Legitmix

» see legitmix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Legitmix was a Canadian company that launched in 2011 with offices in Ottawa and in Brooklyn, run by Omid McDonald with Gerry Burtenshaw as its chief technologist. It existed to solve one problem, and the problem was a hard one: a remix that samples six songs needs permission from six rights holders, which in practice means the remix is illegal and gets distributed for free on a blog until somebody sends a letter.

The company's answer was to stop selling the music. What Legitmix sold was a small file containing the instructions for rebuilding a remix, plus the remixer's own added work. When you bought one, the software looked at the tracks already sitting in your library, confirmed they matched the versions the remixer had used, and assembled the finished mashup locally. No copyrighted recording ever moved through Legitmix's servers. The rights holders got paid the ordinary way, because you had bought all the originals.

It was clever enough to get written up by MIT Technology Review, The Verge, Billboard and the Toronto Star, and clever enough to attract real artists. The Hood Internet put work through it. So did El-P. Remixers kept 70 percent of the sale price, which was a better split than anything else on offer to a person whose entire output was technically unlicensable.

~ the record ~

~ how the trick worked ~

The catch is visible the moment you write the arithmetic down. Quartz did, in 2013, under a headline about songs costing upwards of fourteen dollars apiece. A remix built from ten samples required you to own ten songs, and if you owned two of them you were buying eight more at full price to hear one track. The exact-match requirement made it worse: your copy had to be the version Legitmix had fingerprinted, so a different master or a different regional release would fail.

This is where the whole thing sat at a distance from where I was. Legitmix assumed you had a purchase history, a tidy iTunes library with receipts behind every file. In Turkey the music I had in 2011 came from a decade that did not work that way, mp3s carried home from internet cafes and from whatever the dorm network was sharing, and there was no legal paper trail behind any of it for software to inspect. The product needed a kind of listener that most of the world had not become yet.

~ the inheritance ~

legitmix.com last served its real front page on 17 November 2016. Within a fortnight the whole site had been replaced by a few hundred bytes of text headed "A Sad Day", which read, in full, that they had high hopes for their win-win solution for remix, that they had sadly reached the end of their rope and shut down, and thanked the remixers and customers and friends and family who had supported the mission. The last line was the honest one: this is not the outcome we wanted.

Nothing replaced it. The sampling problem Legitmix tried to engineer around is still there, and the industry answer turned out to be the dull one, which is that streaming services license catalogs wholesale and remixers either get a clearance deal or stay on SoundCloud and hope. The domain now points at a HugeDomains parking page, for sale to anybody who wants it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »