Creative Commons and Spotify

[doctor_turtle]

Okay, I tried emailing thia question but got no reply so I'll try here.

I've put out a fair amount of music under the name Doctor Turtle, which has varying flavours of Creative Commons licenses (mostly BY-NC-SA and BY 4.0). It's been reasonably successful on the Free Music Archive, and occasionally people ask me why it's not on Spotify. The reason so far is, I don't know how putting it up here will affect the people who've used it in their Youtube videos, and I don't want to risk them getting takedown notices through the content recognition service.

So, if I put it up here through an aggregator, how do I make absolutely sure that doesn't happen? I can't afford to get it wrong, as quite a lot of people have used it, and it would be a breach of faith for them to end up having their stuff removed.

TIA to anyone who can help with this. Doc T

[DonSolare]

May I ask why you gave your music for totally free?

On the other side, if a person got your music for free, they cannot complain if something unexpected happens.

Directly to your question: If you have the control of your own music, usually you can opt-out of Youtube ID-Content system so your clients (or how you call them) shouldn't have any problem. In case of doubt, ask your aggregator (which one is it?).

As for me, having my music on Spotify didn't avoid piracy = people go on using my music without paying me and without being prosecuted (and without even notifying me). So I wouldn't worry too much in your situation. You wouldn't call it piracy in your case, since you seem to agree with the free use of your music.

Now consider this scenario. You gave it for free under Creative Commons.

Doesn't it imply that ANYBODY (including yourself) have the right to upload it to any platform? SoundCloud, Youtube, etc.?

Did you also use the "no attribution needd / commercial use allowed" statement?

[doctor_turtle]

Hello Juan. Thank you for your reply.

The reasons I chose to give my music away for nothing are complex, but essentially I want it to be a resource people can use for their own creative purposes without worrying about royalties or takedowns.

Also, I wanted it to be available to listeners on a pay-what-you-want/free basis, because that's the only way of distributing it that doesn't discriminate between people on the basis of wealth. (For this reason, I'm only looking to put it on streaming services.)

Of course, once stuff's out there in the world, you lose control of what happens to it to a degree. Everything I release shows up on Russian and Asian bootleg sites within hours. It doesn't particularly bother me. But in answer to your penultimate question, it's complex but essentially no. If you want to read more about CC licensing in more detail, here's the relevant site: creativecommons.org/licenses/