Continuing its trend of pulling its music from online services that won’t pay it heed–or at least a nice chunk of money–Universal Music Group has yanked 30-second sound samples of its labels’ songs from iLike, the music-sharing site that’s quite popular with the Facebook set. According to Silicon Alley Insider, the dispute stems from a lapsed agreement between UMG and the sound-sample middleman Muze, which supplied iLike with UMG’s streams. So now iLike and Universal are trying to hammer out some sort of deal that will restore the label’s audio to the service, a deal which, if precedent is any indication, will likely involve iLike cutting some sort of punishing check to Doug Morris and his merry band of shmoos. All that, just so some sophomore at UW-Whitewater can keep introducing himself to prospective conquests with “In Da Club.”
Universal Music: MIA on iLike [Silicon Alley Insider]
i wonder if any of this is stemmed from the fact that UMG is attempting to reap a bigger profit from doling out digital samples or more to do with the fact that muze is shuttering its seattle offices and trying to move production back to new york where the staff is significantly smaller.
I worked on a music store site here in Canada. All clips were stored as 30s MP3s because they said that anything less than 30s couldn’t be found as a copyright violation and fell under fair use.
That’s not how copyright law works, I’m afraid.