As many of you know, I have been consistently fighting copyright issues and song takedowns on Soundcloud for the past 3 years, finding ways to keep my music online to share with my fans. I have come to an impasse – I now have the maximum number of strikes allowed on Soundcloud, and have been forced to remove all of my tracks from my account in a last ditch effort to keep my fan base intact. This means that I have effectively been erased from the internet – my music has disappeared from the thousands of blogs that have shared my work via the Soundcloud widget and from every Facebook page and social media post where my songs have been shared. My Soundcloud account averaged almost 20K listens per day, with a total of nearly 20 million in the past couple of years – and I was gaining hundreds of new fans each week.
Over the years I have tried a number of things to combat copyright issues – I have posted my work to Legitmix and thefuture.fm, both legal sites that protect my work. However, my fans have never followed as they prefer to listen to my work on Soundcloud. I have spoken with the labels (one of my three strikes comes from an official remix!), worked with lawyers and called in favors. At this point, this is the only reasonable course of action that remains. While I would love to write a treatise on the many issues with American copyright law and with the archaic thinking employed by the major labels, I will save that for another day. For now, I would like to find a way for you, my family, friends and fans, to continue to enjoy my music.
I have uploaded almost all of my work to www.youtube.com/scottmelker. Further, over the coming weeks I will be uploading everything directly to my blog – https://themelkerproject.com/. You will always be able to find my music there, so please check in on a regular basis. There is an email submission form on the right side of the site – please send over your address so that I can send my music directly.
I hope that you choose to continue to listen to my music, as I will continue to make it for you. Thank you.
Posted by The Melker Project and tagged as Copyright, Scott Melker, Soundcloud