocked on all services that Audible Magic services.

Audible Magic was launched in 1999 and is one of the leaders in automated identification of audio and visual content for web media platforms and social networks. Content owners can include their content in Audible Magic’s fingerprinting system by delivering their catalogue to Audible Magic.

Facebook, Tiktok and Twitch (amongst others) as UGC platforms use Audible Magic’s audio fingerprinting services to monitor and block unauthorized usage of audio content by users on their services. All content submitted to Audible Magic for inclusion in their audio-fingerprinting system will be automatically blocked on the UGC platforms that use Audible Magic.Audible Magic does not provide content owners with a system or dashboard to set their own usage policies. Audible Magic only allows the possibility to block or to unblock. To block content, content has to be delivered to Audible Magic.To unblock content, the content has to be taken down from Audible Magic.

Distribution to AudibleMagic is available on VerseOne Distribution.

BMAT monitors and reports music 24/7 in over 5,000 radio stations, 1,500 TV channels in 134 countries and over 1,000 venues on 5 continents. BMAT can tell when and where any song is played and provide the metadata that describes who owns each of the rights in that song.The service is calledVericast and can track any public communication of music and is currently used by more than 100 CMOs and 600 labels and publishers worldwide.After delivering your content to BMAT, they will generate audio fingerprints of your catalog using proprietary and patented technologies.These fingerprints are used by CMOs around the world to easier identify content, ensuring a more accurate payout for your neighboring or publishing rights income.

Today the BMAT platform delivers 26 million identifications monthly and oversees 1 trillion digital transactions yearly.The music monitoring services aim to provide a neutral source of data available to any party involved in the value cycle – creators, producers, labels, publishers, distributors, CMOs, broadcasters, DSPs and venues.

As an additional (paid) service BMAT can also give you access to territorial play count reporting with and more detailed data reporting services.

Digital music distribution to BMAT is available on VerseOne Distribution.

Dubset provides a platform called ‘MixBank’. The MixBank service is a content management system built by Dubset that allows content owners to identify, block, or monetize usage of their content in mixed or remixed content uploaded to MixBank for clearance and distribution and provides the following functionalities:

– Registration: Creators of mixed or remixed content (professional or amateur DJs) are able to upload their single-track remixes or multi-track mixes, mashups or longer DJ sets to MixBank for identification and potentially clearance and distribution to DSPs.
– Identification: Mixed content uploaded to MixBank by creators is being analyzed and identified by Dubset’s identification technology (using fingerprinting information from Gracenote)

– Content Management:After the different pieces of content used in mixed content uploaded to MixBank are identified by the MixBank technology, usage thereof is reported to the respective rights holders to the extent they are registered in the system and submitted their content.The MixBank platform subsequently allows these rights holders to manage usage of their content in mixed content through the MixBank dashboard and set their own usage policies.The MixBank dashboard offers rightsholders functionality to set their own rules and restrictions that determine how their content may be used in mixes or remixes.The dashboard also provides rightsholders with an overview of all mixes and remixes uploaded to the system that contains their content.

– Distribution & Royalty Payment: If 70% of the content used in a mix or remix uploaded to MixBank is identified and cleared for usage by the respective rightsholders, Dubset offers the ability to distribute that mix or remix to Apple Music and share in any royalties earned for streams of the mix or remix on Apple Music. Mixed content cleared through Dubset’s MixBank is being made available for playback on Apple Music in the genre section ‘DJ Mixes and Live Sets’.

Digital Music distribution to Dubset is available on VerseOne Distribution.

Fizy is the subscription download and streaming service operated by Turkcell, the leading mobile phone operator in Turkey with 33.76 million subscribers as of end-2018.
Fizy was first launched in 2008 inTurkey as an illegal filesharing platform.After the service was blocked in 2010 at the request of MÜ-YAP, the Turkish Music Industry Society, it was acquired by Turkcell and relaunched as a legitime service in 2011.

Fizy offers mainly paid audio and video subscription streaming services in Turkey, Northern Cyprus, Belarus and Ukraine , and does not operate a free tier. In Turkey only Fizy also offers permanent download subscriptions (audio only).

Fizy is the leading music service inTurkey,Northern Cyprus,Belarus and Ukraine right afterYouTube.Across all services, Fizy currently has 600,000 subscribers.

Fizy consists of the following services in the below territories:
A. In Turkey and Northern Cyprus
Subscription Download Services:Various permanent audio only download subscriptions are available, including weekly and monthly bundles. Download subscriptions include only audio downloads (no video).

Digital Music Distribution to Fizy is available on VerseOne Distribution.

Gracenote is a US company that provides music, video and sports metadata and automatic content recognition technologies to various entertainment services and companies worldwide.The company operates in 5 sectors: music, video/TV, sports, automotive and video personalization. Its core business consists of providing enhanced, complete and normalized sets of metadata in order to help discovery of content via search, recommendations and playlisting. Gracenote licenses its technologies to a wide range of developers of consumer electronics devices as well as online media services, who integrate the technologies into media players, home and car stereos, and digital music devices.

Gracenote’s music recognition technologies using its audio-fingerprint database which contains data on over 100m songs of music enables digital audio devices and music platforms to identify songs. Gracenote’s data powers music recommendations and discovery platforms for streaming music services such as Apple Music and Amazon. Other companies that use Gracenote’s content recognition technologies are Tesla, Apple Music, Dubset, Spotify, Amazon, Toyota, Mercedes, Time Warner Cable etc.

Delivery of your content to Gracenote will help to ensure accurate display of your music information with the correct song and album titles, artist name and relevant cover art in hundreds of millions of smartphones, tablets and automotive entertainment systems as well as several music services worldwide.

Distribution of Music on gracenote is available on Gracenote is available on VerseOne Distribution.

GrooveFox is a newly launched niche music streaming service from the US that focusses on electronica/EDM content only.The service is available in the UK and the US and offers two types of services;
– ‘Free’: a free service which gives access to GrooveFox’s DMCA compliant web radio service including a live radio stream, with limited on-demand content and no offline playback; and

– ‘Premium’: a ‘Spotify style’ subscription streaming services that includes on-demand access to GrooveFox music library as well as to its web radio services.
The service also provides access to podcasts, hosted radio shows, original content and interviews with various artists.

VerseOne Distribution also distributes content to Groovefox.

Hungama is one of the large local players in the Indian (digital) music industry and operator of the country’s 4th most popular local music platform Hungama.com (behind Gaana, Saavn and Wynk). Hungama’s music service consists of an advertisement funded and subscription audio and video streaming service as well as a download store. Hungama also provides ringbacktones and pre-paid download bundles.

Next to its own music platform, Hungama also operates white label music services on behalf of other companies and brands, mainly for telecom providers in the SAARC region. In addition, Hungama also provides content to major India telco service Airtel’s music service Wynk.The company also hosts its own music channel through DTH (Direct-To-Home) via Tata Sky, Airtel, Dish, Videocon.

The Hungama platform itself has approximately 50m monthly active users, but Hungama’s total reach is much wider through its partnerships with major telco’s in the region, especially Wynk.
Hungama carries international content, but it holds a small share of total music consumption on the service, around the 10 to 20% maximum. Consumption of international catalogue has been increasing on the service. Hungama is also one of the largest owners of local Indian Bollywood catalogue.

Distribution to Hungama is also available on VerseOne Distribution.

Jaxsta is an Australian based music tech company that has built a rich informational database with music credits. Jaxsta collects and verifies music data such as recording artist, producer, songwriter, label, session musician and engineering credits and makes this information available to users through its Jaxsta service and website. Jaxsta has sourced (and licensed) the data directly from many copyright owners. Jaxsta aims to be for music what IMDB is to film. It also aims to work together with DSPs to help increase the quality of metadata.

Jaxsta plans to offer three different service level tiers for three different groups of users, being:
A free-to-the-user B2C web platform located at www.jaxsta.com: an online music informational database which is free for the user to access and use.The service provides various recording, performance, songwriting credits as well as liner notes and album artwork.This B2C webservice is currently live in beta (since June 2019).The service is advertisement free.

Jaxsta Pro: a paid subscription tier that is aimed at the professional user that provides additional third party sourced insights and data, such as worldwide music charts, festival and music conference dates, market insights and reports as well as publisher and label details. Jaxsta Pro is yet to be launched. Launch is expected towards the end of 2019.

B2B Distributed Service: a paid service specifically aimed at professional third parties such as music platforms which includes integration of the Jaxsta database into such third party’s platform or service
( through API calls most likely). The B2B Distributed Service is not yet launched and a launch date has not yet been set for this service.

Music distribution to Jaxta is available on VerseOne Distribution.

Kakao M Corp. is a subsidiary of Kakao, a major South Korean Internet company that was established in 2014. Kakao was formed as a result of a merger between Daum Communications, a top 3 Korean webportal, and Kakao. Kakao is the company behind the popular app KakaoTalk, a free mobile instant messaging application for smartphones with free text and free call features. It is the biggest messaging service in South Korea, used by an estimated 93 percent of smartphone users in the country, with 220 million registered users and 49 million active monthly users worldwide. In January 2016, Kakao acquired a 76.4% stake in LOEN Entertainment and rebranded the company as ‘Kakao M’.

Kuack Media Group is a company based in the US focussing on building and operating white label music streaming services for various large mobile carriers in Latin America and the Caribbean (including Movistar, Vodafone etc). Kuack operates subscription-only streaming services, which are offered by mobile carriers standalone or bundled with other services.The catalog of Kuack contains more than 25 million tracks.The company operates two subscription tiers; the Spotify-like “Premium” tier and the more affordable “Top Chart” tier.

The Premium tier provides unlimited on-demand music streaming, with offline access, including the ability to create playlists, share songs, and playlists on social networks.This tier can be utilized by a max of 3 devices.

The Top Chart tier is a lower priced offering with more limited access. It provides on-demand access to a Top 40 playlist and up to 5 other playlists a user can select himself from a range of different curated playlists. The Top Chart subscription tier also allows for offline playback, but only of the complete playlist, not individual tracks.

Naver Music is South Korea’s 5th most popular music service, after YouTube, MelON, Bugs! and Genie and holds a market share in the South Korean market of 6,5% mid-2018. Both services combined have approximately 1m MAU and 400,000 paying subscribers.

Naver Music consists of a wide variety of services, including a la carte streaming (audio and music video), permanent music and music video downloads in various formats (including HD formats, up to 24bit/192kHz for audio and Full HD for video), streaming subscriptions, as well as BGM (background audio streaming for blogs and social media pages).
Audio and Video distribution to Naver Music is available on VerseOne Distribution.

Nightlife Music is one of Australia’s longest standing providers of B2B background music services to commercial establishments and businesses.

Qobuz is one of the world’s first music services to offer music aficionados streams and downloads in CD quality and higher. From its headquarters in France, Qobuz operates a subscription streaming service and an a la carte download store, both with a strong focus on editorial and human curation and providing rich metadata. Qobuz carries all types of genres and most popular genres on the service are pop, world, jazz and classical.The service specifically targets audiophiles that enjoy listening to music in Hi-res quality. Qobuz has ambitious plans to roll out its services globally.

Slacker Radio is an interactive Internet radio service and subscription streaming service available in the US and Canada. It launched in 2007 and was acquired by LiveXLive (live event streaming platform) in Sept 2017 for $ 50M. Pandora currently has accumulated 1,2 million unique monthly users. Listeners can access the service on the web, through mobile apps on multiple smartphones as well as on Slacker Personal Radio Players and other devices. It allows users to create and share customized music stations.

Stellar Entertainment provides inflight entertainment systems to various airlines in Asia-Pacific, including Malaysia Airlines, Air Asia and Virgin Australia.The company is based in Australia and is one of the first in-flight entertainment providers in the world.
Content available on Stellar’s inflight entertainment systems is limited and highly curated by Stellar’s in-house curation team.

Stellar Entertainment provides two types of entertainment systems; a non-interactive linear or playlist based streaming service and a fully interactive music streaming service.

TIM Music is a music service operated by TIM, Italy’s 2nd largest telecom provider with 20m clients. TIM Music consists of 3 different offerings, each giving the user a different level of access to music:

Digital Music distribution to TIM Music Italia is available on VerseOne Distribution.

TouchTunes is one of the leading B2B background music streaming service providers in the US.The company provides digital jukeboxes to over 65,000 venues across the US, including bars, restaurants, gyms and other social venues.TouchTunes offers two types of music jukeboxes;
– a coin-operated pay-per-play jukebox that allows for on-demand listening
The jukebox has curated playlists and an option for background music.
– a background music streaming service that allows for semi-interactive listening
This jukebox is more advanced than the coin-operated jukebox. By installing the TouchTunes app, visitors get access to control this jukebox remotely.The app also shows all the locations where the jukeboxes are available.The service works on a semi-interactive basis as users only have the ability to play tracks from curated playlists.

XITE is a young Dutch company that offers a variety of music video streaming products:
– a linear programmed 24/7 music video television channel offered as part of a TV package and available through cable (4K broadcasting quality) (payments through collecting societies)
– a personalized semi-interactive music video television channel that allows viewers to like and skip music videos available through cable (“XTV”)
– a mobile ad-funded semi-interactive music video streaming service (“XITE Lite”)
– a mobile subscription on-demand music video streaming service (“XITE Premium”)
Xite’s cable music video services are distributed through Vodafone Ziggo in Benelux, through Ooredoo in Qatar, FUBO TV, Comcast Xfinity X1, in the US and through Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, and Roku.

Xite Lite and Xite Premium are available worldwide, but its main territories are Benelux, UK, and USA. Popular genres on Xite are Pop, Hip Hop, R&B, Latin, Rock, Indie, Dance, Era’s (70’s – 00’s) and it specifically targets a younger audience, mainly millennials. XITE would like to receive besides the normal Music Video’s, also backstage material or other video material surrounding artists that have sent a Music Video.

Audio(HQ only) and Video music distribution to Xite is available on VerseOne Distribution.