It’s been revealed that the excellent Dummy Magazine has had their Soundcloud account frozen for violating copyright rules today.
Soundcloud’s move to monetisation has been a perennial thorn in the side of the service, and this week yet more publications and artists have fallen foul of the service.
Like most reputable sites, Dummy post tracks to their burgeoning Soundcloud with the relevant label’s explicit permission. But it’s been revealed that Sony has lodged copyright complaints against them, and now that Dummy has accumulated three strikes it has had their account unfairly frozen.
While it must be said that Soundcloud probably didn’t have much say on the decision, it’s a bit two-faced of Sony to court Dummy’s significant reach to further the careers of their artists to then just turn around and use the ban hammer on them. It’s quite literally biting the hand that feeds you, and it’s an incredibly short-sighted way of treating an online publication that helps its artists.
Hopefully, Sony will realise they’ve made huge mistake and get Dummy’s account unfrozen quickly.
In a post to their website, Dummy said:
The reason Soundcloud has given is that we have received three strikes for content that we have uploaded which is in breach of major record company Sony’s copyright, although Soundcloud have so far not told us which tracks are in question.
Soundcloud have stated if we can persuade Sony to remove the objections then they will remove the strikes to restore and unlock our account. However, under instruction from Sony, Soundcloud are not allowed to tell us who to contact within the organisation. We have only ever uploaded music that Sony have sent us to promote, so it seems ridiculous that they would want to shut down our account and prevent us from supporting new music signed to their label in the future.
