Business

Stockholm-born music library giant Epidemic Sound is launching a new remix series, called Extra Version, on Wednesday (May 28) with help from DJ/producer Honey Dijon. As part of Extra Version, Epidemic pays participating DJs and producers “five to six figure sums” to pick from the songs, stems, samples and loops in its catalog of over 250,000 pieces of IP — and remix them into something new.”
Epidemic then adds the results to its ever-growing catalog available for use by clients — like content creators, advertisers and brands looking for easy-to-clear songs to soundtrack videos — and distributes them to streaming services.

To kick it off, Honey Dijon flipped the Epidemic-owned song “Umbélé” by electronic artist Ooyy and Swedish Grammy-award winning performer Ebo Krdum. “Teaming up with Epidemic Sound was a vibe,” she said in a press release. “They’re shaking things up in the best way… It’s all about freedom, fun and keeping the groove 100%.” The company plans to also collaborate with Major Lazer co-founder Switch and rising Korean talent Jeonghyeon on future Extra Version editions.

Trending on Billboard

With this series, Epidemic Sound CEO/co-founder Oscar Höglund tells Billboard he wants to show off the “high quality” of Epidemic’s catalog, which he believes rivals the quality of traditional major label releases. “The art of consuming music is changing,” he says. “It’s going from being a spectator sport to being a participative one. People want to remix their favorite music, they want to collaborate, and they want to create.” Epidemic, he continues “is creating the opportunity for incredibly talented producers and remixers and DJs to collaborate [and remix] our catalog. And then, we will help them distribute their remixes around the globe [both to streaming services and to their platform which provides pre-cleared music to content creators] – and they’ll get paid well while doing it.”

In this interview, Höglund talks the ins and outs of Extra Version, the ways he is integrating AI remix features to “create more use cases for the same songs,” and why he feels the allegations that Epidemic Sound has filled Spotify mood playlists with “ghost artists” is “deeply offensive to the artist in question.”

Why are you launching Extra Version?

We’ve seen that even though culture is moving towards [more participation and remixing], creatives have held back from doing it because from a legal perspective, it’s very hard to get rights to music because of fractional ownership. Our catalog has been built up, for almost a decade and a half, around the premise of having all the rights in one place. There’s nothing fractional about it. We own all of our music, and we are more than happy to offer the catalog up to producers. We just want to do it in a way that works for the artists who originally made the music [that Epidemic now owns], the remixers, the creators and the platforms where this music will go live and proliferate.

What is the payment model for Extra Version participants, and how does that differ from how producers are typically paid for remixes?

What often ends up happening is that producers are asked to create a remix for an artist, and they don’t get paid much to do it. Rather, the logic has been, the more culturally relevant the artist in question is, the lower your compensation, because your payment is in the cultural value you receive as a remixer from being associated with the artist.

We took a contrarian view here. We’ve always prided ourselves on putting our money where our mouth is, so instead we’re paying much more handsomely up front [to Extra Version participants]. We can’t disclose exactly how much, but I would say between five and six figures [for each remix]. We’re paying a lot up front, and this is not recoupable. It’s not a loan. It’s something the producer gets to keep.

Next step is that we allow the remixer to choose whatever track they feel creatively inclined to use from our catalog. Allowing for choice is a huge part of this. Remixers don’t have to license anything or worry about different samples being unlicensed. We own everything in perpetuity, and it’s all made available to you to pick and choose from. Then we will distribute the song. Most remixers don’t get a commission, just a flat fee. With Extra Version, we want to cut the remixers and producers in.

With Extra Version, Epidemic is opening up its catalog for remixes, and also making stems available so producers can mix and match the building blocks of your catalog. Does Epidemic have the goal of taking on sample or beat marketplaces like Splice or is this just for Extra Version?

When we started commissioning songs, we always got stems for everything. It is important from a soundtracking perspective. To the second part, the way we think about Extra Version is that this is not the end. We’re definitely not stopping here — rather, we’re saying this is the first step in our endeavor to help more music creators sustain themselves and democratize access to music. The bigger picture here is we want to help soundtrack the entire creator economy, and as such, we need to unlock our music.

So it sounds like the future of Epidemic Sound is offering samples, beats, and individual elements of the songs in the catalog to everyone, not just fully formed songs?

Correct.

Do you see Extra Version as an ongoing series, or is it a limited run?

This is not a limited run series. It’s the starting point of ushering in a completely new paradigm, one which is much more centered around the remixing and collaborative nature of culture. This is something that we’re deeply committed to and we’re going to spend a lot of time experimenting and seeing how this space is going to evolve.

It feels like you’re moving in the opposite direction of major labels. Nowadays, competitive deals at majors regularly involve the artist getting their masters back eventually, but the advance the artist gets up front is recoupable. Meanwhile, Epidemic is asking for full ownership of an artist’s tracks, but you provide non-recoupable money up front for the song. What is your goal with this approach?

At our core, we’ve taken one fundamentally contrarian belief: if you’re an artist, common wisdom says you should hold on to all of your [intellectual property]. That’s the traditional music industry right now. We think, in order to provide wide distribution and to provide superior monetization, we need to own 100% of the copyright. If we can build a platform, like we have, where there’s one point of contact when you want to license the song, then we can indemnify our customers and allow them to use the songs across all platforms, in all jurisdictions, and in all different scenarios. This allows for us to create predictability with Epidemic, so we can also pay our artists more predictable fees, too.

How is Epidemic thinking about AI?

We think that AI is an incredible tool to help augment human creativity, but never replace it. We’ve so far found that there’s tremendous amounts of value in using AI to help both music creators and video creators. We can use AI during the recommendation phase. If you’re a video creator we can use advanced AI search tools to help recommend tracks.

The old paradigm was, if you found a track that you like, suddenly you had to spend hours trying to re-edit that track such that it perfectly fit the video story you’re trying to tell, often with huge challenges from a legal perspective. “Am I even allowed to change the composition of this track?” The answer is often no. We’ve now been able to use AI [so] that, if you are a content creator, and you find this one track that you want to use to soundtrack your video, you can now speed it up, slow it down, change it. You can cut it. You can edit it — not replace it. This helps create more use cases for the same songs. Where there might have previously been 10 content creators who can use your track, now with adaptation maybe 20 or 30 or 100 creators will use it. That means the track is going to get played more and it’s going to earn more royalties [on streaming services]. And so ultimately, the human who made that track is going to make much more money, because AI has augmented the use cases.

Point three is purely generative — we’ve launched a product called AI Voice. We’ve gone to human voice actors, and we’ve struck agreements with them such that we pay them up front, we train and we use their voice, and then we allow our customers to use their voices. Every time they do, there’s an additional royalty so that the voice artists make additional money. We also put their personal emails out there in case content creators want to work directly with them. So suddenly, even when we go into the generative world of voice, we’re seeing that voice actors get used more, get more work, and get paid.

There have been allegations dating back to 2016 that Epidemic Sound has a deal of some kind with Spotify to fill some Spotify playlists with royalty-free music. It has been highly criticized. Can you explain what that arrangement is, if there is one?

I’d be happy to. Epidemic parallel publishes all of its music to all of the major DSPs around the entire world. We do that for a couple of different reasons, but the primary reason is it’s in our artists’ best interest, because we realized early on there was a Stranger Things, Kate Bush effect, meaning when Kate Bush’s track was used in Stranger Things, there was a massive surge in that song on streaming platforms around the world. We realized early on that that happens [when content creators use our songs].

There was also an adjacent trend, which we also tapped into very early, on streaming platforms in general — Spotify being one of them — that there was much more lean-back listening going on. The role of the record [or album] as the [driver] for music consumption started to diminish. More and more, [people were listening to] standalone tracks, but then ultimately playlists started to proliferate and come into their own.

Many of [the playlists] are hits-oriented, but there’s a huge proportion of playlists which are more functionally oriented. We do incredibly well across all the different playlists where people are looking to get to a specific theme or in a specific emotion. There’s music for sleeping, for concentrating, for studying, for getting ready, for meditating or for walking your dogs. Because what we do at our core is soundtracking, it turns out we were really, really good at [those playlists]. And while other people were trying to get into the bigger playlists to create the hits of tomorrow, we just kept doing the thing that we do really well. There was huge demand across all different DSPs, so we started to grow. And we became very, very significant and very, very successful.

Do you feel that it harms non-Epidemic artists in these genres to be competing for spots on mood-based playlists with your music?

No. If anything, the contrary: I think the old articles about Epidemic artists are deeply unfair. There was speculation: “Who are these artists? Do they even exist?” They are super talented artists in their own right. I took issue very much with that.

Various writers have referred to your music that is on Spotify playlists as “ghost artists” or fake artists.” How do you feel about those titles?

I think it’s deeply offensive for the artist in question. If you are an actor, you can play multiple different roles because you portray many different characters. That’s second nature. Artists, like actors, have the right to express their creativity in a multitude of different ways. It’s always them who determines if they want to publish their music under one name or not. Odds are that their fans might think they are all over the place, so quite often what we see happen is that artists have one brand for a certain genre of music, and different brand for another kind. If you look at Elton John, Madonna they [use] aliases. I seriously doubt that Madonna and Elton John would like to be called fake artists or ghost artists. That’s them creatively expressing through a different persona.