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can not get back into my VIP account on smule
opentype replied to Debbiehoffman7's topic in Smule Help Forum
I’m not sure what you are describing. -
can not get back into my VIP account on smule
Ren_Shan replied to Debbiehoffman7's topic in Smule Help Forum
Today,I create new Smule account but no put my password...its Confirm password.How I can get back my account with VIP???https://www.smule.com/JCOLLAB_ENT -
Elephant in the room: 99.5% of all tracks on Smule are illegal!
inspired_Dev replied to inspired_Dev's topic in Lounge
ADDENDUM TO PART 2: Glassdoor Reviews for Smule see more: https://www.glassdoor.co.in/Reviews/Smule-Reviews-E361201.htm Here are some excerpts: Two reviews are especially descriptive, heart-felt and eye-opening: REVIEW A REVIEW B -
Elephant in the room: 99.5% of all tracks on Smule are illegal!
inspired_Dev replied to inspired_Dev's topic in Lounge
PART II: I tried writing this part several times, but every time it got too lengthy. I wanted to keep it crisp and true. But it's also about the big picture. So please bear with it. It is both important and urgent. This earlier comment was actually kind of a "scratch recording" for Part 2. Please give it a glimpse. It'll help. Smule is a for-profit company, competing with around 10 other similar or copycat products in the market, like StarMaker, WeSing, SingSnap, Yokee etc. All of them have similar user-upload system and similar terms of service. Smule was the pioneering one as far as I'm aware. Along time, these products copy each other's features to "stay ahead". Gifts were present on StarMaker before Smule. It is so unnecessary to the whole singing thing - we already have likes and comments. But Smule added it anyways. Because with it they get to sell their virtual coins to users for real money for buying virtual gifts to give to other users. Anyone outside the ecosystem will laugh at this proposition. But users spend real money and buy virtual gifts for each other, because they've already been sold the "value" of this ecosystem. And it provides an additional revenue stream along with ads and subscriptions. Let's look at their mission statement: "Audio"? But recordings are in "video" mode by default, since these tend to become viral easily. Great audio recordings will often stay quite small in comparison to mediocre video recordings. "new levels of Self-expression"? By aren't we mostly just copying by singing on the same music tracks and trying to sound like the original singers, rather than creating our own creative cover versions, mashups or songs? How about just singing unplugged, freestyle for the sake of "self-expression" - how many do it? How about using this freestyle along with the group join feature, giving you the freedom to make a large number of creative choices, enabling you to reach "new levels of self-expression"? It's been possible for a long time, you can record upto 100 joins on the same track using the group join, and there are no restrictions whatsoever if you sang on the freestyle track! But how many have even thought about it? "to connect the world"? (this became a bit long, sorry) By inundating us with notifications about likes, views, followers, joins (and in the beginning, when the user is new and there are 0 notifications, they write: "psst? wanna get noticed?") which happen to be both: a) dopamine-inducing reward signals - in short, stuff that makes you keep using the product, develop new habits and even get addicted, (refer to the book "Hooked" by Nir Eyal) b) status symbols that sell you the "Superstar Dream" and make you feel like are "becoming a star" (reinforced by "sing with stars" mass invites from official Partner Artists, invites from "sing with renowned smule users" invites made by different regional community handles, "verified" badges, plus the "viral" videos of users singing with "stars" or other users, featured on the home page) Thus, we can see that rather than "connecting", they are making us "compete" with one another for more views, likes and followers. How many of the 50 million users do you see becoming the next big star? And how fair would it be anyways? It's more like a lottery rather than rewarding talent. I've easily come across 100s of good singers in my 1.5 years here. You can now see why you and others might have complained about bad/unfair/irritating-behaving users or the lack of improvements in essential features, but with no effect. You might also have felt elated (extreme case: became an egomaniac) or discouraged (extreme case: became depressed), based on how much views, likes, followers etc. were happening to you. (also you might've compared yourself with other users). You may have also tried to "game" the system to get these status numbers by doing things other than singing, like the follow-unfollow tactic, upload tracks to get more followers, spam message your invites and recordings to get more joins and likes etc. But that's just fooling yourself and wasting your time. By competing with similar and other social media apps, for more users who are regular and using the app more, the incentives for Smule have been about staying ahead, rather than fulfilling their mission statement and caring about users. They can always say, "if we don't stay ahead, we will perish in this race, and thus not be able to fulfill the mission anyway". But in practice, even while staying ahead, have they been able to stay true to their words showcasing their vision, values and ideals? (including their hypocrisy about copyrights, which I know isn't so relevant or important to us users, compared to all these other things). You can see that a lot of compromises have been made along the way. Calls for a reality-check, no? I asked them to do this. They denied it was necessary and that I was mistaken in my beliefs and "theories", formed by making "wrong" assumptions or "incomplete" data. Since we are connected through this app and the common love for music and singing, and are affected by all this together, it make sense for us to talk about the things specific to it here. But also remember, that this is happening everywhere. It is called the "extractive attention economy". And it is tearing apart our social fabric, increasing digital addiction, constant social comparison, bullying, race for 'likes', increasing vanity & superficiality and even leading to polarization of ideologies and political manipulation: https://humanetech.com/problem/ Hence, not just as users of the same app, but also as citizens and consumers, we need to wake up, start creating bottom-up solutions wherever we can change things, and collectively demanding top-down solutions wherever centers of power can change things. Empathy and Ethics can guide everyone in this solution-search. -
Elephant in the room: 99.5% of all tracks on Smule are illegal!
inspired_Dev replied to inspired_Dev's topic in Lounge
Oh, interesting. Does it look like it could've been RIAA then? https://www.riaa.com/about-riaa/riaa-members/ -
If you're getting something for free, and even if you know it is illegal, you also know that you are not being penalized for it, so what incentive do you have to pay?
- Last week
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Why doesn't Smule make a deal with X artist, X company, or whatever for the license? They'll just lose customers when everything eventually gets disabled. Is it just too costly for Smule to afford all of these individual licenses at the end of the day?
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Elephant in the room: 99.5% of all tracks on Smule are illegal!
The Minty Clinch replied to inspired_Dev's topic in Lounge
By the way, the acts whose uploads disappeared last week all seemed to be signed to Universal Publishing. And Columbia label seemed fairly constant too -
Elephant in the room: 99.5% of all tracks on Smule are illegal!
inspired_Dev replied to inspired_Dev's topic in Lounge
PART I: Summarizing the discussions so far with my thoughts on them... @opentype @Crazyjster @The Minty Clinch and @MissMalice89 have shared their valuable thoughts on this topic so far! No one has objected to the "claim" I've made in the title regarding the legality of user-uploads. [In hindsight, it would be more accurate (technically) and right (ethically) to re-word the title as: "User-uploads constitute most of the tracks (estimated to be around 99%), but there is NO WAY they can be copyright-compliant under the current laws (unless the users also happen to be the original composers/writers/owners/permission-holders)".] We've all known something about copyrights to some extent, and have some idea about the "advise" given in general about how to handle copyrighted material. Still, no discussion about this have happened before here. Only @misterspeakeasy had touched upon this aspect w.r.t. addition of licensed tracks to the official songbook (here). WHY??? Firstly, this has to do with the situation that: Copyrights are already a complex landscape for the real world scenarios for which they were originally designed. And with Internet and the Web and the new use-cases of how original works can be easily copied/modified/shared by millions or billions of people, they become at least a thousand-fold more complex. Secondly, it's because we are millions of users - we automatically get a safety in numbers. And we can see that we are in fact being encouraged to upload tracks. Thus, 1) we don't seem to have any incentive to follow the laws, and 2) are only being encouraged to do actions which "technically" amount to breaking the law. Well, we just want to fulfill our selfish, harmless interests of singing to our favorite songs, and there are no obstacles being put. In fact this process is quite streamlined. So let's enjoy! My appeal to ethics seems amusing and unnecessary to most, while the scope of discussion is limited to individual users. However, this is not about a handful of users. There are millions of us. When we scale something, trivial matters become serious. Plus, this is not limited to copyrights, licenses and royalties. Being hooked to our phones all the time isn't harmless. And there's a reason why we are hooked... The situation of "let's fulfill our selfish interests" is not limited to individuals: Large organisations like corporations and governments also operate on this mentality (or rather instinct, built into us by the natural evolution). Corporations say one thing in their mission statements (and in their terms), but behave quite differently in the real world. They may not be deliberately wanting to be evil or hypocrites here. They are also just succumbing to their selfish interests like we individuals do. But this is problematic, since greater the power, greater the responsibility (and also greater the scope for corruptibility). Thus, greater the power, greater the scope for damage possible due to this "succumbing" to the instinct of selfishness in those who possess this power. Does my appeal to ethics still feel trivial, amusing and unnecessary?? Which brings me back here to things directly relevant to us, the users - like our health and safety - which is why I had asked these questions earlier: This expands the scope of the discussion, while being relevant to everyone here, and also being relevant to copyrights, so that it can be continued here at least for a bit. It can be made into a separate topic after everyone (or most) in this discussion get acquainted with the existence and importance of the expanded scope. PART 2 will also reference an earlier comment I've made, containing terms like network effect, attention economy. Another sneak-peek into Part 2: intent informs the design. And design guides the behavior. And behavior shapes the culture. And culture affects the experiences, and experiences comprise our lives. But, what defines the intent currently?? And, what should define the intent? -
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Silly and serious... havin fun but still trying hard to sound as good as possible... casually slaying tracks... etc. etc. 😂
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Pixelation / camera / iPad 7th generation
annaknudsenmusic replied to annaknudsenmusic's topic in Smule Help Forum
Yeah, I think Smule compresses it too much. When I use the video recording that comes with the iPad, the recording quality is fine. And yes, I have the same internet connection as I did on my old iPad. I think I have already enabled the upload only wifi setting, but I will double check. This is really a mystery to me, especially since Smule doesn't seemt to have heard of the problem before - and I can't find any hits when googling. It's a brand new iPad that I used Smule on instantly, before I even tampered with settings etc., so it doesn't make much sense. -
Pixelation / camera / iPad 7th generation
opentype replied to annaknudsenmusic's topic in Smule Help Forum
The pixelation comes from the video compression. Not really sure how this ties to a specific device like a certain iPad though. The compression happens on Smule’s server. Are you sure you have good internet connection on your new iPad? That’s the only thing I could think of worth checking. You could also try to activate the setting in the app to only upload with WiFi. -
Elephant in the room: 99.5% of all tracks on Smule are illegal!
Crazyjster replied to inspired_Dev's topic in Lounge
LOL yes but several months ago changes were made requiring new accounts to have a 3-day trial and then to purchase membership. My guess is people pay for a week and then stay non-vip. The difference between Smule and FB is that FB pulls restricted content they don't have a licence for. If you want premium service on Youtube or Spotify or just to access Netflix for example, you have to pay, because it covers the royalties etc. You don't pay, you loose access. Those services also have content removed and added because contracts change over time and rights to music/movies change. The network effect has seem to be successful for many paid apps that don't offer free services. @MissMalice89 as for attitudes of Non-VIP lol you again make great points but I am trying to stay focused on the topic at hand. PLEASE post your thoughts though because I think they would make a great separate discussions! You have brought up a few that would make about 3 different posts (i.e. non VIP joins, android issues)!- 30 replies
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Pixelation / camera / iPad 7th generation
annaknudsenmusic replied to annaknudsenmusic's topic in Smule Help Forum
Look at this link - a private recording I made for Smule to look into: https://www.smule.com/p/2138041888_3392744037 -
Pixelation / camera / iPad 7th generation
opentype replied to annaknudsenmusic's topic in Smule Help Forum
Can you post an example link or maybe even a before and after? -
I bought a iPad 7th generation - and whenever I am recording, the camera quality seem fine. However, after the recording when I play it - it is very pixelated and completely useless. The sounds is fine. It was much better on my iPad 4, I just got a newer iPad because the 4 was slow. I am in contact with Smule who doesn't seem to know the problem - or what to do about it. Is anyone else experiencing this? 😬
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Elephant in the room: 99.5% of all tracks on Smule are illegal!
MissMalice89 replied to inspired_Dev's topic in Lounge
Also I meant Broadway lol. Stupid typo. -
Elephant in the room: 99.5% of all tracks on Smule are illegal!
MissMalice89 replied to inspired_Dev's topic in Lounge
Sure. But there are so many Musical Theatre nerds on this app and we need more official stuff if they want to cut down on fan stuff. They promote it so they don’t care but our VIP money should be going to paying royalties to CW owners. Also I hate that non-VIP users always ask VIPs to post for them and are jerks about it. Some are nice but it’s an inconvenience. I pay for the app and I think non-VIP should be allowed but give them access to more than like 3 songs which is what they do. They can join all open calls which is often frustrating as I have had so many off key singers ruin my songs because they refuse to pay for the app and just join. I do competitions and cast shows that I have to make private just to stop people thinking they can just join. If I put DO NOT JOIN WITHOUT PERMISSION, that’s not something to ignore but so many non-VIPs are annoying and entitled. So maybe VIP should be the only option. They need to add settings to allow only people invited can join songs, or the ability to delete layers like I said. Smule infuriates me but I have a lot of followers and friends and love to sing so I can’t leave.- 30 replies
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Elephant in the room: 99.5% of all tracks on Smule are illegal!
inspired_Dev replied to inspired_Dev's topic in Lounge
It is a social platform. Heard of network effect? So, they would want you to use it more and bring more people along, just for their profits' sake. But, they do! They show ads to the free users (40-50 million monthly active users, right?). Look at all their "advertising/analytics/tracking" partners listed on their cookies page: https://www.smule.com/cookiepolicy Did Facebook require selling VIP accounts to earn money (revenue, market share, investors etc.)? You use it for free, they get paid through the ads shown to you. The more the user activity (and network effect due to this activity) on the platform, the better it is for the company. Your security, privacy, safety etc. are not their topmost priority. Forget about feature requests and complaining about recordings deleted due to copyrights (a big concern for users, given that most tracks are user-uploaded and not copyright-compliant -- something which everyone here has agreed on, whether they care about it or not -- and so liable to be purged in the future). Welcome to the attention economy, where your attention is the product being sold. cc: @Crazyjster, @The Minty Clinch, @MissMalice89- 30 replies
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I could not find any option in the app to "log out" out of my account. So I had to uninstall the app. I logged into my account from a computer using the website, went to settings to set a new password. I had to enter my old password once, and then a new password twice. Password changed! Work done? When I reinstalled the app on my mobile, it said "checking..." and then they asked "Is this you?" [Profile Pic] @[my username] "Yes or No." I was me!, so I tapped on Yes. It said "logging in..." & was welcomed inside. They did not ask me for my new password. Inside the app, I could go to settings and directly set a new password. It did not require me to also enter the old password, like I'd done on computer. What if I had used my account on multiple other devices in the past and then uninstalled it and forgot about it? Then those devices were given to other people with my consent (just shared temporarily, lent or sold - so need not be a person I know). With this naive security process of "checking...", "is this you?", "welcome!" on each of those devices, even an innocent person not intending to "hack" my account, if they just installed the app and were naively asked "is this you?", could tap on 'yes' simply out of curiosity and be logged in without trouble. Security and privacy are much more fundamental features than effects, filters, gifts (dubbed "most expressive way to show your appreciation" - really, so you can't simply enter a heartfelt comment to express appreciation?) and "stickers for Snapchat sharing" (why Snapchat?). Shows their priorities.
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Elephant in the room: 99.5% of all tracks on Smule are illegal!
Crazyjster replied to inspired_Dev's topic in Lounge
I am going to guess...that that has to do with the fact that it is a separate union, unless the play has been made into a motion picture and there is a soundtrack released under a major record label, but that is my guess... I agree that the company should just pay the rights and cover the royalties for fan uploads since it encourages it. It should discourage posting on social media to cut down on copyright violations or keep private for in-app use like the "kareoke bar" analogy and not allow people on who don't pay. One complaint Smule makes is that they don't profit due to free accounts...well don't let non-vip be an option. Use that to pay for royalty fees. I'm not addressing the android issue...I will happily discuss that somewhere else if you want to post it as a topic. -
Elephant in the room: 99.5% of all tracks on Smule are illegal!
MissMalice89 replied to inspired_Dev's topic in Lounge
Well Smule would suck for Musical Theatre singers on Smule, almost all of the boradway/other musical songs on there are fan uploaded. They won't stop it because too many people would leave. I'd stop paying VIP without those songs and fan uploaded songs. If Smule bothered to get the rights to pay for all the Musical soundtracks that people wanted and not just cater to the casual masses who just want boring pop, then our VIP would go to paying for it. If two million of us are paying VIP that's a lot to go towards royalties. They should also be making it possible to remove people who join and ruin recordings, or if you make a mistake, and making Android have the same features as us on iPhone. Also putting dynamic lyrics back into the app etc. They have better things to be doing that catering to some millionaire who doesn't need any more money but won't authorize their music for legal upload. #sorrynotsorry I'd be honored if they wanted to use my music on there. I'd not ask for a stupid amount of money for use either. Just a relative fixed amount. If the artists weren't always trying to extort exorbitant amounts of money for "copyright" when they could allow fair use for a reasonable amount. Sorry this stuff bugs the hell out of me, because it's us, the users who suffer for it, the app should pay its own copyright fees not us.- 30 replies
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log out of your account on every devise you have logged into and then reset your password with a random letters/numbers/special characters. only log in on one devise. Does the person have access to your devises? If so you might have to freeze that account and get a new one and see if they can transfer your vip over...if you have it.
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