Bypass: Music Industry News for Independent Artists

Thursday edition • 3 min read

Crisis Averted: Native Instruments Is Safe

What's Up Native Instruments found a home. NI got bought by inMusic Brands, the people who own Akai, Moog, Denon DJ, and Numark.

If you remember, they went into insolvency earlier this year. But you can breathe easy.

So What This is the best outcome anyone could've hoped for. And before you go thinking inMusic's some corporate ghoul looking to suck whatever life NI has left, hold on. They were already working with NI through NKS integration on Akai and M-Audio controllers.

Now What Your Kontakt, iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx are all sticking around after all. You can go back to making music now.

[Full story at DMN]

It's Called Astroturfing and It's Everywhere

What's Up A marketing agency called Chaotic Good Projects just got exposed. And what did they do? Oh, they basically manufactured hype for artists by running fake social media accounts to flood comment sections.

So What They literally said stuff like "The second the SNL performance drops at midnight, post 100 times saying it was the best performance of the year." Yeah, that bad. Their website's been wiped since. And it gets uglier. The client list has some pretty big names (allegedly). Names your fans probably respect.

Now What You can't out-fake the fakers, so don't even try. Followers can be bought. Comments can be bought. Sounds cliché, yeah, but build the kind of fanbase that shows up. Work on your email list and set up a fanspace with Discord. Slow and steady beats fast and fake.

[Full story at DMN]

"Run Run River" Is a Knockoff. It Hit #2 on Shazam Anyway

What's Up A South African TikTok account posted an AI version of Stick Figure's "Angels Above Me" and called it "Run Run River." Same lyrics, same structure, same melody, same everything.

So What The song hit #2 on the global Shazam chart. Right now, it's pulling in tens of thousands in royalties. Yeah, that's right. An indie artist's song got cloned, and the clone went more viral than the original. Imagine if "myPhones" started outselling iPhones. That's basically what just happened.

Stick Figure wasn't tagged, didn't get credit, and had to watch as some AI "artist" took his money.

Now What The truth is, you might be doing everything right, but someone's gonna steal your stuff with AI. That's just the world we live in. So, when you pick a distributor, pick one that's actually doing something about it. Believe/TuneCore aren't playing nice with "pirate studios." That's where you want to be.

[Full story at Hypebot]