“The iTunes Store quietly responded last month to the flood of soundalikes on the service by aggressively banning them,” Shawn Setaro reports for Forbes. “Soundalikes are cover songs that ape the original in every respect. Often, they’re meant to fool the consumer.”
“Streaming services are awash with soundalikes – try searching just about any hit song by title on Spotify and you’ll find some,” Setaro reports. “On iTunes, where consumers are paying for each song, such a slip-up can have serious repercussions. Thus, Digital Music News reported, last month iTunes sent notices to digital distributors laying out new guidelines.”
“They banned titling songs in the search-friendly way common to soundalikes: having the artist name in the song’s title, for example, and nixing phrases like ‘originally performed by’ and ‘in the style of,'” Setaro reports. “While these guidelines apply only to iTunes, they will likely effect all digital music services… [since] digital distributors like TuneCore put songs on all the digital music services at the same time. So if a song has one title for iTunes, it has to have the same one for all the other streaming services.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good. Get rid of these things that are obviously meant to fool the consumer. They’re the musical equivalent of Samsung and Xiaomi fragmandroid phones. Apple is all about originality and innovation, their music (and all other) stores and services should be, too.