Category: Music

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Down for anything

Proud to present my latest remix: “Down For Anything” is a track originally by Sam Feldt & Möwe. It was a pleasure to work with the melody and the great vocals of Karra. I tried to give it my own touch. If you like it, you can support my music with a vote at Spinnin’ Records:

Find my remix at Soundcloud:

And on Youtube:


This is the original song:

UPDATE: This is the contest winner:

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Reminding signature

Another excellent song was released under the label of Kygo: “Reminding Me To Forget” is a track composed by David Phelan, Alex Oriet and Phil Plested. Kyrre Gørvell-Dahll alias Kygo added his unique vocal-chopping signature in the production process and created an excellent dance track.

David Phelan and Alex Oriet have composed other famous tracks as well, e.g. one of them is “Dusk Till Dawn” which was produced together with Greg Kurstin for ZAYN.

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Burning legend

Linkin Park was a legendary band. After the death of lead singer Chester Bennington now the vocalist Mike Shinoda will release his debut album in June. It will be hard to replace Chester. This is one of their most powerful songs from 2012, with an excellent symbiosis of heavy metal and electronic music, also the lyrics matching perfectly to the energy of the music. Turn up the volume and “Burn It Down”.

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Sasha Brave

There is a funny German singer who is very creative in marketing campaigns: Sasha Schmitz. He started off as “Sasha” and his major breakthrough was “If you believe” in 1999. This is a beautiful acoustic version of “If you believe” together with Ina Müller, where Sasha was a guest in her late-night talk show.

Then at some point in his career he showed up with a slightly different hairstyle and pretended that he was Dick Brave from Vancouver. At this point it was so hard to speak German. He had such a strong American accent and lost all his memories.
As “Dick Brave & the Backbeats” he was checking if Rock ‘n’ Roll is still popular in 2003.

Since then he learned German very hard and now, after Sarah Connor was very successful with a German album, he appears again as Sasha – but in German.

The song has a quite catchy melody and sounds nice also in the acoustic version.
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Without You

Very surprised and sad to read the news. You left us some great pieces of music. The world will keep on going but unfortunately now “Without you”. Rest in peace Tim Bergling.

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Dreamer

The latest song of Axwell and Ingrosso has wonderful atmospheric sounds, perfect for dreamers, combined with a dance beat. It actually sounds a lot like a One Republic song. The underwater video, directed by Henrik Hanson, shot by Benjamin Kitchens contains several epic shots as well.

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Spinnin’ in circles

In this article I’d like to share some experience with remix contests. I’m heavily contributing my time and work for remix contests on three different platforms: Spinning’ Records, Wavo and Splice. So far my experience is very (re)mixed.

Spinnin’ Records

Probably the biggest remix contest platform is Spinnin’ Records. It’s a Dutch record label, located in Hilversum, Netherlands.

Spinnin’ Records mainly tries to promote their own artists. With a Spotify account, it’s easy to participate in the contests: After they have subscribed your account to multiple Spinnin’ Records Spotify Playlists, the stems can be downloaded. Submitting the remix is also quite easy. It needs to be uploaded to your own Soundcloud account and is then linked to the remix contest page of Spinnin’ Records.

Pros

– Spinnin’ Records has a lot of traffic on their website, your music can attract a big audience
– the copyrights of all remixes are automatically whitelisted on Soundcloud
– the stems are downloaded from Spinnin’ Records directly

Cons

– no support at all
– there is no communication of the contest winners. In the Terms of Service they are even allowed not to chose a winner at all (contest rules exctract: “The Organization is not under the obligation to (and shall not) correspond with participants, in any way, about the selection of the winning Tracks. … The Organization may choose not to select a winning Track at all.“). This is a very bad fact because this way it’s not possible to learn from the winners.
– they are pushing so many Spinnin’ Records playlists into your Spotify account that you have to clean it up frequently
– remixes are limited to songs of Spinnin’ Records artists
– there is a huge amount of vote4vote comment spamming, no mechanisms to avoid this spamming
– on the weekend abound April 14-16, during the simultaneous ending of three contests, the Spinnin’ Records servers were down and all remixes disappeared from all user profiles, see screenshot below of my own profile (just a spinning “S”).

Screenshot of my Spinnin’ Records profile on April 15, all my remixes have disappeared.

Wavo

Wavo is a very suspicious platform. Looking at the Terms of Service, it seems that the main contact person is Conor Clarke in Canada. There is also an office address mentioned on the Wavo website (3414 Av du Parc, suite #320, Montréal, QC H2X 2H5) but the office building looks “very interesting”.

Also, the domain wavo.me was actually registered to Gabriel Lesparance in Paris. There is no more activity on his Twitter account since 2014 and his Instagram account is private. There is NO reaction to any support requests. Wavo is mainly selling music promotion but all these facts don’t really build up confidence that this is a professional company.

Pros

– remixes are not limited to artists of a certain label, occasionally it’s possible to remix superstars like David Guetta
– occasionally the artists themselves comment on your remix
– contest winners are communicated, but almost never in time

Cons

– no support at all
– the Wavo remix contests websites have only very little traffic, without additional promotion there are only a few listeners on your music (much less than on Spinnin’ Records)
– the copyrights of remixes are not always whitelisted on Soundcloud, it can happen that you upload a remix and it gets removed immediately due to a “copyright violation” -> no support
– the stems are sometimes downloaded from Wavo directly but sometimes also from the record labels directly with annoying procedures and different Terms of Service
– you need a Facebook account because they take it as an evidence that you are a real person. Excellent joke!
– there are deadlines mentioned when the winner will be chosen but they are almost never met

– the website has a strange architecture and in case of the David Guetta “Like I Do” remix, the contest webpage is no more accessible, see screenshot of https://wavo.me/pages/competitionsall/ (it’s not possible to click on the David Guetta remix contest anymore, status of April 15. Even after reporting this to Wavo two times, there was no reaction).

Splice

Distributed Creation Inc. is performing their operations under the name “Splice”. It’s a platform mainly selling music sounds and instrument plugins but also hosting remix contests. Founded by Steve Martocci and Matthieou Aimonetti, two different office addresses are listed in the internet: 36 EAST 20TH STREET, 4TH FLOOR, NEW YORK 10003

or 35 EAST 21st STREET, 4TH FLOOR, New York 10010 (according to the Splice Terms of Service):

Even though it’s not a professional record company, the support of Splice is excellent! The response time is quick (within one day) and they are actually solving problems.

Pros

– EXCELLENT support!
– remixes are not limited to artists of a certain label but in general the artists are rather unknown
– the stems are downloaded directly from Splice
– very clear Terms of Service for each remix contest
– contest winners are clearly communicated

Cons

– the Splice remix contest websites have only very little traffic, without additional promotion there are only a few listeners on your music (much less than on Spinnin’ Records)
– the copyrights of remixes are not always whitelisted on Soundcloud, it can happen that you upload a remix and it gets removed immediately due to a “copyright violation” -> they will fix it if you inform them!

Summary

Spinnin’ Records has clearly the biggest audience but it’s a shame that they do not publish the contest winner, if any at all. It rather smells like they are trying to push all their playlists into your Spotify account to promote their own artists, rather than taking care about newcomers.
Wavo and Splice both occasionally forget to whitelist the copyrights for their remixes on Soundcloud. Both platforms also have a very small audience on their remix contest webpages. Splice clearly stands out above all regarding professional support.