Apple
- Musi is a music-streaming app that has millions of users, especially among teens.
- It works by streaming music from YouTube, and unlike Spotify, it doesn't make deals with record labels.
- But this arrangement is, uhhhh, potentially quite curious.
Of all the early 2000s trends to make a comeback — low-rise jeans, Creed appreciation, Anne Hathaway — I would not have expected popular digital music platform that raises a lot of questions about copyright.
Wired reports that Musi is a free music streaming app out of Canada that's especially popular with teenagers. And unlike Apple Music or Spotify, which make their own deals with record labels and pay artists for streams, Musi works quite differently. It essentially streams music from YouTube — and Musi runs its own ads against those streams.
It's now facing potential legal action, Wired reported, citing industry sources. (Musi didn't respond to Wired's requests for comment.)
From Wired:
Musi claims not to host the music videos its users stream, instead emphasizing that these videos come from YouTube. Those videos appear within Musi's own barebones interface, but some flaunt their origins with watermarks from YouTube or Vevo.
Users have to sit through video ads right when they open Musi and can then stream uninterrupted audio, but video ads play silently every few songs while the music continues. The app also displays banner ads, but users can remove all ads from the app for a one-time fee of $5.99.
As you can imagine, this whole arrangement feels sort of ... gray area?
Read more from Wired: Musi Won Over Millions. Is the Free Music Streaming App Too Good to Be True?
Wired talked to a copyright professor who said he wasn't totally clear if Musi was in violation of any laws — some of the details about how Musi functions are unclear, which leaves some open questions. A spokesperson for Vevo, the company in charge of most of the music videos you watch on YouTube, told Wired that Musi doesn't have permission to use its videos and Vevo would be taking action.
I certainly downloaded a lot of music (and malware) from Napster, LimeWire, and Soulseek in the early 2000s. At that time, it felt like downloading a free song couldn't really hurt those fat cats in the record industry. (Lars Ulrich wasn't really too sympathetic a character if you remember.)
But two decades on, anyone can see what happened to the music industry: It's terrible for the streaming platforms, record labels, and, of course, the artists themselves. Knowing this, my level of desire to do something that might rip off an artist of the even puny portion of a penny they get for a YouTube or Spotify stream is much diminished. I think I'll pass on Musi.