How often does SMULE add songs to the official songbook?

[[Member mist…]]

As I understand it, SMULE negotiates all the appropriate copyright for songs added to the Official Songbook, whereas songs added to the Community Songbook don’t have such protection or validation.

What I’m asking is how often SMULE adds material. (I take it that such material either requires negotiation with multiple parties... and may even require to be commissioned as a fresh recording by session musicians).

The question behind this question is really how, as a user, I can encourage the addition of more (legitimate) tracks. A few of us really enjoy singing to acoustic versions of pop and MOR classics.... especially when such material has been given a very fresh, new, alternative treatment (viz. a jazz version, a stripped down version, a slowed down version, a piano version, an acoustic guitar version). 

Any thoughts on this would be very welcome!

 

 

[Guest]

Good question! I don’t have the answer. Maybe a start would be if more users request more tracks, as you’re doing now. 

I have a couple of songs I would like to see added to the Smule songbook. I wish there was an acoustic guitar or piano version of the song “On My Way Back Home” by the Band of Horses. Another song I wish was in the songbook is “Alibis” by Sergio Mendes. Neither of the songs of any version exist on the app. 

 

 

 

[[Member mist…]]

I think we have to bear in mind that the cost of in-house material (including ongoing royalty payments) can be pretty high.... and that a very large number of subscribers are not native English speakers..

It probably makes sense for SMULE to navigate the cruise ship away from hidden reefs, shallow waters and rocky coastlines... and stick to the main shipping lanes.

[Guest]

I was merely throwing out my simple thoughts, as you asked, pertaining to your  root question. Maybe someone with more “thoughts” can assist you. It appears you have more concerns than just the addition of songs. Good luck! 😁

[Guest]

Good News! Thanks to Sing Salon the Smule Community has a new upload: the song “Alibis” by Sergio Mendes! 🙌🏼 A nice user saw the post/request on this site, and he uploaded it today. He did an excellent job! It’s precisely timed, and parts are separated perfectly. A big thank you to this super kind user! 🙏🏼😊

Edited October 5, 2019 by Guest
spacing

[[Member insp…]]

On 10/6/2019 at 4:22 AM, PeacefulJoin said:

Good News! Thanks to Sing Salon the Smule Community has a new upload: the song “Alibis” by Sergio Mendes! 🙌🏼 A nice user saw the post/request on this site, and he uploaded it today. He did an excellent job! It’s precisely timed, and parts are separated perfectly. A big thank you to this super kind user! 🙏🏼😊

@PeacefulJoin A user uploading a track to the Community Songbook is committing a copyright violation, if they are not the owner/creator of the original song, or haven't obtained the license to use that song in this manner. (I'm not even aware if such a license even exists, since "social karaoke apps" are a relatively new trend compared to the Copyright Laws). For the same reason, everyone singing on top of this "illegitimate" track ( @misterspeakeasy rightly called the licensed tracks in the Official Songbook "legitimate") is also committing a copyright violation from a legal standpoint, since we haven't acquired the permission to make use of copyrighted content in this manner. This has also been defined in Smule's own "terms and conditions" and "community guidelines".

What this implies that we are knowingly or unknowingly committing copyright violations almost every time we sing (or upload) on Smule, since most of the songs here are these illegitimate unlicensed user-uploaded tracks, the rights to which we do not own. And that through its "terms and conditions", we've agreed that we "know" that Smule has transferred the responsibility of monitoring our behavior to us, so they are technically "not responsible" for any of this. I wish that more people were made aware of this implication, and that there was discussion of how we all can sing on Smule in a legally sound manner, and be able to demand more legitimate songs as @misterspeakeasy said in his opening post. Will Smule make this fact more clear to users when we use the app, and not keep it hidden in their "terms and conditions"? The chances of this are quite bleak, since Smule's business model depends on letting users add tracks of their choice, without which there would be only a few thousand songs (mostly English), instead of the millions of songs in various languages from all around the world.

Going back to your original question @misterspeakeasy, I suppose there are 3 types of legitimate tracks here:

1) Smule-uploaded tracks, for which they have acquired the licenses and paid royalties.  I believe there are 2622 of these currently ( this is the number of "Songs" mentioned on Smule's official profile https://www.smule.com/Smule ).

2) Songs from Partner Artists who've made legal agreements with how they and Smule can promote and use their particular songs. Some of these are uploaded from official Smule account, and some from the Partner Artist account. I guess you can find the Partner Artists listed here on Sing Salon and visit their Smule profile for their song(s) https://sing.salon/smule-partner-artists/

I believe both of these will be listed in the Official Songbook database on Smule's website: https://www.smule.com/songs

3) Any original songs that have been composed/written by any Smule user and uploaded to Smule by the same. However, there will be no way to find these easily. You might know a few users you sing with usually who've done that.

The rest, which I suppose are 95% or more of the tracks in the Community Songbook, will remain illegitimate, and could be taken down anytime (including deletion of any recordings made on them) IF anyone with the Copyrights to them objects/complains.

HOW OFTEN a legitimate track gets added is certainly not clear to me as well, and I don't know any way we can request and vote on getting particular songs added legitimately - I wish there was a song request board for the Official Songbook! But I don't think that will happen until a critical mass of users are made aware (who will do this? probably not Smule!) of the illegitimacy of most tracks on Smule, and our collective demand for more music (which results in the culture of "singers" requesting songs to the "uploaders" and the latter get to work and add these songs to Smule on a pro-bono basis) is channelized properly, so that we can enjoy music responsibly.

P.S. I myself am both a "singer" and "uploader" in the Smule app, and only recently stopped uploading & opening invites to songs, after I became aware of copyrights, licenses and royalties. I'm in a state of dilemma & also looking for answers as to how to go about using Smule in a legitimate manner henceforth, and how more users can be aware of this, and how we users can make sure that creator artists all over the world get remunerated for their musical works, which we so love to make use of for our pleasure! Any comments/ideas to this would be very welcome!

[[Member insp…]]

20 minutes ago, musiclover2020 said:

I guess you can find the Partner Artists listed here on Sing Salon and visit their Smule profile for their song(s) https://sing.salon/smule-partner-artists/

You can also easily find Partner Artists in the Following list of Smule's official account: https://www.smule.com/Smule/following

[[Member mist…]]

I raised this issue a long time ago in Sing.Salon...  and a reply was given from a relatively authoritative source (as far as Sing.Salon is concerned) that, although there may be a number of breaches of copyright when uploading material is concerned), the likely outcome would be a request from the offended parties to take down the recording. 
 

Many original creations actually don’t have many listeners (compared to, say, Spotify). A request to take down a recording would seem a pragmatic course of action as far as the copyright holders are concerned.

The problem, of course, still exists. It hasn’t gone away. 

My understanding is that there are a number of interested parties concerned when material is uploaded.

1). There is the copyright to the music (the writers / publishers)

2). There is the copyright to the recording

3). There is the question of payment to the musicians for their performances.

4). There is the question of the arrangement of the music.

One practical solution to side-stepping issues relating to 2) and 3) (and possibly 4) is to upload original (usually solo, acoustic, ‘stripped down’) versions of songs. 
 

However, there is the very real point that SMULE are making money out of the  creative endeavours of others. Yes, there is an effort to wash the hands... but I doubt whether it is true that the bulk of SMULE subscribers gain any kind of remuneration from contributing to SMULE. It’s for enjoyment. And in practice the small number of listeners to each creation barely count as public performances in any meaningful way.

Point taken, musiclover2020. You are right. (But don’t lose too much sleep... I don’t think the FBI will be banging on your door at 3.00am.... which is not to dismiss the offence. After all, it is wisely said that the man who is dishonest in small things will be dishonest in larger matters too). 
 

I think it is worth while to raise this issue with SMULE through official channels.

[[Member insp…]]

4 minutes ago, misterspeakeasy said:

but I doubt whether it is true that the bulk of SMULE subscribers gain any kind of remuneration from contributing to SMULE.

I'm confused by this: I never implied that the Smule users get or should get remunerated. Did anyone else imply that?

When I wrote:

52 minutes ago, musiclover2020 said:

and how we users can make sure that creator artists all over the world get remunerated for their musical works, which we so love to make use of for our pleasure!

I was talking about the original creator artists (composers/lyricists/owners) of songs should be getting remunerated if we users wish to upload and enjoy singing to their works, and if Smule is allowing & enabling us to do so.

What incentivizes/motivates "uploaders" to go on uploading tracks is not just unavailability of tracks & requests made by fellow users, but the improved chances of gaining more "followers", since people get prompted to follow the uploader after singing on their uploaded track.

9 minutes ago, misterspeakeasy said:

One practical solution to side-stepping issues relating to 2) and 3) (and possibly 4) is to upload original (usually solo, acoustic, ‘stripped down’) versions of songs.

This still infringes upon the 1) "copyright to the underlying music (songwriters/publishers)" since we don't obtain a karaoke/cover license (but how can we even obtain a license for using their song on Smule, if license for this new usecase doesn't even exist (as far as I'm aware)?). I suppose we need the critical mass of well-informed consumers in order to demand for changes in copyright laws and inclusion of new usecases.

17 minutes ago, misterspeakeasy said:

And in practice the small number of listeners to each creation barely count as public performances in any meaningful way.

Fair point. You can make the case for it even better if we are opening invites privately and saving our recordings privately as well. We can share these private invites & private recordings by messaging the link to our friends.

But then, there are also popular songs in the community songbook which get lots of usage (in terms of invites & joins) and many of these solo/collab recordings go viral as well. That is very public.

12 minutes ago, misterspeakeasy said:

I think it is worth while to raise this issue with SMULE through official channels.

I did. This was their standard email response the first time:

Quote

 

"Hi there,

Thanks so much for taking the time to share your feedback with us. We'll bring it all up with the appropriate team. 

We cannot promise any specific time frame or result, but it will certainly be considered.

Keep the feedback coming!

Smule Support Team"

 

The second time I was more persuasive and critical of their "generic response". So they wrote back this:

Quote

Thanks for the detailed response! 

As mentioned in the previous response, I won't be able to elaborate on any of the points raised but I'm happy to say that we've got works in progress addressing all of them. I'm sure you appreciate that any platform with over 40 million monthly active users has to take the utmost care when implementing changes so we cannot afford to rush anything out the door.

So that's all I got about that from them! Again, nothing serious will be done about this until a critical mass of well-informed consumers demand for it! As far as I know, only you @misterspeakeasy, @opentype and myself are "well-informed consumers", how about finding 997 others? (assuming 1000 makes for critical mass required).

[[Member insp…]]

1 hour ago, musiclover2020 said:

P.S. I myself am both a "singer" and "uploader" in the Smule app, and only recently stopped uploading & opening invites to songs, after I became aware of copyrights, licenses and royalties.

32 minutes ago, misterspeakeasy said:

But don’t lose too much sleep... I don’t think the FBI will be banging on your door at 3.00am.... which is not to dismiss the offence

Besides stopping with the uploads, I also searched my username, got the songs uploaded by me (automatically listed by their popularity - number of votes and rating percentage), and deleted a good chunk of those, to reduce my "effective upload footprint". It was successfully effective, because thereafter, my follower count has practically paused! The remaining songs are mostly of the rare, hard-to-find quality for which there were no tracks available, and which very few people are even looking for. Before I took the above steps about my "upload footprint", I had also asked some bigger & prolific uploaders about this issue, but they never replied to me. So I just went about it with my judgement.

[[Member insp…]]

In the email reply that Smule sent, which I quote partly again

Quote

As mentioned in the previous response, I won't be able to elaborate on any of the points raised but I'm happy to say...

I just forgot to mention this "previous response" that they were referring to:

Quote

The feedback you've provided so far in your emails has been forwarded to the relevant departments. We are in constant contact with power users as well as verified artists to make sure that the changes we implement benefit everyone. 

We cannot offer a discussion regarding these matters but assure you that we are doing our best to address any concerns raised. 

That's about that!

[[Member insp…]]

@misterspeakeasy I'm sending the following set of questions to [email protected]

Quote

SUBJECT: How to encourage/demand more legal, licensed tracks on Smule?

How can users encourage/demand to Smule to add more legitimate songs to the app, by adding more songs to the Smule Official Songbook & from the Partner Artists?

Is there, or will there, be a "Song Request Board", where people can submit names of songs, and upvote on already requested songs, so that Smule can prioritize & triage between the requested songs? 

Are record labels/publishers ever going to officially add their studio minus-one or backing tracks in bulk to Smule, like they add their songs & albums to various streaming platforms today? 

 

Secondly, how to differentiate and find the original songs created by Smule users themselves for which they hold the copyrights, (not necessarily celebrities/professionals, but amateur users making their own original songs as a hobby), from the rest of the illegitimate tracks that users add to the Community Songbook?

 

Lastly, can Smule help to make all its users more clearly aware of copyrights, licenses and royalties, so that they will comply better with them when they upload or sing?

Perhaps even you can send your version of suggestions/requests/ideas to their official support email?

[[Member insp…]]

@misterspeakeasy I have some updates on the actual question of legitimate tracks on Smule!

On July 22, 2015, Smule opened up their Songbook to user uploads. They state they had added 1500 songs until this point.
(https://blog.smule.com/add-a-song-to-sings-songbook-were-all-here-for) 

If I look at Smule official account, it shows 2622 songs on the website, and 2582 songs on the app.
refer to my other post for screenshots (dated 5 Feb 2020): 

So from 2015 to 2020, Smule went from 1500 to ~2600 legitimate songs.

I mailed to Smule Support ([email protected]):

Quote

How can users encourage/demand to Smule to add more legitimate songs to the app, by adding more songs to the Smule Official Songbook & from the Partner Artists?

They replied:

Quote

Please feel free to suggest any song you'd like to see, using our song suggestion form, and we'll do our best to get permission to add them. 

http://bit.ly/SuggestSongsForSmule

If you open that link, you'll see a Google Form. It looks outdated, because it is. Smule (the flagship app) is referred by its old name Sing! Karaoke. The list of apps also contains names of apps no longer in production, like Songify and I am T-Pain.

Search for "Songify app by Smule". I see a third-party app cataloging site page https://songify.soft112.com/ which says "The app is currently available in English and it was last updated on 2013-12-26." Version 1.0.9.

What did Songify do? It converted spoken voice into autotuned "singing", along with accompaniment music. A user-made demo video dated July 10, 2011

Songify by Smule was precursed by LaDiDa by Khush. What did LaDiDa do? It was "reverse karaoke app", i.e. it converted "freestyle" acapella singing recordings into fully-arranged music performances. You just had to sing something to a metronome tempo and then select an arrangement music style, and voila! You've got a master recording! Here's an official demo video, dated Oct 19, 2009:

This is Prerna Gupta, featured in this fastcompany article, when in 2013, she was the Chief Product Officer for Smule: https://www.fastcompany.com/3012440/prerna-gupta-smule

Note how it states that together between Songify and LaDiDa (and some other "music-creation apps" as well? - she mentions Magic Piano at one point in the interview, so that can be certainly included), "users have created more than 950 million original songs". Woah! Some bright ideas and well-executed too, given the successful user activity! Wish these apps still exited today! I don't know what happened to them!

Coming back to the "outdated" Suggest Songs for Smule form, it has to be around 7 years old at least, given that Songify wasn't updated after 2013.

So you see how the Pandora's Box was opened on July 22, 2015 when user-uploads were allowed? And how there is no seriousness at Smule in getting user requests for legitimate songs?

Hope this clarifies the "situation" further!