Beginner Question: What music am I allowed to mix?

As far as I know, you can post mixes without any problem as long as you don’t try to sell them (and even that might be legal). I don’t know if it’s 100% legal, but I’m pretty sure nobody will be sueing you for it.

The only thing illegal about it I can think of would be the fact that you’re probably not paying copyright fees (which should be paid with any performance of other people’s music. Clubs and bars often pay a flat fee to play music all year long).

This is indeed a murky area. Any music played over Internet should have a collection fee that SoundXchange takes care of. Most DJs ignore this and upload their mixes, anyway. MixCloud is doing the right thing as it prompts the uploader to upload the track listing so they could take care of the licensing fees.

If nothing else, at least publish the track listing as a courtesy PR call for the artists/producers to be known.

as long as you dont sell your mixes and you buy your music/use free music (the original tracks uploaded for example to soundcloud with download allowed) it is 100%

but going around fees and saving a few bucks is always handy 😛

Yes I don’t want anyone to get nervous. Just wanted to state the legal side and what is happening in real life. I even wonder what would happen if someone DJs get sued by labels by uploading mixes with material. It’s an unprecedented area.

Anyway, for me the exception is podcasts of many reasons where I would stay away from concerning uploading mixes with music I don’t control. One is that iTunes is picky about such things and might not publish the podcast after a while. Also it might be one specific area where the labels might look at suddenly as in the early days there was a lot of posturing about pod-safe music which nowadays is not followed.

You know what I really want as a producer is to switch over from a paid music model to a subscription one. People could download, mix, upload, stream, remix, do whatever they want with the music. However the piece of music has a unique binary-embedded ID, post IRSC type, where any web site downloading or streaming this piece of music records it as an item used and a very small fee is registered to the music owner. ISPs could easily bake this into their monthly costs.

Doubt this will ever happen, though. But the current business model for music is totally outdated and not suitable for digital music — good example are mixes uploaded.