Legal Lead: Legitmix Allows Remixers to Get Creative

June 22nd, 2011 by Trenton

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WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN: Navigating the process of clearing music for remixes — getting permissions from copyright owners of music, then coughing up thousands of dollars to then pay for those rights — can be about as fun as a trip to the dentist for a root canal.

(l-r) Omid McDonald and Booker Sim of Legitmix.

The arduous and exhausting legal and financial hurdles typically involved often lead music producers to shelve great projects that would have otherwise been released. While this problem has plagued the music industry for decades, a documentary filmmaker and a computer engineer are attempting to streamline, if not, revolutionize the remix clearance process with a website and technology called Legitmix.

With operations based in Brooklyn, $1.2 million in seed financing, and a beta launch set for this summer after a highly buzzed-about launch party with Diplo’s Mad Decent record label at this year’s SXSW, the story behind Legitmix begins in the mid 2000’s when their Co-Founder, Booker Sim, was trying to distribute a movie he made.

“Around the mid 2000’s I made a documentary about Queensbridge, New York hip hop (Tragedy: The Story of Queensbridge) featuring some of their musicians like Mobb Deep and Capone-N-Noreaga,” tells Legitmix Co-Founder Booker Sim. “I didn’t know anything about music licensing, but I tried to put the film in festivals and got a lot of interest from distributors for limited theatrical release.

“They all said that I needed to get the music cleared. So I went and started to go through the licensing process and realized that it was incredibly difficult, and that I went into it quite naive. For one song which was ‘L.A. L.A.’ by Capone-n-Noreaga featuring Mobb Deep and Tragedy, it was based on a song that sampled a song that sampled a song… so I had to get publishing, master, and synch licensing from about thirty people, all of whom were asking for about twenty thousand – I was looking to spend three hundred or four hundred thousand dollars just for that one song.”

Upon Sim mentioning the music licensing challenges he was facing for the film to his childhood friend Omid Mcdonald, a computer engineer based in Canada with a string of successful start-ups under his belt, the birth of Legitmix soon arrived. “He (McDonald) thought the process was really irrational and not systematic,” Sim says. “He felt that technology could solve this. I thought he was being silly, but then he came to me with an idea and it actually seemed to make a lot of sense.

“He invited me to be one of the Co-founders behind the idea and we partnered up with some developers and got money pretty much right away from angel investors from the tech world in Canada that Omid had made money for in the past. We were able to go from idea to working product in about eight months.”

While the actual technology behind Legitmix involves a rather complicated patent-pending process, the philosophy behind it is rather simple: If a remix producer purchases a copy of original music that they want to use in their remix for their personal use, and a consumer who wants to purchase that remix also purchases a copy of the original music used in the remix for their personal use, then pretty much everyone involved in both sides of the creation process (original creators and remix creator) can be compensated without anyone’s legal rights violated.

The brilliance behind this process created by Legitmix essentially capitalizes on the legal right given to any person who lawfully purchases music to mix it for their personal use; a glaringly simple concept that until now has largely escaped the radar of the music industry in terms of how it can solve the problem of clearing music for remix sales.

“One thing to understand about Legitmix is that we see it as a bridge between remix artists who don’t have a way to sell things, and source artists who often lose out when remix artists put out stuff for free on the Internet,” explains Sim. “It’s a way to monetize music that’s not being monetized and has a huge demand for it. Obviously a lot of people are still going to take music for free, but there are people who are willing to pay, and it can be really hard to find the music you need…It’s currently not a premium experience and we feel that there is a segment of the population that is willing to have premium remix content and a premium experience.”

In terms of bringing the company’s operations to New York, Sim notes: “We picked New York as the launching ground for Legitmix because we feel that it’s a remix capital of the world, and if there was one place we had to choose that has some of the most important remix genres, it would be New York, specifically, for the three bases we want to cover – one is obviously hip hop music which is very important in New York, and the others are the sort of Mad Decent /Fools Gold kind of hipster culture; and the third is the dance music/euro demographic.

“Lastly we also wanted to touch the remix underground demographic, and we felt that New York was the best place to cover that at a grassroots level. We’re based in Williamsburg and Fools Gold (Records) is right up the block from us, plus tons of remix artists live in this neighborhood, so they can just pop over and meet with us and make the experience very personal.”

In terms of the future, Sim envisions Legitmix to eventually be known as the “iTunes” for the remix generation. “Ideally we’ll be able to sell all the content that iTunes sells, plus all the remixes of that content. We feel that the iTunes brand is pretty weak with young people and the demographic of people ages 25-44 who like remix music. iTunes doesn’t really address that market and a lot of people would be buying remix music if they had a store which reflected their needs and also empowered the remix artists,” he explains.

Visit legitmix.com to see some of their handywork, including Diplo’s “Mad Legit” remix album.

Words by Shamita Carriman – Entertainment lawyer, founder/ managing partner of Carriman Law Group PLLC, Board of Directors of Women In Music, and music tech enthusiast. She can be contacted at info@carrimanlawgroup.com.