Comelody has released Melodo – a free VST/Audio Unit that lets you browse and share short musical phrases with other users around the world.
The video above demonstrates using Melodo within Ableton Live.
If you give Melodo a try, let us know what you think of it!
This could be pretty revolutionary
..but instead it’s just pretty dead
Not bad 🙂 Sounds useful for all
Nice catch Comelody
very nice idea.
Reminds me of the net enabled bit of the Miselu Neiro, a similar sort of direction..
Careful, careful, CAREFUL HERE YOU GUYS.
I would evade this VST with a very WIDE large arc myself.
It sounds nice, even in the article up there: “A free audio unit that lets you browse and share…”.
Has anyone read the terms and conditions? For a free service this particular item looks very peculiar to me (right after item 1 where you declare that you accept all their terms):
“Solvency. You are solvent and have not filed for bankruptcy, liquidation, debt arrangement or otherwise lost your ability into entering into agreements such as these terms.”
I kid you not; this is the FIRST item. Item 1a.
Why in the heck do they care so much about your financial state if you’re dealing with an alleged “free” service?
I’d stay away from this as far as possible (I’ll go on the record; after this item I didn’t even bother reading further down).
Ok, so I did scroll down.
The only reason I’m writing again is to warn you guys: STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM THIS!
Check THIS item in their terms and conditions:
“Copyright License. You hereby license Comelody an irrevocable, permanent, unlimited, world-wide, royalty-free, sub-licensable, non-exclusive license to use Your Content and to allow Users to use Your Content according to the functionality of Service and/or through Facebooks or other 3rd party services, including the creation of derivative works and the creation of three dimensional works. Such license shall not be limited to Comelody and shall waive all moral rights in your Content if such are applicable. Comelody may allow you to choose different licenses for specific parts of your Content, including licensing under a reciprocal or non-exclusive licenses.”
I’ll narrow it down for you if you think this is too much text:
“You hereby license Comelody a all including license to use YOUR STUFF and to allow other users to use it too”.
That explains point 1 a bit. So translated: upload your music to them and you lose every rights you have regarding your stuff. It has now become theirs.
Dudes… stay the hell away. I can’t stress this out enough.
Technically you don’t lose rights to your work – you grant the same rights to anyone else using the service. It’s still yours, but you can’t, for instance, decide you don’t want something you uploaded to the service pulled after the fact (imagine using the service and getting the intellectual property police banging down your door because a user decided they’d changed their mind a week later!). 🙂
This is a plugin designed to facilitate sharing, so the licencing is specifically designed to ensure that can happen!
I think you missed this part: “including the creation of derivative works and the creation of three dimensional works.”
If you have a copyright on your stuff then creating work fully based on yours (read: adding a mere pad to your stuff can be marked as derivative) is a big no no unless you allow it to.
Here you have no choice.
You’re throwing all your rights away if you use this “free” service. plain and simple.
Well I’d venture that the entire point of this plugin is to share – why else would you use it? I can’t think of a use case in which you’d, rather than use your DAW as normal, create a sequence inside Melodo and then press ‘upload’ if you didn’t want to share…!
Soundcloud is also all about sharing music but I’m still not allowed to grab it and use the scores as if they were my own.
As a matter of a fact they added this “small detail” explicitly in their terms of use. While you may consider the whole thing to be a minor issue I doubt that someone who has spend several days (weeks?) to get his score setup would agree.
Thanks for reading through that stuff–this could be really revolutionary (not to mention fun and a good last-minute way to finish tracks before showtime), but the Legalese here is disconcerting.
Let me explain – I don’t work for Comelody or anything, I’ve just studied contract law.
The license is simply so they can operate the service. It is a bit of a reach, insofar as it’s irrevocable, so there’s no way to take your snippets down once you put them up. OTOH the derivative works clause is necessary, because otherwise Comelody would have to police the behavior of every user who ever downloaded anything from the site, or be names as co-defendants in any copyright infringement suit. Think of it as trading away your rights in order to have access to a wider pool of collaborators than you could meet other ways. What you put up goes public, but equally you now have access to royalty-free samples from other people in addition to the social benefits.
The clause about bankruptcy and financials is so that Comelody can’t be sued by creditors of someone who happens to be bankrupt and who could realize income by selling their music. There’s quite a lot of bankrupt musicians and many more professional musicians who are under contract to a label, and if any of them breached the terms of their bankruptcy agreements or label/management contracts by using Comelody, Comelody could be sued by counterparties. In other words, you’re promising Comelody right at the outset that the copyright in your music is yours to give away freely, rather than being contractually assigned.
So I know it sounds weird, but from a legal point of view it’s just practical.
I guess you didn’t come into contact with many other equal service providers.
According to what you’re saying its amazing that services such as Soundcloud can manage while still making it obvious beyond any reasonable doubt who owns the (copy)right of the material put online. They make this very clear right from the start.
Let me go on the record:
“Any and all audio, text, photos, pictures, graphics, comments, and other content, data or information that you upload, store, transmit, submit, exchange or make available to or via the Platform (hereinafter “Your Content”) is generated, owned and controlled solely by you, and not by SoundCloud.
SoundCloud does not claim any ownership rights in Your Content, and you hereby expressly acknowledge and agree that Your Content remains your sole responsibility.”
VS:
“You hereby license Comelody an irrevocable, permanent, unlimited, world-wide, royalty-free, sub-licensable, non-exclusive license to use Your Content and to allow Users to use Your Content according to the functionality of Service and/or through Facebooks or other 3rd party services, including the creation of derivative works and the creation of three dimensional works. Such license shall not be limited to Comelody and shall waive all moral rights in your Content if such are applicable. Comelody may allow you to choose different licenses for specific parts of your Content, including licensing under a reciprocal or non-exclusive licenses.”
Dream on dude!
You’re missing the point.
No intelligent musician would use a melody sharing service if they didn’t include legalese like this.
The primary purpose of SoundCloud is to make it easy to share music so that people can LISTEN to it. This is comparable to Flickr, where the primary purpose of the site is to share photos so other people can VIEW them.
The purpose of Melodo is to let people share musical ideas so that other people can WORK with them, not just listen to them. This only makes sense if users can work with melody fragments without worrying about getting sued.
You may think that the purpose of Melodo is stupid – and you might have a point – but it doesn’t make any sense to suggest that the legalese behind it is.
Actually I don’t think the purpose is stupid at all. I think the way its being executed is plain out dangerous and I honestly (I’ll go on the record again) don’t trust them.
We’ll see if I’m right or wrong in a few years I suppose.
My problem is basically boiling down to digital rights. I can see from the votes that many people don’t agree, which is fine with me. Its my experience that people only stop to think about these issues when it personally hits them. Not before.
Small (offtopic) example: Google map cars were also collecting WIFI data. Which could be considered a breach of privacy. In England many people were heavily in favor of Google doing “their thing” because if you got nothing to hide you had nothing to worry about.
And then the Brittish government stepped in and filed a formal request with Google to obtain all the collected data. And all of a sudden a lot of “computer geeks” weren’t that happy anymore with their data being used. Now it suddenly turned into “abuse”.
(see “theregister.co.uk” for all the juicy details).
Which is my point here… Sure; it could be well explained why this company uses the end user agreement as they do now. That is not the problem. The problem is what they can also do with this agreement. The kind of rights you’re giving away to merely use their services.
My point is that this is the kind of service I can see getting overrun at some time (sold to another company for example) and then everyone will most likely end up crying out about their material getting abused while in fact they signed up for it themselves.
A lot of “tech sites” look like a nice service, but in the end its also about generating revenue and popularity up to a point where you get a good offer you can’t refuse.
“In the end its also about generating revenue…”
That’s how usually how businesses are supposed to work.
My question for you is – how do you think Melodo should handle the legal side of a melody sharing site?
First off – no one would EVER want to use ‘shared melodies’ that came with strings attached.
Second, no company would want to be the middle man between two parties that don’t know squat about music licensing trying to make a music licensing deal.
Finally, if they allowed you to share your melodies in ways that no one else would want to use, they’d also have to deal with the usability issues of throwing music licensing options into the workflow. Somebody just wants to share or download a melody and all of sudden you throw six Creative Commons licensing options at them. WTF?
sure i’ll totally help a complete stranger write a hit song and not get paid for it, of course why not?
I guess these guys don’t understand what a “user library” is. Like the Liine (Lemur) user forum (which you don’t have to use so you can keep your secrets) THE POINT IS SHAREING. If you put creative content in a sharing community you should expect people to use it, and really every note combination has been done and copyrighted so its about how you use it and make it sound…
sharing not shareing, lol
i get your point but they should at least make everything you contribute to this plugin a “CC by SA” creative commons license so at least you could still get credit for what ever another user makes from what you contributed
I actually investigated it and they ARE using Creative Commons (CC0 and Attribution), you should check it out before going on the record so much.
the music is more always important than the musician, lets just have fun and make some weird shit