I'm usually a pretty easy going guy and try very hard to be understanding of others, especially in business, but there comes a point when a business with bad business practices needs to be called out. That's what I'm doing, right now, with my own opinion.
I've been with CDBaby.com for years. It's a great service, selling music for independent musicians online and also handling digital distribution. I've been very happy with my service from CD Baby.
A few years ago though, CD Baby aligned with
Rumblefish, another service which pledged to handle synch licensing for independent musicians, so the musicians could have their music licensed for videos, commercials, movies, etc. Sounds like a good deal, huh? That's what I thought, so I signed up.
I never saw a great return from Rumblefish. I think the biggest payment I ever received from them was 5 cents over a 3 month period, or less. Then the most frustrating part happened. Rumblefish claimed licensing rights on MY OWN VIDEOS ON MY OWN YOUTUBE CHANNEL.
I thought that was surely an honest mistake. They must have used a bot of some type to identify the videos using my music and claimed it, to monetize it with ads, from which the songwriter, me, would get a share. The trouble was, I was getting a MUCH SMALLER share through Rumblefish, than I was on my videos which had already ben monetized through Google Adsense.
No problem. Rumblefish has forms to fill out to reclaim your own music, which they have claimed. It took a lot of searching to find it, but I FINALLY found the online forms to let them know they needed to relinquish the claims on the videos which I owned myself, and didn't want or need them to monetize. I filled them out faithfully.
A month went by. Rumblefish did not turn the rights back over to me, FOR MY OWN MUSIC! Sooooo, I turned to CD Baby. I went to their page and opted out of the Rumblefish Service, and received an email from CD Baby stating Rumblefish had been notified and at the most, it would take 30 days for me to regain control of my music videos.
More than another month went by, and still Rumblefish claimed control of my videos. My next step was to contact CD Baby AGAIN and let them know what had happened....or in this case, what had NOT happened. CD Baby was gracious and asked for specifics so they could find out what was going on with Rumblefish. I also went directly to Youtube and disputed Rumblefish's claims on my own videos.
To date....nothing. Rumblefish STILL has active claims on my own music and is costing me money. My OWN MONEY ON MY OWN SONGS! Rumblefish has obviously been very lucrative for its owners and now claims to be licensing more than 8 million songs. Four of them are MINE, and I WANT THEM BACK!
In my opinion, songwriters and musicians should think long and hard before doing business with Rumblefish. You might wind up in a rumble yourself, trying to get back what's rightfully yours in the first place!
Postcript: Finally, after the disputing the claim through CD Baby and Youtube, I was able to regain control of my music on my videos.....the long nightmare was over!
