Hey guys and gals, we have an important question for you and need the community’s help! Should DJ TechTools be able to use anyone’s music in our tutorial videos – and does the use of that music help or hurt the artists? You are the best people to answer this question – so in today’s post I turn to you for help, and feedback. More details and the backstory after the jump:
Many of you love Chris Brackley’s excellent tutorial video work. Recently he showed everyone how to combine Mixemergency with Tratkor in a great tutorial on our YouTube channel. In that video, he demonstrated the concept using an excellent song from Ten Walls called “Walking with Elephants”, which has become quite the hit lately.
About a month ago we got an email from Material Music asking us to pay a license fee for this song or take down the video. Before we could come to an agreement on the music, they reported the video to youtube and had it taken down.
Long story short, this not only means a good tutorial is gone – but YouTube has penalized our account and removed all in-video links through to the blog, which really hurts this community. We have asked Ten Walls’ management to undo this reporting so we can remove the video on our own, but they have not responded to any requests.
ON TO YOU THEN
Ok, so how can you help? Well, I would ask two things of our loyal and amazing readers:
- Answer a few questions in the comments about how you feel – do our videos help or hurt artists?
- Let Ten Walls (Mario Bassanov) and their management know they should reconsider!
First, here are the questions we are wondering:
- Do you discover new tracks through our videos?
- Do the tutorials inspire you to then purchase the music?
- Do you feel that it’s ok for us to use artists’ music without asking for permission for educational purpose? “Fair Use” in legal parlance.
Help DJTechTools Get Our YouTube Account Back
- Let Ten Walls, and their management know how you feel about this situation
- Here is their Facebook, Twitter
FAIR USE?
Technically, demonstrations that include copyrighted music in tutorials are usually “fair use” by the legal standards of today. While a very grey area of IP, there are a few clear guidelines which indicate if use of another persons copyrighted material is fair to use without explicit permission:
- Not commercially exploited
- Educational in nature
- Re-purposed or re-contextualized
- Does not hurt the artists ability to commercially exploit their material
Historically DJ TechTools has been pretty relaxed about using copyrighted music in our videos. They are not for sale, and ultimately promote the artists in a positive way. We have never received a single complaint (until now) so it was assumed that sharing great music was a positive thing!
On the other hand, we do understand that music creators like to have some choice over how their music is used and will try to only work with content that comes from friendly places in the future.
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR LABEL OWNERS / ARTISTS
Our YouTube channel has over 25 million views to date, with most of them coming from DJs – exactly the kind of people which buy dance music. If there is one place you would want to get your songs, then this is it!
Ultimately we don’t want to promote, or offend artists that don’t want their music used in this context, and would rather focus on supporting those who do! So, if anyone would like us to use your music in our tutorial videos, then please add the following email to your promo list! promo@djtechtools.com
