In news that probably isn’t really news to anyone who thinks for a second, it turns out Apple Loops (as found in Apple’s GarageBand and Logic Pro) are not as safe to use as one might think.
Yes, Apple has provided them royalty free for end users to include in their tracks, but that very fact means they can soon become ripe for content matching and copyright claims.
It stands to reason, if one person can use an unaltered Apple Loop, so can everyone else. Then we have the sticky situation about which track can legitimately lay claim to them.
The issue is that the (most likely AI-based) content matching services are only comparing the content of newly uploaded tracks with what’s already accessible online, and not with the plethora of sound libraries from which the samples are taken.
It’s not exclusively an Apple Loops issue. Any sample library can have sounds and music snippets lifted, placed in compositions (whether by humans or from AI generation) and put out as complete tracks. It then becomes part of the environment from which ID matching works.
Sprinkle in some nefarious actors who deliberately sniff around looking for publishers to attempt to extort money from based on spurious copyright claims, and you have a big mess.
This includes the popular and heavily promoted Splice, which I’ve already read the horror stories from.
The moral of the story?
Some people take the supposed high ground and blabber on about people learning to play their own instruments, and not to use samples at all. This might work for some musicians, and some genres of music, but is hardly a universally acceptable solution.
Case in point, I can play the piano and keyboard, but I still use samples because they serve an important purpose in the kinds of music I produce. The same is true of hundreds of other creators.
So, ultimately, you have to do some work on any sample you pick up — however legitimate and royalty-free that sample may be at source.
Chop it up, add effects, deconstruct it and change its instrumentation — continue to be creative but don’t leave those samples the way you found them. As an added bonus, you may find new creativity and musical results as a byproduct of spending a bit more time.
This doesn’t 100% guarantee you’ll not receive copyright strike notices or flagging from time to time — it seems to go with the territory of sharing music online these days — but it should vastly reduce the likelihood of it happening. And that means less headaches for you and more time composing and creating, which has to be a good thing,
Apple Loops and the like can be a great source of inspiration — but use them unedited at your peril.
With a hat tip to The GarageBand Guide whose video (linked below) alerted me to this.
