"Crucially, January is a time when many employees start to look for a new role, and so it's vital that companies keep their teams happy and cohesive in the run-up to Christmas."

DJs around the world are becoming increasingly aware of copyright rules due to takedowns and mutings online – but the complex nature of music means that things aren’t always as clear as they could be.

Today, I hope to shed some light on this space that has been something of a gray area for many artists. We’ll discuss how things work, the copyrights that exist in a song, how licensing works in different countries, and why you need to know about all this as a DJ.

Editor’s note: Nico (this article’s author) is the co-founder and CEO of Mixcloud – making him one of the best people in the DJ industry to speak on the intricacies of copyright law from a DJ’s perspective. Yes, he’ll plug Mixcloud Live at the end, and rightfully so: it’s one of the only streaming platforms out there that works for DJs and pays artists for plays of their songs.

First: how copyright works

Let’s start with the two underlying pieces of intellectual property that are copyrighted in every song:

1. The underlying musical composition (also known as a musical work): This refers to the notes, lyrics and composition that form the core of the song. These could all be written by one person, or by multiple songwriters – as is the case for many pop songs.

2. The sound recording (also known as a ‘master’): This is created when you fix the musical composition in a tangible medium. Take, for example, when you go into the studio and record a track with a vocalist.

...and how to use it:

Anyone who wishes to use either of these copyrights from a song needs to license them from the person or entity that owns or controls the rights.

A Grant of Rights

Depending on how you would like to use them, you’ll need a different grant of rights in a license. Some examples of these grants include:

A grant to publicly perform a sound recording

A grant to record a cover version of a composition

A grant to synchronize a composition to a video and make it available on-demand

Finding the right rights

This is only the first level of complexity. The next level arises because of the fragmented international nature of copyrights, and the fact that in each country or jurisdiction, you need to seek different rights from different entities.

To give some examples:

In the United States, you need to clear the public performance right in musical composition through the ‘Performance Rights Organizations’ (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR). To make a copy of a composition (also called a ‘mechanicals right’) you can use a statutory license, but need to comply with certain regulations and rules written by congress. In the UK and most of Europe, these rights are usually bundled together and can be licensed through one entity such as the PRS in the UK.

Sound recordings can either be licensed through a local collective management organisation like SoundExchange in the US. If the use case involves interactivity (meaning the ability for a listener to choose an individual song on-demand), you’ll need a direct license with record labels.

This matters to you as an artist. Here’s why.

So, why do you need to know about this complicated and obscure legal world as a DJ?

The answer is simple: if you play other people’s music, then the artists that get played should get paid.

This is the foundation of the modern music ecosystem, and supports our culture.

But not all platforms are behind this.

When streamers and DJs are hit by music copyright takedowns on other platforms like Facebook or Twitch, it’s because those platforms have not – for whatever reason – secured the right music licenses. They are not paying the artists that are getting played.

With that, keep in mind that it would be next to impossible for an individual DJ to clear the rights needed globally to stream a mix. This is not the fault of artists or labels. It’s down to the platforms.

Oftentimes, these platforms encourage DJs and artists to use their platforms despite not having the correct music licenses – all th...

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Report: Networks resilient under pandemic

The Network Intelligence Report from data-driven network intelligence and analytics specialist Nokia Deepfield, which examines service provider network traffic and consumption trends in 2020, reveals the networks were made to withstand the Internet’s rollercoaster year.

The report examines overall changes in Internet traffic patterns in the last decade and in 2020, focusing on key application areas such as video streaming, video conferencing, gaming and Distributed Denials of Service (DDoS) security.

As Covid-19 lockdown measures were implemented in March-April 2020, consumer and business behavioural changes transformed the Internet’s shape and how people use it virtually overnight. Many networks experienced a year’s worth of traffic growth (30 per cent-50 per cent) in just a few weeks. By September, traffic had stabilised at 20-30 per cent above pre-pandemic levels, with further seasonal growth to come. From February to September, there was a 30 per cent increase in video subscribers, a 23 per cent increase in VPN end-points in the US, and a 40-50 per cent increase in DDoS traffic.

In the decade prior to the pandemic, the Internet had already seen massive and transformative changes – both in service provider networks and in the evolved Internet architectures for cloud content delivery. Investment during this time meant the networks were in good shape and mostly ready for Covid-19 when it arrived.

“Never has so much demand been put on the networks so suddenly, or so unpredictably,” notes Manish Gulyani, General Manager and Head of Nokia Deepfield. “With networks providing the underlying connectivity fabric for business and society to function as we shelter-in-place, there is a greater need than ever for holistic, multi-dimensional insights across networks, services, applications and end users. Nokia Deepfield’s software applications have allowed service providers to understand activity in their networks in these critical times. The data and insights we’ve drawn on for this report also show how continuity of service can be ensured to create value for their customers.”

After monitoring network traffic over an eight-month period, Nokia Deepfield identified five key takeaways for service providers to use in planning future network capacity and value-added services for their subscribers:

1. The networks were made for this. While the networks held up during the biggest demand peaks, data from September 2020 indicates that traffic levels remain elevated even as lockdowns are eased; meaning, service providers will need to continue to engineer headroom into the networks for future eventualities.

2. Content delivery chains are evolving. Demand for streaming video, low-latency cloud gaming and video conferencing, and fast access to cloud applications and services, all placed unprecedented pressure on the internet service delivery chain. Just as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) grew in the past decade, it’s expected the same will happen with edge/far edge cloud in the next decade – bringing content and compute closer to end users.

3. Residential broadband networks have become critical infrastructure. With increased needs (upstream traffic was up more than 30 per cent), accelerating rollout of new technologies – such as 5G and next-gen FTTH – will go a long way towards improving access and connectivity in rural, remote and underserved areas. Better analytical insights enable service providers to keep innovating and delivering flawless service and loyalty-building customer experiences.

4. Deep insight into network traffic is essential. While the Covid-19 era may prove exceptional in many ways, the likelihood is that it has only accelerated trends in content consumption, production and delivery that were already underway. Service providers must be able to have real-time, detailed network insights at their disposal – fully correlated with internet traffic insights – to get a hol...

DISH, Crown Castle tower deal

Connectivity company DISH and communications infrastructure provider Crown Castle have agreed a long-term deal through which Crown Castle will lease DISH space on up to 20,000 communication towers in the US.

As part of the agreement, DISH will receive certain fibre transport services and also have the option to utilise Crown Castle for pre-construction services. The agreement encompasses leases on towers located nationwide, helping DISH facilitate its buildout of the first open, standalone and virtualised 5G network in the US.

Crown Castle is the first infrastructure partnership DISH has announced. Over the past several months, DISH has made several wireless vendor announcements, including software, core, BSS/OSS, and 5G radios. These agreements provide a clear path toward DISH’s rollout of a nationwide 5G network.

“The announcement of Crown Castle as our first tower partner marks an important milestone for DISH as we set our sights on building a first of its kind 5G network in the US,” commented Dave Mayo, DISH Executive Vice President of Network Development. “Crown Castle brings the experience and broad tower portfolio we need, from major markets to more rural areas, to help DISH bring to life the promise of our standalone, nationwide 5G network.”

“We are excited to establish this long-term strategic relationship with DISH, and we look forward to supporting their nationwide 5G network deployment for years to come,” added Jay Brown, Crown Castle’s Chief Executive Officer. “DISH’s 5G network buildout marks an important development for the industry, and we believe our ability to offer towers, small cells and fibre solutions at scale provides us the best opportunity to deliver value as we support their wireless infrastructure needs.”

Related posts:

1. T-Mobile/Sprint/Dish deal is done (almost)

2. DISH, Sinclair agree retrans deal

3. DISH closes Boost Mobile deal

4. Telxius acquires Telefónica Deutschland tower sites

5. American Tower buys InSite Wireless Group

It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your files are?

Google announced a new storage policy Wednesday governing user accounts, and while most of the resulting headlines focused of a new price tag for Google Photos, an important change went mostly overlooked. Notably, going forward, Google says that if you don't check in on your Google Drive files every now and then, it may delete them.

Google frames this change as a way to tidy up abandoned digital detritus, perhaps left over from long-forgotten accounts. Which, maybe, sure. Or, alternatively, it may be that a Google user simply stored some valuable files away for a while — like one might with physical documents in a fire-proof safe — and simply hasn't peeked at them in a few years.

"We're introducing new policies for consumer accounts that are either inactive or over their storage limit across Gmail, Drive (including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and Jamboard files) and/or Photos to better align with common practices across the industry," explains Google in a blog post announcing the change. "If you're inactive in one or more of these services for two years (24 months), Google may delete the content in the product(s) in which you're inactive."

In other words, Google at present has no plans to just start deleting your stuff willy-nilly. However, it's letting you know that, come June 1 2021, the clock is ticking.

Google goes into more detail on its support page, but is still frustratingly vague about whether or not it will actually delete your precious files. Thankfully, there's a Google-confirmed way to avoid the possibility.

"The simplest way to keep your data active is to periodically visit Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive (and/or collaborative content creation apps like Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms, Jamboard and Sites) on the web or through an official Google app," explains the support page. "Make sure you're signed in and connected to the internet."

Notice the key phrase "through an official Google app." That's Google's way of letting you know that a third-party email app, for example, won't cut it.

But don't stress too hard. Google claims it will attempt to warn users "using email and notifications" before throwing their documents in the trash. It will do so, the Google support page explains, "at least three months" before the two-year mark.

Interestingly, the ability to delete the contents of users' accounts after a predetermined amount of time is actually a Google feature. It's called Inactive Account Manager, and it lets users instruct Google to delete their data after a set period of time. This makes sense if you don't want Google holding onto your data well after your death, but turning on that feature used to demonstrate a specific intention by a user.

Now, with Wednesday's update, Google has made it clear that it's no longer interested in being your forever storage locker. So make sure to check in on your files every now and then going forward, or Google might just take care of that growing pile for you.

Spotify’s making another big podcasting acquisition. This time, it’s buying podcast hosting company Megaphone for $235 million, according to a source close to the companies. The deal doesn’t affect Spotify’s own podcasts — it already hosted its shows on Megaphone — but it does mean more shows will have access to Spotify’s proprietary ad insertion technology, called Streaming Ad Insertion.

SAI functions similarly to typical dynamic podcast ads, which are targeted based on a listener. But in Spotify’s case, the ads are inserted in real time as opposed to being swapped out ahead of a listen. This means Spotify’s system is making real-time decisions about which ads a specific listener should hear based on their data and also based on the goals of the various ad deals Spotify is currently running.

This acquisition means all podcasts currently hosted on Megaphone will gain access to SAI after the deal closes. No other hosting services offer SAI, so if podcasts or advertisers want to target their ads to Spotify’s data and potentially better reach listeners, they’ll have to pay to host their show on Megaphone, or they’ll have to pay Megaphone to distribute their ads. Megaphone has over 5,500 shows hosted on the platform from big publishers like Slate, iHeartMedia, Disney, and Vox Media.

With Megaphone, Spotify now owns a fully rounded-out podcasting ecosystem: a network of exclusive shows, a podcast player, podcast creation software, a hosting company, and its own ad sales team.

This flashy acquisition follows other big-name deals, including Gimlet Media for a reported $200 million, Parcast for $56 million, The Ringer for $196 million, Anchor for $140 million, and reportedly more than $100 million for just the exclusive distribution and ad sales for The Joe Rogan Experience. Spotify only really entered the podcasting world in earnest in 2019, and already, it’s buying its way to dominance.

Update 11/10, 9:23AM ET: Updated to reflect Megaphone’s current show count of 5,500.

Satyagraha, (Sanskrit and Hindi: “holding onto truth”), was the philosophy proned by gandhi when addressing the British Imperialism: non-violence, self-scrunity and research of truth. It lead to citations like “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”, and more simple saying like “believe what they do, not what they say”, which should be applied any marketing material, really.

For the past two years, all CDNs and most streaming server vendors, have been trying to downplay the disruptive impact that WebRTC would have on their business. It wouldn’t scale. There would be no market for it. It would not be needed. It has now changed.

A first wave of streaming WebRTC CDN have emerged: Limelight, phenixRTS and MilliCast (*), showing that e.g. WebRTC can scale while maintaining an order of magnitude lower latency than the traditional offers. The traditional CDNs were left with no excuse and still had no answer to WebRTC-based solutions. They did what anybody with money would, and moved on to the next ...

“marketing spin”. Other, smaller and tech-oriented company realise the trend, and recognise it publicly, but think that there is space for both technology stack: a more mature slower stack well-adapted to pre-recorded content streaming, or VOD, and WebRTC more suited for real-time content. For example, the founder and CEO of bit moving, co-inventor of MPEG-DASH, opened his talk at NAB 2019 about CMAF saying just that: if you re looking for real-time WebRTC would be better, but for any other cases, and there is a lot of them, MPEG-DASH and HLS are still the best out there, and CMAF is a much welcome improvement to them.

Some come up with new protocols that will save the world, and their business, from WebRTC.

For Wowza, WebSocket is the solution, even if it does include any media related reliability, and is still an HTTP-based protocol.

For Haivision (and wowza), SRT is the solution, even if it is not a standard, unlike WeBRTC which went through the standardisation process at both the W3C and the IETF, and reached consensus, and will never be accepted in Browsers: at least it provides some kind of answer.

For many CMAF is the current hope word: “wait, don’t leave our service, we are going to make it faster!”, which is true, but hide the fact that by design, “faster” for HTTP-based (transport) and file-based (container) technologies can only go so far as a second or a couple of second latency.

Very recently, we can witness a new phase of the organised retreat from the traditional video CDNs: “granted, we cannot achieve the same level of latency, granted, our scalability is but marginally better, and the quality is admittedly in par, so, let’s not speak about that, it’s not important anymore. Instead of embracing the new disruptive tech, or in order to buy us time to do so, let’s go into smaller and smaller niche to differentiate, by coupling the “live” keyword with some other keyword we believe WebRTC CDNs can’t achieve yet:

LLNW: “Live events require ad-insertion and forensic Watermarking”

may 2nd

VDMS: “Live events require ad-insertion.“

may 6th

And of course, the old school Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) tactic used by bigger corporation against smaller ones, as infamously illustrated by Microsoft halloween memo in 1998:

“They are small, they can go belly up anytime, we’re a big corporation, nobody has ever been fired for buying IBM’s”

“They are young, they do not know what they are doing, we have been doing this for decade.”

In the later case, in the words of Verizon Digital Media Services it translates into this:

“As a live event streaming platform that has supported thousands of live sporting events, including some of the largest leagues, biggest venues, and most watched games, we’ve had to address these concerns. Working closely with our customers, we’ve continually evolved and optimized every aspect of our live streaming video workflow and architectu...

Home schooling in the coronavirus pandemic has been the time for educational technology to shine, but flaws have meant it hasn't lived up to its promise, says Justin Reich

PROPONENTS of education technology have made remarkable promises over the past two decades: that by 2019, half of all secondary school courses would be online; videos and practice problems can let students learn mathematics at their own pace; in 50 years only 10 mega-institutions of higher education would be left; or that typical students left alone with internet-connected computers can learn anything without the help of schools or teachers.

Then in 2020, people around the world were forced to turn to online learning as the coronavirus pandemic shut down schools serving more than 1 billion students. It was education technology’s big moment, but for many students and families, remote learning has been a disappointment. When the world needs it most, why has education technology seemed so lacklustre?

Educational software has a long history, but throughout there have been two major challenges. The first is that most people depend on human connection to maintain their motivation. When a student closes their laptop in frustration in a classroom, someone can see it and respond. When the same thing happens while using an education technology product, human connections are shut down with it.

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Well-designed online learning environments can encourage meaningful relationships, and online learning has the potential to transcend typical classroom boundaries, but in practice, many online students struggle to stay focused.

The second challenge is that curricula are complex. On any given day in a school, one teacher may introduce a new sound-letter mapping in phonics, another finish a unit on plate tectonics, and a third facilitate a seminar on Don Quixote. Many teachers can walk down the hall into a new lesson to teach different subject material. But for every new curriculum area for education technology, new content, tools, resources and assessments need to be developed and disseminated.

Assessments are also a thorny challenge. In some domains, like mathematics and computer science, education technology can instantly detect when a student solves a problem or creates a correctly functioning computer program. We can reward students for getting answers correct, nudge them towards resources when they get things wrong, and create the feedback loops of instruction, assessment and iteration that good learning requires.

Unfortunately, the same approach doesn’t work so well in other areas. We can ask students to calculate how far a tectonic plate might move given a certain speed and time and computers can instantly evaluate a correct numerical answer. But if we ask students to write a paragraph that explains how plate tectonics work, computers can’t reliably identify correct, partially correct and incorrect responses. Computers cannot reliably evaluate how humans reason from evidence, and reasoning from evidence is the very core of schooling.

Education technology has long promised to transform education, but at best, the field has developed individual tools for niches of the curriculum. For large swathes of school learning, we don’t have online tools or resources that are any better than a printed textbook.

Every technological solution is also a human capital problem: integrating technologies into learning requires giving teachers and students time to play with and get acclimated to new tools, routines and pedagogies.

For most teachers, the road to more effective teaching with technology looks less like a transformation, and more like tinkering: a slow and steady process towards identifying the right tool or approach for particular students in a particular context.

Netflix has gone linear for the first time.

The channel, dubbed Direct, will launch in France as a test of the viability of Netflix as a more traditional TV offering. It will air French, international and US films and series that are available on the streaming service, available exclusively to Netflix subscribers.

At least initially, the channel will only be available via web browsers with no plans at present to make it accessible via set-top boxes or CTV apps.

France, with 9 million subscribers, was chosen by Netflix for this experiment as consumption of traditional TV is high in the country and that “many viewers like the idea of programming that doesn’t require them to choose what they are going to watch.”

In a statement, Netflix said: “Whether you are lacking inspiration or whether you are discovering Netflix for the first time, you could let yourself be guided for the first time without having to choose a particular title and let yourself be surprised by the diversity of Netflix’s library.”

Netflix has seen a stellar 2020 so far as it approaches 200 million global subscribers, but saw muted growth in Q3 of 2.2 million adds. France is a particularly strong market for the company, and it is looking to maintain its position as the market leader in the face of Salto, the french domestic streamer which launched in October as a joint-venture of France Télévisions, TF1 and M6.